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Today, I came back from lunch, and noticed my “All Programs” was missing from my start menu. If you haven’t played with the new Windows  7, you might not know how the new start menu works. When you click on your start button, a menu pops up, that looks like a previous version of Windows start menu, but it has some “improvements” on it. You can now hover or click on “All Programs” allowing it to display the list of programs on your computer. This works nice and dandy, but if the “All Programs” option is removed, there is no way of accessing the programs in your start menu. You have to manually go to each one in Windows Explorer to run them.

If you have the problem where your “All Programs” option is missing, you can fix it by following the steps below.

1. Right click on the Start Button
2. Click Properties
3. In the Task Bar and Start Menu Properties window click “Customize”
4. Click on the “Use Default Settings” button
5. Click “OK”
6. Click “Apply”
7. Your Start Menu should now be back to normal.

I have also been told this will fix the problem with the Start Menu, and All Programs menu, if the icons disappear next to each program.

A month ago, I wiped out one of my old computers that had Windows Vista on it. Since then I have been having a hard time installing Windows XP on it, so I decided I would try and install my Windows 7 Professional Upgrade on it. The computer has two hard drives wiped totally clean. The only thing I had was my Windows 7 Professional Upgrade DVD and needed to install it on my computer.

I was able to by doing the following steps:

Windows 7

I opened regedit and navigated to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from “1″ to “0″.

I went and typed cmd into the search bar and ran it as an administrator. I typed the following command “slmgr /rearm” (without quotes)

I rebooted my computer and went to activate Windows normally. It activated just fine. Of course, I had a copy of Windows XP that came on my Dell, so I was prepared to enter the serial key if needed. Fortunately, it was not needed and I was able to use the Upgrade DVD to complete a fresh install.

Thank you Microsoft!