For a while, before turning my PC off overnight and rebooting in the morning or when I restarted to allow updates, I had a really nice Start screen setup. I’d like to know the steps to get it back and lock it somehow as my default.
Firstly, I don’t like the Start menu as a window on top of some kind of background (currently the rays through a window theme). So under System/Tablet Mode, I set “automatically switch to tablet mode” after signing in. Both the buttons are Off, first because I don’t want the app icons hidden and secondly because the touch-friendly mode does horrible things to the taskbar/notification area (?) strip at the bottom of the screen. Some icons disappear and the unnecessary (for my mouse/cursor) spaces are simply inefficient looking, i.e., ugly.
Under Personalisation/Start, I have everything On, particularly the “Use Start full screen” button, which removes the “window” effect.
The result is that when I hit the keyboard window button, I get a full-screen Start screen with live tiles and small boxes for my browsers, VLC Player, WPS Writer (I’ve removed MS Office completely), StreamWriter, MailWasher, Pegasus, and all my other frequently used programs. And, of course, almost all the other programs are available on the left-hand panel via the top or bottom deluxe hamburgers.
The problem is that this beautiful combination of settings doesn’t seem to hold through reboots and update restarts, at least, that’s my impression. For one thing, the icons go back to the default spread-out tablet-friendly setting, and that sucks! As a result, I’ve installed a new version of StartMenuX, which solved problems I had with my Win 8.1 desktop such a double-clicking not working, in order to get stable access to my programs.
I suspect a conflict between “switch to tablet” and “use Start full screen” and some default function, but I don’t know enough to be sure. Can any of our MVP’s figure out a fix for this problem?
