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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Open Shell, originally known as Classic Shell, is open-source software that allows you to replace the standard Start Menu on Windows 10 and Windows 8. Open Shell originally came out as Classic Shell ...

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 8 no longer includes the traditional Start Menu that Windows users have become associated with using. Instead they replaced it with a new interface called the Windows Start Screen that many ...

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 ...

Windows Vista, Microsoft’s newest OS and arguably its largest project ever has finally hit Beta 2. Windows Vista is the latest and most complex operating system to emerge from Microsoft’s Redmond, WA ...