Windows 10: Shortcut won't add to right side (with parameters)!

Hi

I've found that I can't add a shortcut to the area on the right of the Start menu, designed for adding apps, if it has parameters. e.g. "...\xxxxx.exe" /p

I need to add a parameter for this app to run correctly. I added the parameter to the shortcut in the usual way by opening the shortcut properties and editing the Target address.

When I open the shortcut, the app opens using the parameters. I can also pin the app to the task bar and it opens correctly. However when I choose to pin to the Start, nothing happens. There is no error message, but nothing appears in the start menu. I can add the shortcut to the start menu without the parameter and that works. But no way to put a shortcut with a parameter on the start menu.

Can anyone suggest a workaround? If not I'll keep it on my task bar.

:)

 

How to pin shortcut to start menu.

There is an interesting quirk with shortcuts containing '/'s (forward slashes) on the Start Menu. I was trying to add a VLC* shortcut with command line parameters. The shortcut would show on the Start Menu when there were two slashes in a row (//), but
not if there were three (///). The solution is to quote any command line parameters.

* VLC requires three slashes for a device name. E.g., dvd:///R:/ -> "dvd:///R:/"

 

Windows 10 Send to Desktop as Shortcut is missing

According to this page (

http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows-8/create-keyboard-shortcuts-to-open-apps) you can only add shortcuts for apps
that run on windows desktop. Any of the apps installed from the Windows Store (some of which come pre-installed, like MS Edge, or Twitter) you can't Send to desktop.

These apps seem to be initialised by passing a shell argument to explorer.exe. If you can find out what the shell parameter should be for a given app, only way I've found to create a shortcut is manually by right-clicking the desktop, go to New... select
shortcut, and paste in the path to explorer.exe followed by the shell parameter. For example, to add a shortcut to MS Edge, it would be "C:\Windows\explorer.exe shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MicrosoftEdge". Whilst this works, you lose
the nice shiny icon. If you're really enthusiastic, you can download an ico version of the icon from the interwebs, right-click the shortcut, go to Properties, then Shortcut tab, and change icon to the downloaded one.

Very annoying though. Such an important thing to be able to do, and should be simple, guess that's just what happens when you're trying to update a relic OS to be like the all-singing all-dancing money generating app store-y wonderfulness that is OSX, instead
of going back to the drawing board... you end up forcing a square peg into a round hole!