Windows 10 Tips, Tricks, and Improvements Options

[SubRosa]

I created this to be a place where people can post their Windows 10 life hacks. Not a place to troubleshoot problems, but rather a place to put ways to customize and tame the beast.

I will start with a little program I just found that can restore the old style start menu from Windows 7 or XP. Open Shell Menu is a free program that allows you to customize the Windows 10 Start Menu. As I said, it allows you to recreate the format of the older Windows editions.

You can also create folders on the start menu, and move shortcuts back and forth on the menu however you want. Things you cannot do in Windows 10. (You can do that with the tiles, but not with the list of programs on the start menu just left of the tiles). It also brings back the Recent Items list.

It also still leaves you a single icon on the new menu that you can click to bring up the original Windows 10 style start menu.

Here is an example of what I did with it on my non-gaming PC There are a lot of ways you can customize it however. So this is not the only way it could look.

[SubRosa]

I found how to remove the blue and yellow UAC shield that Windows puts on icons when you set them to run in Administrator mode.


Open Registry Editor

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Create a new Key and name it Shell Icons

Within its folder, create a new String Value and name it 77

Double-click it to open it up, and in the Value Data box add: %systemroot%\system32\imageres.dll,197

Restart Windows



Edit: I have noticed a side effect that can sometimes happen if you do either this or the previous icon hack. Sometimes your desktop icons might turn solid black. I did some research, and what is happening is that your icon cache is having issues. I have had it happen twice now since doing both, so I am not sure which is responsible.

The first time it happened I rebooted, and the icons were back to normal again. Basically the icon cache rebuilt itself. The second time I was busy writing and did not want to reboot. So I just kept on working, and when I looked back later the icons had fixed themselves.