Most every longtime Windows user knows the sad saga of the lowly Start menu. Born as a button in Windows 95, modified in XP and Vista, and blossoming into its most usable form in Windows 7, the Start ...

If you miss the Start menu on Windows 8, try Classic Shell before spending a dime on commercial alternatives. You’ll probably want to stick with it. Windows 8 doesn’t have a Start button. If you don’t ...

For anyone having regrets about upgrading to Windows 10, there are now two good options for bringing back the look of Windows 7. This week, Classic Shell officially added Windows 10 to support for its ...

A reader wrote to say she had been using a Windows XP computer forever. But recently she bit the bullet and bought a Windows 10 machine. Ouch! The wound still hurts. Mainly, she hates the clutter in ...

Windows only: Start menu replacement utility Classic Shell adds back some of the missing features in Windows 7 or Vista that used to exist in XP—like the Classic-style Start Menu. During the ...

A reader wrote to say she had been using a Windows XP computer forever. But recently she bit the bullet and bought a Windows 10 machine. Ouch! The wound still hurts. Mainly, she hates the clutter in ...

Quick question about upgrading to 8.1. I run classic shell as my start button for windows 8 pro, and I've been thinking about getting the upgrade to 8.1, but not if I have to use the crappy 8.1 start ...

Windows 8 has some pretty cool things going for it, but it's become incredibly controversial because of one major change: the Start menu is completely gone. Luckily, there are a ton of programs out ...

On Windows 11, you can use the "Open-Shell-Menu" utility to bring back the classic Start menu. I'm not a fan of using third-party tools to tweak the behavior of the operating system, but this app ...

Although the Windows 7 Start menu provides a host of useful features, it tends to take up a lot of screen space when opened. If you want a compact Start menu for your Windows 7 computer, your best bet ...

If the Open Shell is not working on your Windows 11 PC, you can use the following methods to fix it and customize your Start menu. Click on Run as an administrator under Windows PowerShell in the ...