Alternatives To The Windows 11 Start Menu

so do you hate the start menu in Windows 11 or just need something that's just a little less basic well today we're going to be looking at some alternative start menus for Windows 11. stay tuned the windows 11 start menu is definitely different some may argue that its usefulness as a start menu is kind of hindered by how basic it is I mean this is the first time that I can remember in Windows history that the right click secret start menu has more options than the start menu itself but you know what regardless of your feelings about the windows 11 start menu it's objectively true that Microsoft has simplified it quite a bit I mean the start menu has always been a utilitarian menu that not only allowed you to launch applications but also aided in administering a Windows PC that's not really the case anymore the start menu in Windows 11 has one purpose and that's to launch applications for the vast majority of Windows users that's really all they need it to do in the first place so it makes sense that Microsoft would simplify it to serve that primary purpose for the majority of Windows users but you know this video is not about hating on the Windows 11 start menu but rather it's about showing you alternatives if the windows 11 menu simply doesn't work for you and you know what I've done videos like this in the past but most of the time it's concentrating on specific Alternatives rather than giving you a whole bunch of different options like we're going to do in this video today but you know what because of that I'm not going to go into a great amount of detail on every option but I'm just going to show you what the options are that are available then you can go and experiment with them yourself but before we get into that we have to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under twenty dollars stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video now the first start menu that we're going to be looking at today is the windows 11 start menu if we're going to be looking at Alternatives we should probably take a look at the menu that we're trying to compare all of these alternatives to so let's jump on the computer and get to it okay so if you look at the windows 11 start menu it's essentially just a glorified app launcher it doesn't have a lot of options like the old start menus in the past used to but you can you can get to different aspects I can get you your settings in your file explorer and things like that so it is a usable start menu however it's really basic it essentially shows your pinned icons up top as well as recommended applications or documents in the bottom some of your recent documents will be listed down here as well as recently installed applications you can also go over to the all apps button right here and this will show you all the different apps that are installed on the computer itself and then if you go down here you can turn off the computer and then you can also have some functions right here where you can either sign out lock or switch accounts and things of that nature and other than that that's about it but if you go into the settings menu right here we're going to go into settings real quick we're going to go into personalization and we're going to go down into start and this will give us some of the options for the start menu so some of these options can include first stop the layout by default it essentially splits the start menu into two sections and that's going to be the pinned icons as well as the recommended settings however if you'd like to have more pinned icons you can simply say more pins and then when you open the start menu you'll see that there's a lot more pins not as much room for recommended settings but you can also go the other way too and go to more recommendations and that gives you the opposite it gives you less pinned icons and more recommendations I like to keep mine on default or even with more pins typically but some of the other things that you can do here is you can also add folders which this gives you a little bit more utilitarianism to the start menu I guess you could say but if you come down here you can always turn some of these on like I'm going to go ahead and turn on settings and file explorer and then if you go down here to the start menu you can see that it's added these right here next to the power button and that gives makes it a little bit more usable and then also while we're sitting here looking at the start menu it's also a nice thing to keep in mind the taskbar settings as well so if you go back into personalization and you go into taskbar this will give you some of the settings that are associated specifically with your tax bar you can turn off the search box right here and you can turn off the other things like task view widgets and chat and usually on a system that I have in active production all of this stuff is turned off it's only turned on on this system because it's a test system that I use for making videos so I like to keep this stuff on to give it more of a default look of Windows 11. and also some people really don't like the center setup for the start menu and if you'd like to change that you can go right into here to taskbar behaviors and then from there instead of Center you can just say left and it'll move your start menu over to the left like you typically would see it in traditional Windows operating systems I'm going to go ahead and leave mine on Center for right now though so as you can see the windows 11 start menu is very basic there are ways to enable more advanced features but for the most part it's pretty much just an app launcher so next we're going to be looking at a program called start 11 which is a retail program that'll set you back about six bucks let's take a look at it okay start 11 is a program made by stardock and we're going to go ahead and click the free trial right here and download it real quick and once it gets downloaded we can install it on our system and it might take a second to download this one because it's a 40 megabyte file but you know what their website is really slow too so it's kind of downloading kind of slow so I'm going to jump ahead until it's downloaded and then we'll get it installed in the system figure it out all right so once it gets downloaded we should have the executable here I'm going to go ahead and run it real quick I'm going to go ahead and hit yes to the user account control agree here and hit next I'm going to hit next again all right and then once it starts up it's going to ask you to start a 30-day trial so I'm going to go ahead and click here and unfortunately it wants you to enter your email address in order to start this trial now I don't want to give them my email so I use a temporary mail service I'm going to go ahead and copy that email address real quick and we're going to go ahead and throw it in here and then once you go through the setup process go ahead and just hit finish and here we are so I'm going to go ahead and minimize all of our folders that we have open here so we can take a look at the program itself now the first thing that you're faced with here is it allows you to either set it to left aligned or Center aligned I'm going to leave it on Center aligned right now but you can choose which one you want and then go ahead and hit OK and at this point you can choose what kind of style start menu You Want It by default starts with a Windows 7 style so if you click the start menu as you can see it looks a lot like Windows 7. and then if you go through some of these other settings right here like if we go to Modern this gives you kind of a more modern looking start menu but it's still very Windows 7 looking and if we go to the windows 10 style and click Start this one actually is a really good representation of Windows 10 and then the windows 11 style which I think is kind of funny gives you the windows 11 start menu back which you know I'm not sure why you'd want to do that being you're on Windows 11 why not just use the windows 11 start menu but that's okay and then if you kind of go through here this does have a lot of different settings that you can change for instance you can change the start button itself but in order to do that you have to position the start menu on the left side so if we go ahead and turn that on right there and go ahead and move our start menu over to the left hand side then we can turn this on we can change our start button and for that you essentially just go through and you pick whatever start button you want whatever you decide you want to change it to you can also use custom start buttons as well so this is really similar to other programs that allow you to change your start button and it uses the same format the same formatted start menus as the other ones so if you actually go to pick image right here you can see that it's the triple style picture that will allow different color changes and stuff when you Mouse over it you know it's a really good feature to have and it's something that you can use if you want to customize Windows in other ways other than just your start menu and then we're going to take a look real quick at the taskbar as well because you can also modify the taskbar and if you turn that on go ahead and hit yes to the warning they have there you can change the way that the start buttons are combined so it's like right now you can see that I don't have them combined on the programs that I have opened or you can have it to where it never combines them and that should open up all of your different icons then you can also set it to sometimes too if you want to personally I like the always combine because you know it kind of cleans up the look of the taskbar a little bit and also another neat feature within this program right here if you scroll down to here to apply a custom texture to the taskbar you can actually change the taskbar image itself so if you click right here you can pick a different image and it'll change the taskbar to that texture so I think I think it's a cool way to be able to customize your taskbar however all of these settings are kind of out of the start menu realm however I'll go ahead and let you look through some more of these settings so you can kind of play around with it and see what you like about this program so start 11 is actually a pretty decent program for the price it seems to be pretty stable and gives you a wide range of options as a start menu replacement as you can see you can configure your start menu to mimic Windows 7 10 or 11. however the windows 11 one I do still kind of find funny considering we're using this on Windows 11 already however if you're installing this program on a computer that has Windows 10 you could also use the windows 11 start menu if you wanted to however it's up to you either way start 11 is a great program for the price and it does give you a wide range of settings for not only the start menu but also the start button and taskbar the next alternative we're looking at today is start all back which is another retail program that will set you back about five bucks let's take a look at it okay so I have Windows 11 here set back to default now so we're going to go ahead and open up Chrome and we're going to be looking at start all back so we're going to go ahead and download the program right here and this one right here downloads a lot quicker than start 11 did so now that we got it downloaded I'm going to go ahead and run the executable and we'll get this installed right here so it'll take a second to install foreign okay so now we have it installed it usually is a really quick install I had a couple of issues with that one right there for some reason it wouldn't allow me to install it for myself I had to install it for all users which is fine so if you run into that you know you may run in you may run into the same issue if you do you may have to follow the same process that I did and just install it for all users instead so here you have a bunch of different uh alternatives for whatever start menu that you decide you want to use and this one has a proper 11 kind of 10 and remastered seven which honestly if you look at some of these right here so if we click on remastered seven you know it is a Windows 7 start menu if we click on kind of 10 and it is a Windows 7 start menu which is kind of funny being it's called kind of 10 and then if we click on proper 11 it is a Windows 7 start menu yeah that that's that's kind of the interesting thing about this program because it really doesn't do anything but all these different settings right here kind of change your taskbar so if you go to remastered 7 you can see the taskbar is a lot different and it has the Windows 7 start button if you click on the kind of 10 it has a Windows 10 style start button and a little bit different taskbar and then the proper 11 same thing it just changes the start button icon and the taskbar but it doesn't do a lot with the start menu itself it's still a Windows 7 style start menu however it is different for each different setting so this one here has a different texture or a different theme on it however you still are stuck with a Windows 7 style start menu no matter which one of these fit you pick right here so if we click down we can go ahead and click the taskbar settings themselves and these taskbar settings I wanted to take a second to look at some of these because some of these are some pretty neat settings so you can change obviously you can change your start button itself so you can change your start button to a numerous different kinds of start buttons as well as I think you can do custom start buttons as well on this one in most of these programs you can do that you can also change the taskbar location on the screen so if you're somebody that wants your task bar up on the top instead of on the bottom you can do that as well and then some of the other settings that I like on this one right here is first off the center task icons if you click on that it essentially just moves it to the center just like Windows 11 did however if you click on segments it will cut the start menu into these little segments that have the clear area around it if you uncheck segments you can click on Dynamic transparency and you essentially get no taskbar at all you just get your regular desktop with the buttons on top of it kind of a Mac OS X looking however if you click on an icon it does show the taskbar the taskbar does show up and then if we move down into the Explorer settings this one also has some really cool settings right here for instance and I think the biggest one is you guys all know I hate the context menus so it gives you the ability to bring back the classic context menus however if you don't like that you can uncheck it and you can have the windows 11 context menus for whatever reason I'm not sure why you'd want to do that but you can do that however one setting and this setting right here is my favorite setting in this program is right here it says restore control panel applets and if you have that checked on if you go to control panel so we'll go ahead and open control panel real quick here and then if we go to the one that we all know has already been moved so if we go into system and then click on system right here it actually stays in control panel it doesn't throw you into settings so this is one of my biggest complaints with what Microsoft is currently doing with control panel within windows 11. and it's nice that this program gives you an ability to actually bring that back which I really like so just like start 11 start all back is a pretty decent program for the price however it doesn't come with a lot of start menu options you're pretty much stuck with the Windows 7 look however it does have different themes so you have different different versions of the Windows 7 start menu however where start all back really shines is the option for the Explorer options the ability to restore the classic context menu which is a good one but especially the control panel applets it's a huge bonus for the five dollar price tag however considering the lack of features for the start menu and taskbar it's kind of comparable to some of the free options that we're going to be looking at next the first one of those options is Believe It or Not Explorer Patcher which I bet most people thought was just a taskbar replacement but it actually does replace your start menu too let's take a look at it and I'll show you what I'm talking about okay so got Windows 11 all back to default now so we're going to take a look right now at Explorer Patcher and you can get this one on GitHub it's an open source project that anyone can download if they want it but right now it currently has some bugs and I'll go over those for you but the first thing we want to do is go ahead and click on the latest version right here and we want to scroll down and click on the setup executable and it should go ahead and download that and once it's downloaded we can go ahead and install it and it should install fairly quickly just by running the executable and hitting yes it should install it however as you can see sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't as you can see the taskbar didn't show back up and if that happens to you just go ahead and hit Ctrl delete go into task manager and then from task manager you want to scroll all the way down until you find Explorer and when you find Windows Explorer just hit restart and once you restart explore it should launch the taskbar back I know it's annoying but you know unfortunately for an open source program it's still a pretty good good program but it does have some issues so once you get it installed as you can see it looks exactly the same as it did before but if you right click you can see you have a lot more settings on your taskbar now and if you go into properties this is where you get the settings for Explorer Patcher and where I was talking about the start menu replacement here is as you can see if we click on the start menu it is the regular Windows 11 start menu however if you go into your start menu here you can change this to the Windows 10 start menu now if we go ahead and hit it now you can see this is a perfect representation of the Windows 10 start menu That's because it is the Windows 10 start menu now you don't have a whole lot of options with this one because Explorer Patcher is for the most part A taskbar and kind of Explorer modification program but it does give you some settings that you can go through in order to kind of tweak the Windows 10 taskbar slightly so if we go ahead and click on that as you can see it's a pretty basic setup right now however if we come through here we can go ahead and we can add regular pin folders and things of that nature so what we'll want to do is go ahead and click on the start menu and we want to go ahead and open up settings and then from settings you want to go into personalization and you want to go into start menu and from there where it has folders listed you can come through here and you can switch folders on and off and it switches them on and off here so the nice thing about Explorer Patcher is it uses the regular Windows settings in order to modify the start menu itself you don't have to set a lot of these settings up from within their UI you can do them right from the windows UI and then if we go ahead and close this these are essentially the settings you have available for the start menu it's not huge it's not very customizable but it does give you a perfect representation because essentially it's giving you back the Windows 10 start menu and also if you go through this program I've covered Explorer Patcher in many videos Before It's a program that I highly recommend and I use it quite often when I'm on a Windows 11 system so go ahead and check this program out I really like it however it's definitely not perfect and there are some bugs that are currently plaguing it right now like for instance whenever Windows 11 updates whenever you run Windows update and you install new updates for some reason Explorer Patcher won't launch again and you'll have to go through and reinstall Explorer Patcher so what I highly recommend is go ahead and leave it inside of your downloads folder so you can just run in there and you can reinstall the application however hopefully there'll be a bug fix to it soon that'll fix those problems so many people have watched this channel for a while know that I really love Explorer Patcher I just think that it's a great project with a ton of future potential unfortunately right now it's kind of buggy and that's really unfortunate and because of the problems that it's currently experiencing I would really only recommend it to more advanced users that know how to deal with issues when they arise however I would still highly recommend keeping an eye on this project and if you can afford it I would definitely recommend throwing some cash towards the developer he has a PayPal link on his GitHub page and the best way to help projects like this get better is by supporting the developer now the next project we're going to look at is another open source project called openshell This is a spin-off from the very popular start menu replacement from the Windows 8 days called Classic Shell let's jump on and take a look at it okay so got Windows all set back to default again and now let's go ahead and install openshell so if you go to the link in the description below you can find this and this is essentially it's another open source project and go ahead and go to the main page and click on the latest releases right here and then from there scroll down and click on the executable just like this and then once it downloads we can go ahead and open it in our folder here and go ahead and install it and then from here it has just a basic installer we're just going to run through here real quick and keep all the options at default and it might take a second to install go ahead and say yes to the user account control and there we go we now have it installed however this one right here is a little bit difficult with Windows 11 because honestly I don't think it fully supports Windows 11 yet but we're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you what I'm talking about here so if you click on the start button you still have exactly the same start menu that you had before so to get open shell to actually work go ahead and go into all apps and scroll all the way down until you find open shell right here and you're going to want to have the open shell menu settings and once you open those up you're going to want to click on show all settings and you want to go over to the start button right here and then click on replace start button and then once you do that and hit OK you'll notice that your start button appears over on the left hand side and when you click on it now you have the original settings that would normally come up and then from here you have very few settings when it comes to the kind of start menu that you can choose from essentially it's the Windows 7 start menu but once you pick the one you want you can go ahead and hit OK and then there you go you have a Windows 7 like start menu and you also have the windows 11 one and if you'd like to replace the windows 11 one completely what you can do is you can right click go to taskbar settings and then from there you can go to taskbar behaviors and then instead of Center you can have it aligned to the left and then by doing that all it does is move the start button to the left and as you can see open shell just sits over the top of the windows 11 start by button if you come in real close to the edge right here you actually can still click on the Windows 11 start button so it's still there but this will give you one that just kind of goes over the top of it so what we're going to do real quick is I'm just going to take a look at some of the custom options that you can do so if you come in here there's tons of different settings and I've gone through these in other videos before and I recommend you spending some time to look at these because it's amazing the amount of customization that you can do even on a Windows 11 system with this program here but if you go into skin you can change this to multiple different kinds like for instance if you want to go down to Windows Arrow hit OK as you can see this is a lot more Windows 7 looking here and it'll give you the option to be able to really tweak the way that the start button looks and so even though you're still stuck with a Windows 7 start menu you know the options are almost endless with the kind of modifications that you can do in this program but I'm going to go ahead and leave that up to you to check out yourself so for quite some time open shell simply didn't work in Windows 11. luckily it does today but support definitely isn't perfect also the project hasn't been updated since 2022 so I really hope that this isn't just a dead project because openshill is a really great program if you like openshell remember that these free open source projects are almost always developed by people like you and me who have lives and bills to pay so if you benefit from software like this don't hesitate to donate to these developers it can also Aid in the development moving along a little bit quicker now the next start menu replacement that we're going to look at I have to admit I put on this list for reasons other than it being good you know actually let me just show you what I'm talking about yeah this is really bad okay so I have Windows 11 all back to defaults now so we can jump into the next start menu replacement so for that this one's called start menu reviver 2.0 and as you can see from the picture yeah it's it's a Windows 8 style start menu so I'm going to go ahead and scroll down we're going to download now and I'm going to show you what a Windows 8 like start menu looks like in Windows 11. so we're going to go ahead and install the program here it is a regular installer so we'll just go ahead and go through our installer right here and then once it's finished it should fire up the new start menu and right there go ahead and check launch menu reviver and once it's done go ahead and minimize this and as you can see there's our new start menu but we have to take a tour first so let's go ahead and go through the tour and as you can see it just put it right over the top and this is really similar to the way that um openshield did it is you still have the windows 11 start menu you just have this one in addition to that but you have to watch this little video right here that kind of yeah this is an app and essentially you can't stop it or speed it up you just have to watch it so we're gonna watch it I guess and go to the Windows 8 start view all your apps yes yes yes okay so we're almost there I think maybe okay there we go so now when we click on the start button there you are it is it is a a Windows 8 start button and if you go down here you essentially if you want to associate a program with a different icon I'm assuming you click here and you would pick it from the list so if I picked on file explorer no it just launches file explorer so I'm honestly okay here we go add title Maybe shortcut yeah this is um this is not a fun program and it looks really bad and if you go into the settings right here it gives you ability to open up different different services and action center command prompt and you know some of these are nice and you have your start menu settings themselves which are really basic settings and for the most part though I didn't include this one for how good it is I just included it because it's really bad at least in my opinion it's really bad okay I have to admit that my opinion of this specific start menu replacement might be a little bit biased and that's because I hate windows 8. I mean hate is a strong word but I don't believe that it's strong enough to express my deep-seated hatred for Windows 8. so this might be kind of coloring my opinion of the start menu just a little bit however with that said I think the reason why they called it start menu Revival was because they were trying to revive the dead horse that Windows 8 is I mean seriously who wants to subject themselves to the worst version of Windows ever created on purpose but to be honest with you I think the only purpose for this start menu replacement to exist is that the company that makes it also makes a lot of retail PC tune-up software and I think they threw this start menu together that because it filled a niche that wasn't being filled by other start menu Replacements so they could use that for you know to Market their other software they did that not knowing why no other start menu Replacements were filling that Niche could it be that Windows 8 sucked and no one wants it I don't know that might be it either way this start menu replacement is buggy it looks awful but if you want a start menu that looks like Windows 8 I'm pretty sure this is your only option so if that's what you're looking for well there it is so the next start menu replacement we're looking at today isn't really a start menu replacement as much as it's a portable app launcher you know it's actually easier just to show it to you so let's jump on the computer and I'll show you what I'm talking about all right so we have Windows 11 all the way back to default and we have thoroughly disinfected it from the Windows 8 disaster that we just looked at so the next program that we're going to be looking at today apparently we didn't they're still there okay so the next program we're looking at today is a program called Spencer and this is just a portable application so I'm going to go ahead and download it right here and essentially what this does is it's just an application launcher so I'm going to go ahead and right click here we're going to go ahead and extract this into this folder and then once it gets extracted it essentially is one program it's just an executable so we're going to go and minimize this I'm going to drag this executable out onto my desktop here and then we're going to go ahead and run it so if we click on it it gives you well it gives you a Windows protect your PC thing so we got to go ahead and hit run anyway and that gives you the menu and now when you click on it it should give you a menu so essentially all this is is an application launcher it'll allow you to go through and launch applications and it gives you some windows tools as well as access to your settings and control panels in a command line and it also lets you shut down Windows it's a very basic start menu and this is something you can probably keep on your thumb drive and you can use all the time so as you can see this really isn't a start menu replacement in fact it doesn't affect the start menu at all it doesn't even install on your computer it's just a single executable in fact it doesn't even have settings that you can change you're pretty much just stuck with it exactly the way it is it's kind of a clone of the old classic Windows Men start menu from the Windows XP or the Windows 98 era however the reason why I put this one primarily is because of kind of the Elegance of it it has one job and that one job it does pretty well I could see this application coming in handy for technicians who just want easy access to Applications across multiple different systems that have some you know continuity to it so if you have a Network that has different versions of Windows you can have one start menu that launches that new thing but with that said as you can see there's tons of different options available for Windows 11 start menu depending on what works for you this video was just meant to be kind of an overview of some of these options that are available it's not intended to be a definitive guide for Windows 11 start menu Replacements so if I left out any options that you personally like it's because either I didn't know about them or I tried them and found them to be not worth covering essentially all of these options were options that I liked except for yeah start menu Revival I covered that one just for the sole purpose that it was comically bad that and I just thought it was would be funny to cover however in the end I have to say that Windows 11 is a lot more customizable than people give it credit for in fact I have an entire playlist on different ways you could customize Windows 11 and I'll go ahead and tag them here if there's anything on that playlist that you that I didn't cover let me know in the comments below and I might make a video on it so as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 126,538

Keywords: start 11, start all back, explorer patcher, open shell, Start Menu Reviver, Spencer, Windows 11 start menu replacement, changing the windows 11 start menu, windows 11, start menu, windows 10, windows 7, windows 98

Id: 79LZVgfOy1E

Length: 31min 28sec (1888 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023