This powerful free/donationware utility adds the features back to Windows 8 and 8.1 that Microsoft should never have taken out. Classic Shell isn’t a me-too Windows 8 fixer. This free utility’s first ...

Microsoft has a habit of tweaking the user interface of Windows every time the company puts out a major new release. Windows 8 replaced the Start Menu with a full-screen version called 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Long a mainstay of the old-fashioned Windows interface fan club, Classic Shell’s developer Ivo Beltchev has thrown in the towel, releasing the code to SourceForge Hundreds of millions of downloads ...

Times were simpler in 2001. Amazon had just turned its first profit, Google was still just doing search, and Windows had a new bright green Start button you could spot from the other side of a room.