2. What about the Start menu?

Classic Shell brings back the Start menu that Windows 8 took away.
From the very birth of Windows 8, this was the biggest complaint: “Where’s the Start menu?” 

Even with the improvements of 8.1 and the 8.1 Update, which brought back the Start button, there’s still no Start menu.

One could argue that the Start screen—which is what you get when you click the 8.1 Start button—can do everything that the Start menu can. Except that it can’t. You can’t hover the mouse over a Modern tile and get a submenu of files recently opened in that application. And the Start screen just doesn’t feel right. When you’re working in a windowing environment like the Desktop, you don’t want to be thrown into a bad-imitation iPad just to launch a program 

Luckily, where Microsoft fails, others provide. You can find plenty of third-party Start menus for Windows 8, and many of them are free.

My favorite, Classic Shell, is one of the free ones. It’s capable of giving you, with no trouble at all, a close facsimile to the Windows 7 Start menu. But you can change that look with additional skins, add separate Programs and Apps menus in place of the traditional All Programs, and pick an image for the Start button. You can also control what happens when you left-click and shift-click the Start button.

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