How to Customise Your Windows Start Menu|••

1. Customize the Start Menu

Windows 10's reprise of the Start menu, which dates 20 years back to Windows 95, has been a much-applauded feature of Microsoft's next operating system. But it's not a simple return to the old Windows XP-style Start menu. Instead, Windows 10 combines the tiles of Windows 8's modern, touch-friendly user interface with the earlier metaphor.

Maybe you want more tiles, maybe fewer or none. You can have the new Start menu your way: Simply click and hold the cursor on the edge of the Start box and drag it to the size you want. As with Windows 8, you can also pin any applications—including traditional desktop ones—to tiles. If you tap All Apps, you'll see a small tile for every single program on the computer, and you can pin any with a right-click option.

There are even more settings for the Start menu, accessible from the Settings > Personalization > Start page of the modern control panel. From here, you can even re-enable the full-screen Start page. You can also turn on or off recent apps, recent groups, and content and app suggestions, and get very granular with the Customize List option, which lets you choose links that appear below the frequent items, such as Settings, Explorer, and so on.