Want a faster Windows Explorer? Cleanup your context menu

Context menus are the menus that appear when you right click on an item or inside an application. It’s a menu that changes depending on the context that it is in.

In the Windows Explorer it is possible to add additional context menus. These are added by software companies to improve the performance of certain applications. Some of these menus may improve your working environment, most of the time they get in the way and slow down the Windows Explorer folders.

It is possible to remove these context menu items. The menus are installed by applications and these applications may allow you to remove the context menu.

IZArc, a popular compression program installs context menu extensions to manage compressing and decompressing files. These can be seen in the figure below.

IZArc includes an easy way to disable those context menu extension through it’s program settings.

Some applications do not provide an easy way to disable these menus. For this, you should look at some specialize software to do the job.

The context menu entries (or handlers) live in the registry. You might think that this would provide an easy way for you to go in and remove the ones you don’t need. Unfortunately, the context menu entries could be spread throughout the registry making it nearly impossible to clean by hand.

Luckily there are third party tools available to do the job. One free program, FileMenu Tools will make this job easier. FileMenu Tools allows you to enable and disable the context menus installed by applications. It’s actually better than that. It also allows you to custom create your own context menus.

Selectively disabling these context menu items will speed up Windows Explorer when you right click on an item. Try disabling various menus and see which ones offer the best tradeoff for speed and functionality.