Vista Tip: Speed Up Start Menu

This is a quick tip to speed up the start menu in Vista. I wrote a previous article about helping the user interface more snappy. This tip concentrates on the start menu but will have a similar effect. So if you employ both strategies the UI will run more smoothly. This tip requires a registry edit so as always when doing a registry edit make sure to create a restore point and/or backup the registry settings.

Click on the Vista Start icon and type in regedit in the search field. You can also use the RUN Command provided it has been enabled. Press Enter.



This opens the Registry Editor. Where you will see the various registry folders in the upper left side as shown below.



From here we need to expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Click on Desktop



This opens several values in the left panel. We want to Double click on "MenuShowDelay".



After double clicking "MenuShowDelay" you will get the following Edit String window which should have a default value of 400. Delete that and change it to 0. Click OK and exit out of the Registry Editor.



That is it! Now the Start menu will launch much faster!