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Windows 10 Start Menu Wins IDSA Design Award
jones_supa writes: Despite some criticism, it turns out that the design of the Windows 10 Start Menu isn't bad at all, as a designer organization has recently decided to give Microsoft its own Digital Design 2015 award for the feature. In a description on their website, IDSA (Industry Designers Society of America) explains that the design of the new menu makes it easy to access files across platforms, as it comes brings together PCs, tablets, and phones. More, the Start Screen and the Start Menu look similar, so it's easy to adapt to the interface that suits best to your device. There are plenty of Start Menu customization options and if you have a look in the Settings screen, you will find plenty of choices to tweak the default look and feel. Live tiles can be removed completely as well.
If you don't like the start menu and prefer the old Windows 7 style start menu, then there are alternatives.
http://www.classicshell.net/
There are also other alternatives, like Start8 and whatever.
Since I have several machines to play with at home, I decided to go ahead with the *cough* upgrade *cough* on one of them. Here are the problems I've encountered in just a couple hours of usage.
1. Windows Explorer has been replaced with MS Edge. I often VPN into work, and attempted to do so with Edge, but had no luck. The good news is that Explorer still exists somewhere on the system. From Edge, there's an option to open one of your favorites in Explorer, and I was able to pin explorer to my bottom bar to avoid having to launch edge. MS seems to have hidden Explorer...it doesn't show up in the list of all apps.
2. iPad no longer charges from USB ports. Other devices, like my Garmin GPS watch does. The iPad still syncs up with iTunes, but refuses to charge.
3. My Nvidia graphics driver crashes occasionally, but relaunches. I am running the latest driver, and they claim they're working on it.
Just another day in Paradise
What sort of morons put an arbitrary limit on the number of items your menu has?
Apparently there is a fix in the pipeline, but it's a bit stupid to have released this with a known issue that should be a simple fix. In this day and age, there is simply no excuse for an arbitrary limit on the number of items in your start menu. I easily have 1500 unique items (Microsoft being one of the worst offenders of dumping lots of useless entries into my start menu) in my Start Menu->Programs folders, so it's likely something important will be displaced by some application's web URL or an uninstall link.