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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.
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.
And that is really, to get rid of "legacy" apps entirely. I think Microsoft is pretty tired of having third parties (hence, the reason for the surface) and OEMs give their hard work a bad name. So what they are doing is introducing a new API (Windows RT) that requires "certification" (Minecraft didn't want to do this for whatever reason to "stick it" to Windows 8), which means that they require that if you have an app in Windows 8, it uninstalls *completely* and *cleanly*, among other performance indicators and things like that.
Microsoft is trying to retake its OS, under threat of the web, Apple, Google, etc. Windows 8, far from popular belief on this site, is actually a really good OS -- better in many ways, than Windows 7 is. It's faster (by a LOT), it's smooth, and its extensibility and APIs are still very good. The experience between "Metro" and the "Desktop" however, is extremely jarring. While I've written (and been modded up!) in the past about how bad the transition between the desktop and metro are, and how much better they "could have" done things, looking at a variety of information since then and forming a new opinion leads me only to think that they don't WANT it to be better. They want it to be jarring. They want you to start hating desktop apps and going to their store so you can get crap-ware free apps, that uninstall FAST and CLEAN, that don't bog down your computer, and have the additional benefit of getting a cheap piece of hardware to put it into like a Dell/HP/etc rather than paying two times the price for an Apple product.
Whether this is a good strategy or not, remains to be seen. Microsoft uses a LOT of data and telemetry to make its decisions in terms of UI design, API improvements, usability, etc. As much as I'd like to say that Windows 8 is just a boneheaded move, the performance of the OS is just too damn good to think that. And I know us here on Slashdot will revile the new UI and its use (though honestly, the loss of the start menu was no big loss for me as I adjusted to the new way in about 3 seconds). There are things that definitely need improvement even in the metro UI, but I feel we'll get that with a few patches.
The bottom line is that Microsoft is tired of having an unfriendly "BSOD" image, and they want to take steps to nix that, even if it means alienating a whole bunch of developers. I think they feel that their platform is still better on the whole than OSX (and I'd tend to agree here), and developers will still flock. By Windows 9, you won't see any more desktop apps being released... and that's the plan MS is heading for.
Just a warning before you flame me though, I'm not ENDORSING this idea, I'm simply stating that this is where I think MS is going.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The start menu is still there. You just don't see the icon in the task bar. All the functionality of it is still there. The first level is for commonly used programs. It's a nice clean layout that's easy to customize. From there, you can call up the 'All Programs' section. That's not organized quite so well, but it works.
There's no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8, but unlike Vista, there's no reason to actively avoid it.
Replacing Windows 8's Missing Start Menu
How do you replace something that's not there? Wouldn't you be *adding* it instead?
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
Believe it or not, BSODs can occur due to bad hardware/firmware, not just drivers. While you may have installed industry standard apps and signed drivers, did you also verify that the firmware of your CD-ROM, BIOS, etc. were up to date? Also, bad memory modules, incorrect timing settings, and over-clocking can cause BSODs. I'm assuming that you were not overclocking at the time, so it sounds like your CD ROM drive may need a firmware update.
The point is that BSODs are not random occurrences, there is usually an underlying cause.