Pin to Start Menu: A Cautionary Tale

This post involves a couple of items that may not be familiar to everyone, so I'll go over those before I begin.

Number one is a computer game, Oblivion. It's a single-player RPG, the fourth in a fairly popular series.

Number two is OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender), a program that loads Oblivion on top of itself using a hooking DLL method, thereby extending the scripting commands available to third party modders to further extend the modability of Oblivion.

Now that we've got those covered, on to the main portion of this post. My brother had Oblivion installed on his computer, with OBSE, but had not used it on some time. While I was there, he wanted to set it up to play again, however the start menu items had dissapeared, so knowing that OBSE had to be run to make the scripts that used them work, he right clicked on the OBSE loader in the file browser and chose "Pin to Start Menu", and Windows of course complied. However, upon clicking on the link just pinned, it came up with an error about not being able to find Oblivion.exe.

My initial solution was to reinstall OBSE, thinking that it was somehow corrupted or had bad settings, as I could clearly see that the Oblivion.exe file was right there. After updating, I double-clicked OBSE in the file browser and Oblivion worked fine, so I assumed it was fixed.

It took me until the next morning to realize my mistake. Pin to start menu does NOT make a shortcut, it pins the actual file to the start menu, so OBSE, which requires Oblivion to be in the same folder, could not find it in the start menu folder. Later testing verified this - clicking on OBSE in the start menu still caused the same error, but running it from the file browser worked fine.

Final Solution

The real solution to this is to make a shortcut to what you want in the start menu right in the folder it is in. You can do this by right clicking on the file and choosing the Create Shortcut option. Then pin the shortcut you just created to the start menu rather than the file itself. In this way you can also rename the shortcut and give it a different icon, as in the case of OBSE_Loader.exe, the name nor icon is very descriptive of what it does, so I changed the name of the shortcut to Oblivion and the icon to the Oblivion icon, taken from Oblivion.exe.

Conclusion: Be careful what you pin to the start menu; you may have unexpected results.

Disk Storage Technology

If a hard drive is partitioned, the first sector is a Master Boot Record. If it is not partitioned, it is called a Volume Boot Record. MBR's are used for:

Holding a partition table

Booting the operating system

Giving each disk a 32-bit signature

The MBR is not part of any partition.

For more information on MBR's, including how to repair a broken one or creating your own with a disk editing utility, see Wikipedia's article.

My First Blog!

My name is Quentin. I'm from Colebrook, New Hampshire.
If I had a thousand dollars, I would probably spend it on tutition.
I spend a lot of time with computers, they are my number one hobby. I also skateboard a little, and I am hoping while I'm at college to get into gym climbing. I have a lot of computer background - I grew up with computers since my dad repaired and resold them, and also worked as a programmer. I wrote my first functioning program before I was in young mens.
This next Wednesday we are installing Vista on our virtual PC's, which should be interesting since I've done it ohhh 20 times or so. So far I like this class quite a bit. Being on the projector was interesting. My initial reaction to the class is: I think this will go well.

Here is a picture.