Hacking Windows 7 Media Center

Custom Start Strips with WMC Custom Configuration Wizard

by Michael Healy @ 9:00 am on July 22nd, 2009 in start menu strips with 21 Comments and Permalink

WMC Custom Configuration Wizard Setting up custom start menu strips for Windows 7 Media Center used to be a task that required quite a bit of playing about in the registry. Even using the Hack7MC custom start strip package was fairly cumbersome and required Media Browser to be installed. Now we have a simple wizard which will allow you to create, arrange and delete custom start menu strips with ease.

Using this handy new tool is simple, just download the zip file, extract it to your hard disk and run. The wizard will take you step by step through the process of creating new start menu strips. Select Create New Start Menu Strip and give your new strip a name and a title which will appear in the start menu.

new strip name

On the next screen choose the programs you’d like to appear in your new custom start strip by holding down ctrl and selecting the programs from a list of all the programs available on your system.

select programs

After choosing your programs the next screens will allow you to arrange the order of programs in your new start strip as well as the order of your new strip in the start menu. All new non-default strips will appear under the Extras strip and can’t be moved below the other default strips.

arrange order

That’s all there is to it! Just rinse and repeat to add multiple strips to your Windows 7 Media Center. The wizard also provides the ability to remove custom start strips by selecting Delete existing start menu strip and choosing the strip you’d like to remove.

If you’re interested in removing the default start menu strips check out the Mikinhosoft app from this article. It really doesn’t get much simpler than this, hopefully we’ll see more useful programs like these come along in the near future as Windows 7 is finally released.

21 Comments


zombiefly
Comment #2226 from zombiefly [Reply]

:D
Thanks for this. Infact thanks for this site. For the past 2 yrs i’ve been painfully having to work through the perils of MC. Suddenly everything I need is in one place on your site!

One thing though, the site layout is screwed in firefox :(

ZF

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 10:39 am with Permalink

Michael Healy
@Reply #2229 from Michael Healy [Reply]

Really? I don’t have any trouble with the layout in Firefox 3.1 or 3.5. Guess I’ll have to give it a run through BrowserShots.

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 11:19 am with Permalink

Michael Healy
@Reply #2231 from Michael Healy [Reply]

Huh, BrowserShots.org is showing the layout to be working in versions of Firefox as old as 1.5. Do you have any special firefox plugins installed that could be interfering with css or javascript?

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 11:44 am with Permalink

zombiefly
@Reply #2249 from zombiefly [Reply]

i’ve posted a screenshot here

i’ve disabled all my addons, deleted cache and refreshed… I have the same issues at home too

Comment left July 23, 2009 at 8:32 am with Permalink

Ryan
@Reply #2251 from Ryan [Reply]

hello, i think your firefox layout problem might come from using an adblocking program. I run adblock and my layout appears the exact same way as your screenshot, but when i disable it it appears correctly

Comment left July 23, 2009 at 10:07 am with Permalink

andrewwiebe
Comment #2228 from andrewwiebe [Reply]

I see you have weather and email in your list, what plugins are you using, just out of curiosity?

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 10:44 am with Permalink

Steve
Comment #2232 from Steve [Reply]

Is their a way to add more applications to the list?

It seems I can only create a strip with applications that are already in Media Center.

I would like make a ‘Games’ strip and add all of my pc games to it.

BTW, any chance u can put a date on the top of your articles?

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 12:20 pm with Permalink

roordown
Comment #2233 from roordown [Reply]

I second the date request. I can get an idea of the date through the URL, but sometimes it difficult to know which article came before the other. Since content is growing fast, I think it could be helpful.

Anyway, continue the good job. I’ve setup 7mc with mediabrowser last week-end using almost exclusively info from hack7mc. Thanks for your hard work.

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 1:17 pm with Permalink

Michael Healy
Comment #2234 from Michael Healy [Reply]

I’m actually working a on completely new from-scratch theme to replace this current one but it’s going to be a month or so before it’s ready and it does include the date for each article.

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 2:15 pm with Permalink

Nick
@Reply #2236 from Nick [Reply]

Thanks a lot for this site, and the article.
PS. Actually I decided to make this wizard after reading your article “Creating New Start Menu Strips”…

Comment left July 22, 2009 at 6:15 pm with Permalink

TIM BLACK
Comment #2280 from TIM BLACK [Reply]

Michael,

Great! Post!

Great! Tool!

Ive been waiting quite a while for this to happen.
Keep up the good work!

Tim

Comment left July 24, 2009 at 9:04 am with Permalink

Paul Wood
Comment #2471 from Paul Wood [Reply]

Is there a way to use this program to add any of the default menu items to a new strip? Eg I want to add ‘Music Library’ to one of my custom strips.

Paul

Comment left August 3, 2009 at 7:22 am with Permalink

Michael Welter
@Reply #2890 from Michael Welter [Reply]

I wrote a small plugin for doing this: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/77801/384042.aspx

Comment left August 25, 2009 at 12:36 pm with Permalink

Michael Healy
@Reply #2895 from Michael Healy [Reply]

Cool! I’ll be sure to check it out in the next few days and see how it works.

Just curious, did you use a social network to login? Trying to track down that avatar bug that seems to be popping up for some people.

Comment left August 25, 2009 at 1:50 pm with Permalink

Michael Welter
Comment #2897 from Michael Welter [Reply]

Yes I did, I used Twitter

Comment left August 25, 2009 at 2:23 pm with Permalink

WoB
Comment #3144 from WoB [Reply]

Is there a limit of 5 apps per custom strip? I added 9 apps but only 5 show in MC.

Comment left September 7, 2009 at 3:28 pm with Permalink

Michael Healy
@Reply #3150 from Michael Healy [Reply]

Yes, there is a hard limit of 5 tiles on custom start strips.

Comment left September 8, 2009 at 9:05 am with Permalink

WoB
@Reply #3161 from WoB [Reply]

OK, cheers Michael. Will just add another strip if needed then. Thx.

Comment left September 8, 2009 at 2:51 pm with Permalink

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