Restoring the Start Menu in Windows 8

[Rob Williams]

Anxious to move to Windows 8 when it launches, but still hate the Metro-styled Start screen? Lucky for you, there already exist a few good options for restoring the Start menu as we've come to know it. The folks over at ITworld have taken a look at three, and believe it or not, some are in fact better than others. If you're not set on restoring a 1:1 Windows 7 Start menu, you can opt for a replacement that might offer unique abilities.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[madmat]

That last one, ClassicShell, looks like the winner to me. I tried Stardock's version when I was experimenting with 8 and it was pretty bad although the article says they don't support VM run versions of the OS.

When it's all said and done, though, I think I'll just stick with 7. I like it, it's fairly intuitive and I don't have to worry about a M$ update screwing up a "fix" that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

 

[Rob Williams]

To be honest, as much as I like upgrading right away to the latest OS, I might stick with W7 as well. I just can't get past that new Start page... I can't. It's so counter-intuitive to me, it's just mind-blowing. When an OS frustrates the hell out of me, it's a sign not to use it, despite what other perks it might bring.

 

[madmat]

I'm hoping that M$ will come to their senses when the adoption of 8 falls below their expectations because of the metro interface. At present everyone discounts PC's because sales are down. They fail to realize that sales are down simply because there haven't been many reasons to replace PC's that were fast 2 or 3 years ago.

Right now it's a game of inches. You can get 90% of the performance by simply throwing in more ram and a new vid card with a 2009 era PC as you can by buying a new CPU, motherboard and all the rest. Case in point, PC sales are down but nVidia did comparatively good last year, they didn't sell as much as 2011 but that's due to chip shortages, not demand shortfalls. Since their products weren't going into new PC's that means it was mainly upgrades.

The same people that are upgrading their current PC's are more likely to stick with 7 because it is, as you've said, not counterintuitive. I don't foresee it having the same sales figures as 7, 7 was a hot piece of software. Everyone loved it, it flew off shelves. I think 8 is going to pan out to be like M.E..

 

[Kougar]

I would also be amongst the first to upgrade my OS, but this time around I can't even be bothered to pay $30 for a new copy of Windows 8 Pro. I have spent some time using Windows Server 2012 and although I eventually discovered many of the context-menus still exist (right-clicking the start area brings up a "start menu" of important system links), but there's still too many others missing.

For example, anyone using Windows 8 ought to go check their Startup folder, just to make sure no programs dropped anything into it or something.....