Last week we looked at the new Start Menu in Windows 10. If you read it you know that we only looked at the left side. Today we venture on to the right side of the menu system in W10.
The right side of the start menu may send shivers of fear down your spine. If it does you were almost certainly a former Windows 8 or 8.1 user. It looks awfully familiar to the “Metro” window of those happy days gone by.
The right side shows you “Tiles” some of which are live/active and some are not. For instance, it will come with the default live news and weather tiles. The news will provide a constantly changing “tile” which updates news during the time you are on your computer. The weather tile will do the same thing with the weather. This is of course, when you have started the menu.
You must first set up the weather by clicking on the tile to open it and set your location. I used my zip code and it found everything very quickly.
The regular, non-live tiles have an icon and the name of the program they connect to. When you click them the program opens. These are pretty much the same as the old Windows 7 menu that had text links which opened the specific programs.
You can move the tiles around on the start menu, change their sizes to small, medium, wide and large depending on what the tile allows. You can also group the tiles. The default is the group with the news and weather titled, “Life at a glance.”
You can also change the size of the menu. To do this move your mouse to the top or side edge of the menu and when you see the double headed arrow, click and drag. Doing so will make the menu larger or smaller as you would like. If you would like, you can go to All Settings, Personalization, Start and cut on “Use Start full screen.” The menu will then cover your desktop.
If you want to add any program to the start menu all you need to do is find the program in the All Apps area, right click it and then click, “Pin to start.” In just a second it will appear in the start menu and you may then proceed to size and/or move it as you wish.
Now on to, “The reason Ron really does not like the new menu.” My reason is I like the old menu since I could add my five or 10 apps to the top of the menu bar and get to them quickly. In my opinion more quickly than I can in the new W10 menu. I have started using it; however, I just do not appreciate not being able to put items on the left side of the menu as I want them placed.
I have solved this for myself by adding those particular apps to the right side as tiles and setting them at the small tile size. I do not like the wasted space when compared to text links but it is doable.
One last thing you can do if you really do not want the new menu is to install IObit’s “Start Menu 8” (rd.dblclx.com/1LShmDO). It brings a very similar Windows 7 start menu back to you and worked well on Windows 10 and 8.1 when I tried it out.
Personally I decided to stick with the W10 menu and get used to it, which is working for me so far. 
