The remaining options in the Start menu were given their own column for faster access. The Programs menu that was found in the first iteration of the menu became an All programs menu at the bottom, but it still worked pretty much the same way, with suspended menus for subsets of apps and tools. Below that, you'll see apps that you opened recently, so you can quickly get back to what you were doing before. If you have an app you use all the time, you can pin it to the top area (Internet Explorer and the built-in email client lived here by default), so it's always there for you. The primary column houses your pinned and recent apps.

In Windows XP, the Start menu prioritizes the apps you care about the most. Because all of these options were suspended menus, you also didn't need to click all these UI elements, and hovering your mouse over them would show you all the options inside it. All your apps would go in the programs folder, and if you wanted to change any settings, the Control Panel was quickly accessible from the Settings folder. There wasn't anything overly fancy, but really, anything you could want was there.

Start housed a folder containing all your programs, one for your documents, and one for your system settings, plus the Find option along with the ability to run a program or turn off or suspend the computer. It truly was the starting point for using your PC. The Windows 95 Start menu was already loaded with pretty much anything you'd want to do on your computer, too. Prior to this, getting to your apps or settings was all done through the Windows Explorer window that opened by default when you booted up Windows, but this new concept enabled the desktop to be the home for all your icons without anything getting in the way. The introduction of the Start menu in Windows 95 was a pretty big deal, at least from the perspective of someone more used to later versions of Windows.

Windows 10 start menu folder icons