0Windows 8250 consumer preview: Traditional start menu

Win­dows 8 looks to have many nice new fea­tures, but unfor­tu­nately, as I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, Microsoft has decided to cre­ate a phone/tablet user inter­face and foist it upon desktop users as well.  This would­n’t be such a prob­lem if Microsoft had left an option to turn the excel­lent and well estab­lished tra­di­tion­al inter­face back on, but in their infin­ite wis­dom Microsoft has­n’t provided any such option.  For­tu­nately there are 2 options for get­ting the tra­di­tion­al start but­ton and menu back.

1. Start menu without but­ton, without 3^rd party software

• Right click on the taskbar
• Go to tool­bars and “new toolbar”
• Paste the fol­low­ing: %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs and click “select folder”
• Right click on the taskbar again and select “Lock the taskbar” (which will unlock it)
• Use the ver­tic­al line of dots to drag the “pro­grams” entry across to the far left
• Double click on the ver­tic­al line of dots to shrink the menu
• Right click on the taskbar again and select “Lock the taskbar”

2. Full start menu, via 3^rd party utility

• Down­load ViStart
• Install.  You’ll need to give it per­mis­sion to run

Cred­it to Ask­VG