Various

[imported_razz]

Hi, I am not a complete novice, as some of you may assume by some of these questions.
Your response to any or all of these questions will be greatly appreciated.
My OS is XP Home.

(1) When you click the "Start" button and then click "All Programs", a long list of programs are shown. It seems to me that some articles refer to this menu of programs as programs in your Start Menu. Is this correct, or is your "Start Menu" only programs that start when you turn your PC on?

(2) Is it necessary to have most of these programs within this menu (the menu that pops up when you click "All Programs", after clicking "Start"), or is it best to delete most of them from this menu?

(3) Does it matter... i.e. does not having alot of programs listed in this menu help towards better performance?

(4) I use System Mechanic 6 along with CCleaner and Lavasoft Adware to aid with general PC health. They all seem like good tools, do you agree? Naturally I have a firewall (ZoneAlarm) and virus protection (Hauri ViRobot).

Thank you so much for your time!

 

[Quiksilver]

1) The stuff that is pinned in your start menu are what windows thinks are your most frequently used programs or what you told to be pinned there. It has nothing to do with what appears under "all programs". You wouldn't have a big list of programs there if you just simply unchecked the boxes "create start menu shortcut" when you install files.

2) Some programs only install one short-cut and it happens to be in the start menu, others are there by factory default, others don't really matter as long as you have another way to access them.

3) I don't know of any specific gain you would achieve other than having a more clean menu and being faster to spot what your looking for if you were to remove these programs.

4) Zonealarm is laughably bad. Most users will only need the default windows firewall as long as it is kept up to date, and if your paranoid just get a cheap router; it has a built in firewall. Never heard of that anti-virus though.