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Geek Culture / Disabling the Start Menu in XP

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
19
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Joined: 10th Apr 2005
Location: The Fifth Plane of Oblivion
Posted: 28th Nov 2006 20:26
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Is there any way of doing this? If explorer crashes, my PC is still fully usable using ALT+TAB or the task manager, but it runs 20-30% faster. Plus, Firefox stops hanging. Any ideas?


Since the other one was scaring you guys so much...
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Raven
19
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Joined: 23rd Mar 2005
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 28th Nov 2006 21:27
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If explorer crashes, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager; then end the Explorer.exe task.

Once it's stopped the desktop should disappear, then use the File > Run... "Desktop" and it should restart with a warning; but completely clean any issues you were having.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, 512MB DDR2 667MHz, ATi Radeon X1900 XT 256MB PCI-E, Windows Vista Business / XP Professional SP2
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Seppuku Arts
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20
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Joined: 18th Aug 2004
Location: Cambridgeshire, England
Posted: 28th Nov 2006 21:32
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Or New Task - 'explorer.exe' either way which works for you, I mean I turn off explorer when its not needed, makes this much faster.

"Cut down the gods if they stand in your way" - Hakamoto Tsunetomo
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Dave J
Retired Moderator
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Location: Secret Military Pub, Down Under
Posted: 29th Nov 2006 01:53
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I think he wants to disable it completely (as opposed to reopening it), by the looks of it.


"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Location: The Fifth Plane of Oblivion
Posted: 29th Nov 2006 17:11
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Correct. I want an empty space where my performance hog of start menu currently resides.


Since the other one was scaring you guys so much...
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Vampiric
18
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Joined: 30th Oct 2006
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Posted: 29th Nov 2006 17:26 Edited at: 29th Nov 2006 17:26
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you could write a small program to disable the process and plonk it into your startup folder

All bow down to evil
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Chris Franklin
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Joined: 2nd Aug 2005
Location: UK
Posted: 29th Nov 2006 17:59
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taskkill.exe is what you need i dunno how to work it tho (It's built into windows so no need to download anything)

My nvidia compo entry
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Kentaree
22
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Joined: 5th Oct 2002
Location: Clonmel, Ireland
Posted: 29th Nov 2006 18:15
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I think the problem could be that the Start menu is part of explorer. Go to the task manager, and kill explorer.exe, and you'll see it disappear. Not the best idea though

Nephin Games
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Mikey P
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Joined: 23rd May 2005
Location: Manchester, UK
Posted: 29th Nov 2006 18:48
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I know it isn't actually the question, but if you're sick of Explorer being a CPU-hog, you could try Litestep, which is an alternative shell for Windows . It's themeable, and so long as the theme you use isn't super-graphic-intensive with all the bells and whistles, doesn't use much CPU time or memory.

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