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Replacing Windows 8's Missing Start Menu
jfruh writes "The Start Button, which has offered Windows users quick access to important programs, folders, and configuration options since 1995 and has looked more or less the same for all that time, has been re-engineered beyond recognition for Windows 8, replaced by a Start Screen of colorful Metro tiles that greets the user upon startup. One big problem: once you enter Desktop mode to access non-Metro apps, you lose easy access to all the stuff you expect from the Start Button. This has given rise to something of a cottage industry for Start Button replacements, with multiple replacement utilities available even before Windows 8 officially arrives."
replacing the missing Windows 8 with Windows 7 instead and just like, carry on with life?
You might hate it, but you're gonna look really stupid if you don't know how to use Windows 8.
Stop Bitching and complaining about every change in technology and get use to the the Damn thing.
I remember all the bitching and moaning about the Start Button when it was created. And now is is some God Sent UI that you can't live without.
If you get get Windows 8. you will figure it out shortly and you are back to normal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For now. When Win 8 is available, will OEMs force it as the only choice or make consumers pay more for Win 7. Enterprises usually have separate licensing with MS and probably will not upgrade unless there is a need.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If you keep it, people will keep on using it. Windows 8 Goal is to get Laptop and PC manufacturers develop more tablets and touch enabled devices. If you kept the start bar, PC makers will keep on making normal PC's and slowly die away with other OS's like Android and iOS taking over.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Because they've decided to push people toward Metro (or whatever they're calling it now). Probably so that they can try to horn themselves into the tablet market, as well as pushing people to using their own app store.
Trying to force a tablet UI on a general purpose machine like a laptop or desktop is just as bad as trying to use a desktop OS on a tablet. Microsoft are pretty much ensuring that no matter what you try to use Windows 8 on, you get the worst of both worlds..
which is totally what she said
I tried, I really did, to use Win8 on the desktop both without Start Menu replacement and with one. I absolutely could not stand what felt like an unnecessary extra step between switching back and forth. I don't care if it works on a small touch screen, it doesn't work on my desktop, get rid of the extra step AND give me a Start Menu. - HEX
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Most of you will hate this, so fair warning.
I love Windows 8. Let me tell you why. The start menu is supposed to be an efficient program launcher. Ok, so to launch programs with the start menu, you have to click the start button, click "all programs", click your app folder, then click the application to start it. That's 4 clicks. To start a program in Windows 8, I click the start screen area, then click the application, that's two clicks. That's a quantifiable efficiency gain. People have argued against this by referring to pinning apps to the task bar and desk top and the start menu pinned item lists.
First, Windows 8 has the task bar and desk top, so it doesn't make sense to argue with those, if they're so good, use them in Windows 8 instead of the start screen. Two, I like the desktop and task bar clear of every thing, I never liked pinning items to the task bar because it makes it less efficient to determine what's running, I like to glance at the task bar and know everything there is running, where as in the past I have at times, in a rush, mistakenly thought something pinned was running and something running was pinned, which caused problems. The Desktop is a workspace that ideally should be clear of short cuts, as a user will do things like unzip folders there, and create many temp work files there, that need to be moved or deleted, which short cuts will get in the way of, and accidently removed. The start menu's pinned item list can only contain a few items (5 or so), so while they can be launched in two clicks you are severely limited in numbers vs. the start screen which can launch 40-60 apps in two clicks. What I like to do is unpin everything except my main apps/games, and a few metro apps I use, then group them and name the groups (minus button in the lower right.) A small action that makes things much better than the default.
Visual recognition of large distinct icons is a much nicer way to launch programs, rather than reading folder names where often a folder name is not related to the name of the app you are trying to launch, if you have many apps it can be difficult to remember which app is in which folder causing quite a bit of digging.
With the start screen, in addition to saving clicks versus the start menu, and being easier to find the program, you can have live tiles that give you a lot of useful information. I have an email counter, several news sites, calendar, upcoming events, and other things one click away. So why not stick with gadgets and other widgets and system tray notifications you are probably asking at this point? Well, several. Security, stability, and Power. Metro apps are run in a strict sandbox, they install and uninstall in isolated, clean fashion, so no installation or uninstallation of a metro app can corrupt the system, user data, or other metro apps, and they have strict requirements such that they can not use any CPU when not being used by the user, and very minimum system resource usage for notifications. .5% cpu at all times, randomly accessed the disk, and increased DPC Latency, and it was a relatively well behaved email tray notifier as I tried a few others. A small amount, but it adds up for many such items. And programs like that that you (or the average user) gets from the web, have free reign over your user account, even if you don't run as admin (and you almost always have to give them admin at least once to install), they can still steal any user account data and credentials from your browser. Metro apps, being tightly sandboxed, can't read or touch any other data in the user account. I find this to be pretty important, and imagine a huge boon to productivity if users get a lot of their system/productivity utilities from metro apps instead of downloading random programs on the web, where the security risk is much higher.
Contrast this with some desktop apps I was running before to accomplish these tasks, my email program was using about
Windows 8 has a lot of performance increases in it, like for real time audio
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Lot's of people kept using Program Manager anyway because they didn't like it. I wonder how many people still do now?
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