Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1

Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by TheCoreh on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:09PM (#7518165)

Or just go to the bottom right corner of the screen, wait for the charms bar to pop up, click the Preferences icon then shutdown. Which still doesn't make a lot of sense, but is simpler than what you described.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by tracker1 on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:42PM (#7518391)

Yeah, and it's really f*cking annoying to try to do that on a remote desktop to a Win2012 server with the same horrible UI. On a desktop you can just drag your cursor to the bottom right.. in an RDP window, it isn't so easy.

Beyond that, Metro is horrible when you have more than one large monitor. The UI simple doesn't scale well in that environment. It looks like 8.1 update 1 will finally be much closer to how it should have been.

It reminds me of Vista, where half the control panel UI was updated, and half wasn't, and it was just a bad mix of old/new. I don't mind a new UI. For that matter, I'm really digging Ubuntu's Unity interface, ymmv on that.

I think that Windows 7 had a really nice UI, and that metro should have been an option on top of that from the beginning. Trying to make a unifying UX for interfaces from your phone to tablet to dual-monitor desktops just doesn't work that well. You really need two options, and making the UI work for those metro apps in the desktop context makes more sense.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by yuhong on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:51PM (#7518458)

Yeah, and it's really fcking annoying to try to do that on a remote desktop to a Win2012 server with the same horrible UI. On a desktop you can just drag your cursor to the bottom right.. in an RDP window, it isn't so easy.

And the Server 2012 R2 upgrade was not free unlike Win8.1. While at it, don't forget the lack of IE11 too.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by steve-howard on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @05:42PM (#7519274)

Over RDP, I'd just use the Windows+C shortcut. Haven't been a huge fan of "Modern UI," but you can learn to work with it.

Disclaimer: MSFT employee, opinions my own.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by spacelizard on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @08:45PM (#7520105)

That doesn't work if you're RDPing from another Win8 machine, the local OS swallows the keybind. What you actually need to press is Alt + Home or Alt + Delete (good luck figuring that out without doing a web search).

I'm actually really confused why this is, it seems to be such an important use case. I would not be surprised if they didn't even test WS2012.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by wila on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @11:59PM (#7520858)

You can customize your RDP settings on how it behaves with key binding. You can set it local or remote.

Before opening the connection, click "Show options" -> Local Resources tab -> Apply Windows key combinations.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by jsight on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:18PM (#7518226)

Or just press the power button, which actually does make a lot of sense.

There are a lot of things about Metro that I dislike, but killing the "don't touch the power button on a computer" idiom is one that I do like.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by stan_rogers on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:31PM (#7518316)

Except that that gets you precisely one option, which isn't even normally the one I'm looking for. When pressing the power button somehow gives the the restart/sleep/shutdown option, then it will make sense.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by T-hawk on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:34PM (#7518339)

This has been around forever, since at least Windows 2000. The power button signals the OS through ACPI to shut down correctly. It wasn't always reliable on all hardware and BIOSes, and didn't always default to that behavior until set in Control Panel - Power Options, but soft power-off is supposed to have been working for a long time and is hardly new.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by yuhong on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:45PM (#7518415)

Yea, Windows has required ACPI to boot since Vista.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by akandiah on Thursday April 03, 2014 @07:36AM (#7522120)

> Or just press the power button, which actually does make a lot of sense.

No it doesn't. Pressing the power button implements what the PC maker wants to implement. In many cases (especially on laptops) it's for the computer to go to sleep.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by renata on Thursday April 03, 2014 @05:17PM (#7526789)

Nope. Settings -> Power Options -> Change what the power button does.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by bratsche on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @03:37PM (#7518349)

Who would have guessed restart/shutdown would be under the settings?

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by estel on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @06:50PM (#7519613)

I think I heard their justification once was that they thought it was a bit of an anachronism that we'd press a hardware button to turn a PC on, but would have to go through a software route in order to turn it off. Every other electrical device usually has a single on/off button, and in a world of ACPI it's entirely reasonable for that to be the same as a default "turn off" action on a PC. Initiating a manual restart or true shutdown then becomes more of a power-user thing that, yes, perhaps it does make sense as a Settings panel.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by piyush_soni on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @04:21PM (#7518685)

I actually had to Google "How to restart Windows 8?" - How can 'restart/shut down' be a setting. That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen about Windows in all these years.

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Re:Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1 by jyrkesh on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @07:10PM (#7519702)

Or even better, right-click the bottom left corner of the screen, go to Shutdown or Sign-out. Along with a ton of other stuff that power users want most of the time.

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