Stardock has been building software for decades and while some platforms have come and gone (like OS/2), Windows has remained a steadfast component of the modern-computing era for billions of users. During the past decade or two, products like StartX and Fences have been helping those users make their devices more personal and more productive.

With the release of Start11 and Fences 4 last year, we took the opportunity to make sure that these products continued to work well together. I know I am a bit biased in saying this, but I think the experience turned out to be exceptional.

If you aren’t familiar with Fences, this productivity tool makes it easy to organize your desktop in many ways, including creating folder portals that will you access files deep in your folder structure directly from your desktop.

Whenever we are about to launch a new product, I have a folder called “Media Assets” that is located inside my OneDrive for Business folder that I keep located on my desktop via a folder portal using Fences. While it’s easy to access the content in this folder at any time with Peek (winkey+space), I have found a different way for my workflow to open the content when on my desktop via Start11.

With Start11, you can bring Fences into your menu as you see above. Now, when I want to open a media asset that I am working on for release – I hit the Windows key, and then using the arrow keys, I can navigate to the item I need to open. I am also a big fan of using the keyboard, and anytime I can cut out using the mouse for navigation I will absolutely do so. 

It’s a small feature, but one that makes navigating Windows and my content much faster, which is vital to my workflow. While not everyone may want or need to include a fence in their Start menu, it can become an essential way to optimize how you use Windows 10 and 11.