Windows 7 tips and tweaks

Customise the Send To menu and add your own programs

When you right click the mouse on a file or folder on the desktop or in an Explorer window there is a Send to menu with various items on. For example, you can send the item to a compressed (zipped) folder, which will create a zip file. You can send it to another disk drive or the Documents folder, and you can email it.

You can add your own favourite items to this right click Send to menu and then you can send files and folders to other places or to other applications. A really useful item to add to the Send to menu is Notepad. It can be used as a general file viewer and you can then click any file and send it to Notepad. Notepad will open so you can view the item. It's great for viewing files like HTML web pages, .inf files, .reg files, .XML files, .ini files and anything else you care to view. All these files and more are actually plain text files even though they do not have a .txt extension and Notepad is perfect for viewing them. Just right click and send the file to Notepad.

The items on the Send to menu are actually shortcuts that are stored in a special folder on the hard disk drive. To find it, Click Start, Computer to open an Explorer window. Now navigate to C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo. (When customising Windows it is best to use an administrator account with User Account Control turned off. You should enable hidden and system folders too and in an Explorer window, press the Alt key to show the menu bar and select Tools, Folder Options. On the View tab select Show hidden files and folders, and clear the tick against Hide protected operating system files. You can undo these changes afterwards.)

OK, now you've got an Explorer window showing the SendTo folder, you can place programs in here or create shortcuts to them. Find Notepad on the Start menu, then right click it and select Copy. Right click in the SendTo window and select Paste. You now have a Notepad item on the Send To menu. Open an Explorer window and try right clicking a file (anything that contains text). Select Send To, Notepad and it'll be displayed in Notepad. You can add other programs in a similar manner.

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