Tutorial: Clean Up Your Context Menu

Clean Up Your Context Menu

Do you like to install tons of software on your computer? (and most likely you press next..next..next without reading) then you end up with a huge context menu whenever you press right click on a folder or file, and if you don’t have a fast computer most likely it will take ages to bring up the context menu up and when it does it takes you quite some time to find the option that you want.

So here is a quick fix, download a software called ShellMenuView from this site:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shell_menu_view.html

Once you download it, extract the files of the zip archive and run shmnview.exe, once you do you will see a GUI like this:

Now if I were you I’d sort it according the File Type or Extensions, by clicking the File Type or Extensions column name as shown in the picture below:

Now you will see the file types, or if you just want to delete something from the menu that you know the name of, then sort by Menu Name, find it and disable it.

So in this tutorial I’m going to remove ‘Scan using Spybot…’ so I select the items

If you want to select more than one item hold down the CTRL button on your keyboard and click with your mouse the items that you want.

Once you are done selecting all the items that you want, press right click and select ‘Disable Selected Items’ or press F7 from your keyboard.

Or you can click the red button in the top bar:

If before disabling the item you might want to view some more information about that item, just to make sure what it is, you can double click the item and a dialog will pop up with more information:

This is how it was before disabling the shortcut:

And this is how it is now, after disabling the shortcut:

And as said before, if there is a certain file type that brings up a lot of items, just sort and find that file type, select the items and disable them or if you can’t find them you can always use the search function provided by the software itself… just take care on what you disable, although you can always re enable the disabled items by doing the same procedure by instead clicking ‘Enable Selected Items’ or F8 from your keyboard.