The Windows 10 search bar/Cortana still sits at the bottom, to the right of the Start icon, and it’s fully functional. Windows 7 fans will breathe a sigh of relief.Ĭortana remains unchanged. You can pin additional programs to the top of the left side of the Start menu, just as you can in Windows 7, by simply dragging the program (or folder) to the top left and releasing.įigure 4. The entries on the left should be immediately obvious to most Windows 7 users, although there’s a quick link to the stock Windows 10 Start menu on top. The Classic Shell Start installation menu. If you choose all the defaults, you get a Windows 10 Start menu that’s very similar to the Windows 7 Start menu, sitting on top of the Windows 10 taskbar. You get a screen (Figure 3) with options to bring back a Windows XP-style Start menu and intermediate two-column menu, or the full-featured Windows 7 look-alike. Installing Classic Shell couldn’t be simpler. It was once an open source product, but Beltchev converted it to freeware after he discovered people were selling it with little or no modification. Heaven help you if you forget that Paint is listed under "W" for "Windows Accessory."ĭeveloper Ivaylo Beltchev and his team have put a lot of effort into Classic Shell since its release in 2009. While Windows 10 has a phone book view of the All Apps list, with tiles for each letter of the alphabet, the fundamental lack of a hierarchy makes the whole thing unwieldy. You can’t even delete them without deleting the app itself. You can’t move the entries or slide them underneath other header entries. What you see here is basically what you get.įinally, the All Apps list on the left is an unmanageable one-dimensional mess, as you can see from the shot of Office 2013, as installed on a bone-stock copy of Windows 10 (Figure 2). You can create tiles for programs or folders among the tiles on the right (right-click and choose Pin to Start), but changes on the left side are limited to a list of items that can be added to the bottom of the menu: Start, Settings, Personalization, Start, Choose which folders appear on Start. Second, there is a woeful lack of customization. The All Apps list keeps going and going and going. The Win10 Start menu can be resized, but only in fixed-size blocks.įigure 2. You can unpin all of the tiles (right-click), but when you do, you’re left with an ugly black strip that can’t be removed. The Windows 10 Start menu in a fresh install.įirst, the live tiles on the right look a lot like advertising (in many cases, they are), and their movement is distracting. Many users will have no problems at all with Windows 10’s Start menu, shown in Figure 1.įigure 1. Both let you drop back to the Win10 Start menu with a single click. Plus, they throttle Cortana and add custom cascading windows to the All Apps list. Both hide the live tiles unless you expressly ask for them. Start10, from Stardock, takes a few liberties with the Win7 look, which you may or may not like, and costs $5. Classic Shell concentrates on providing a close-to-exact replica of Windows 7, and it’s free (formerly open source, now freeware). Many Windows aficionados yearn for the Windows 7 Start menu, and the two products reviewed here strive to give it to them, pasted on top of Windows 10. Now two of the leading makers of Start menu alternatives for Windows 8 have released counterparts for Windows 10.ĭo you need a replacement Start menu for Windows 10? Some users will find the Windows 10 Start menu to be good enough, but many won’t. Born as a button in Windows 95, modified in XP and Vista, and blossoming into its most usable form in Windows 7, the Start menu anchored the Windows UI until Microsoft foolishly discarded it with Windows 8, sparking an entire cottage industry of third-party replacements. Most every longtime Windows user knows the sad saga of the lowly Start menu.
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