I love how much more stable 9926 is. But I cannot figure how to add anything to start menu list or the "metro section". There is a customize button in Start Menu properties but it is greyed out. Does anyone know how to fix this.
You drag apps from the left, All Apps list, or pin to Start from context menu of items. Drag on the right side to rearrange, use context menu to resize. Drag between sections to create a new section. Hold and drag by the section's three dots holder to move the entire section. Click on the section title to name a section. Note, you also can pin apps beyond the available space on Start, it is vertically scrollable, seemingly indefinitely. Note2, for the time being, if you drag and drop a tile to a section that is not visible on screen, and cause the tile to jump up (such as when having scrolled section on the right, and an empty area on the left on a full-screen Start), Start will crash and require reopening
Or you can restore the previous start menu from earlier builds, by using this registry edit below:- Code: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "EnableXamlStartMenu"=dword:00000000
Thank you everyone for your help. I tried all of them and the second one worked best. I could not get the third one to work. It is nice to have my old start menu back again. I am surprised Windows saved it exactly as it was from 9901. I wondered where it is stored? On a side note does anyone know how to make the taskbar transparent again?
The last two are the same. Only that I linked to winbeta and steven4554 just copied the relevant part. I really don't get why they have to force their metro s**t down everyones throats when it is clearly inferior.
MS is try to get for Phone, Tablet and Desktop the same or as near as same look of the GUI! Anyway the user has a lot of possibilities for to "tweak" the outcome to their own likes. For me that's just OK!
I can agree with MS on the idea of trying to make one OS to fit on all devices. However, it should NOT look and operate the same way on all devices. The VERY FIRST THING the installer should ask the user is. What type of system are you installing Windows on? A> Phone or device with small touch screen under 7"? B> Tablet or device with small touch screen between 7" and 10'? C> Desktop or Laptop computer, or device with larger then 10" screen and/or device without a Touch screen? Then install Windows appropriately, with the appropriate settings and UI for that type of environment. Its simple to me, but I guess Windows engineers are not smart enough to figure this out.
All fine and good, you can re-enable the thing that hasn't been ripped out yet. Better would be to use the new thing they shipped, and make sure to participate in the feedbacks telling them which parts of the old one you want brought back into it. The new thing (XAML) will stay, but with more functionality added.
The Continuum mode is there to switch between B and C, it triggers a popup when you attach/detach a keyboard and asks you whether you want to switch between tablet and desktop mode. If a keyboard is attached during install, I guess it uses desktop mode as default (I'm not sure if it also detects whether touch is available or not to make a decision). A is a different story since the OS for phones and PCs is still different on the higher level, they will have the same core but you cannot install the phone distribution on a normal PC, and vice versa. So actually, they are trying to find a smart enough way to provide a glitch-free experience. I think it's also important to point out that Metro and XAML are not the same. Metro refers to their design language, which describes how things are supposed to be laid out to present the user with a common UI paradigm across Windows apps, while XAML is the markup language of the UI framework, just like HTML is the markup language for websites. XAML itself is pretty mature, it's been around since the Vista days in form of WPF and Silverlight, and since Windows 8 in form of a native implementation as part of the Windows Runtime. It's a far superior technology (feature- and design-wise) for building UIs than the old Win32 ways, so it only makes sense that they're going to use it more extensively as they move on, and not just for Store apps but other visual aspects of the OS as well.
The new start menu stopped opening for me so I went back to the old one and realised how much nicer it is to use :/ Is there any reg hack to remove the search box on it? I mean Cortana makes it kind of redundant - even if it doesn't work as well for quickly tapping in an app name and launching it. I'm kinda torn o_o
Anyone figure out how to add more places to "Places" on the Start menu? i.e. Downloads folder would be great