If you’re like most people, you use your start menu to quickly access your most-used programs and files. But if you’ve got a lot of folders on your hard drive, it can be tough to find what you’re looking for. Here’s how to pin any folder to the Vista start menu the easy way:

  1. Open Vista’s start menu and click the “All Programs” button.
  2. Click the “Accessories” button and then click the “Start Menu and Taskbar” icon.
  3. In the “Start Menu & Taskbar” window, click the “File Explorer” tab and then double-click a folder in the left pane.
  4. In the right pane, right-click a file or folder and then select “Pin this folder to Start.” (If you don’t see this option, your folder isn’t pinned.) ..

This technique comes to us from How-To Geek Forums member whs, who is not only a prolific poster on our forum, but on other forums as well.

Pinning Folders to the Start Menu

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a shortcut to the folder you want to pin to the start menu, because we’re just pinning the shortcut instead of the folder itself. Then simply drag that shortcut down to the Start orb, but don’t release the mouse button yet…

Note that for the example I created the shortcut on the desktop, but you’ll want to create the shortcut somewhere else since you can’t delete it once you’ve pinned it.

The start menu will pop up, and you’ll want to then use the mouse (with the button still held down) to move the shortcut up where the pinned shortcuts usually are (above the gray line)… then you can release the button.

At this point you should have a pinned shortcut to that folder on your start menu.

This is a very convenient technique to use for pinning the Downloads and Videos folder to the start menu, since for some odd reason Microsoft gives you Pictures, Music, and even Games… but not the rest.