Special Folders on Windows – or how to copy a program icon to desktop on Windows 8

Aug 17
2013

Have you ever had a problem of copying a program’s shortcut from the Program Menu to the desktop?

With Windows versions between NT and 7 absolutely no problem: open the start menu, select the item with a right mouse click and then select “Copy” from the context menu and “Paste” on the desktop.

With Windows 8 this is becoming very hard, unfortunately.

The Start Menu structure is here, but on the Start screen there is no possibility to copy the shortcut.

It is here:

c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

Unfortunately, this folder is also hidden.

And since I don’t like to fiddle every time, I have created the small utility OpenSpecialFolders that gives you a list of most special folders on the system and let you open them in a new explorer window, so copying and pasting shortcuts is a lot easier.

You can download a zip file with the exe and a few runtime DLLs here:

OpenSpecialFolders.zip

I hope this will help someone!

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