Is there a way to align the icons in the Start Screen of Win 8.1? The customization feature won't do it and there is no apparent way to align the icons as the user may want to: (e.g. 8 icons in two neat columns).
When I try to align the icons the snap back and forth and it is very difficult, if not impossible to place them where I want.
I want to ask about start screen, here the screenshot.
The icons changes like box show in the screenshot. The last thing I remember before it's happen is, I installed all the font that I copied from other computer using windows 7.
I am getting quite used to the start screen on Windows 8 (as opposed to a start menu (?) - this change in nomenclature is sure to confuse users...)
I followed the tip on organizing into groups - quite useful.
However, once I have my start screen organized the way I like, I find that within groups icons tend to 'shift' positions randomly - which is irritating.
Any way to 'lock' them so once they are in position - one would think MS would have thought of that already.
Noticed something interesting - I am on a dual monitor set-up and when I open the start screen on a different monitor the organization of the start screen changes. Maybe that is why it is not an option (?) ...
I have a problem I can not see more in the icon bar of the start screen of my windows 8.1 tried to explain to a previous restore point but without result ..... I do not want to reformat everything ...
I put my computer in sleep mode, as I have done many times. But this time, after I brought it back on, my Start Screen was missing all the tiles. AND, I can't put them back. When I click the "All Apps" button at the bottom, my screen just goes blank.
My desktop works, so I haven't lost anything. Just have a totally disfunctional Start Screen.
Symptoms:
1) After boot, I'm at the Start Screen.
2) The screen isn't blank. It's got the background and the START in the corner. It's just blank of tiles. There are no tiles on my Start screen.
3) If I go to bottom and right click, I see "All Apps" and if I click that, the screen then goes blank, and the background changes. The screen is totally blank and nothing works except the side menus. There are no tiles listed and no text on the screen.
I installed a copy of Windows 8 Professional. The "Live Tiles" on my new Start screen aren't working. I can click on the Store icon and it comes up, then immediately closes. I've turned off live updating and turned on app locations and all that. It still won't come on.
I've tried it with all my new apps, and none of them work, except for the Maps app.
Is there any way to disable Windows from automatically placing desktop icons on the start screen? Or is there a way to remove multiple icons at one time?
Windows 8 start screen adds 2 new columns when I add 2 items to a block of programs.
I end up with all these categories that have 2 or 3 icons off to the side when one new column would do it in a much more compact format. Some categories could be only one column but it still insists on using 2.
Am I missing something some place in the settings or something?
I wanted to post a screenshot but none of my screen capture software seems to work in Metro.
Snipping tool, Camstudio, and Fraps all close the Metro screen as soon as I activate them.
I just got a new laptop with Windows 8 and upgraded to Windows 8.1.
I don't like seeing my desktop icons, so I did right click on desktop -> View -> Show desktop icons so that they disappear. They're gone, but every time I restart my laptop, they appear again.
I'd like to solve the problem correctly without just deleting all of my desktop icons.
My problem is simply this, when i boot my pc into windows the boot takes maybe 3 seconds to desktop, but the icons on the desktop do not appear for another 10 seconds. The same can be said for the icons in the start menu. The biggest problem is that even if i run the icon such as firefox, before the icon has fully loaded, the program will not run. No programs will run until 13 seconds after boot once the icons have loaded.
The icons on my start menu and text were about right size but today something happened and they got a lot smaller. Now the text is hard to read with a mag glass. How to make them big again?
Within the last month or so, shortcuts on the start menu haven't been refreshing when their respective icons actually change. This only pertains to 3rd party programs and games--not those downloaded from the Microsoft store or included in Windows by default. For example, Steam recently changed the design of their logo. This change was never reflected in the start menu.
There are at least several other apps, like the PortableApps launcher, that the same is happening to. I've actually had to go to the entry in appdata and completely remove them and re-add them to get the changes to show. Never had an issue with anything like this until relatively recently, though I can't place one particular event as being definitive. It may have been like this for even longer and I wouldn't have known until a few things updated anyway.
See system spec for details, as everything is up-to-date. It would be nice for software to update icons and have those changes reflected rather than having to add manually.
The logon screen on my computer is not showing the icons for switch user, power, ease access, etc. The only thing I've done recently is uninstalled some fonts. Thinking this may have caused the problem, I reinstalled them but I'm still having this problem.
I upgraded to Windows 8,double clicked the windows.old folder to get files from old computer, now there are ICONS all over the screen and I can't delete some of them or programs won't work.
The icons on the taskbar at the bottom of my screen become distorted. They'll generate copies of themselves, overlap other icons, and the start menu button disappears. Whenever I try to click an icon, it opens the icon to its left, as if the mouse needs to be calibrated. When I open the start menu, every time I scroll my mouse across a shortcut, it disappears. Poof. Just like that. I scroll my mouse over the icons a few more times, and usually, they'll come back, but if I scroll again, they disappear once more. Thus, I'm not able to open any programs from the start menu. Additionally, my background (which I normally have cycling through a folder of wallpapers) goes completely black.
This happens without warning; sometimes I'm playing video games and it happens when I alt-tab, sometimes I'm browsing the internet and it happens randomly, once I was just looking at my screen without running any programs or tasks and it happened. It will fix itself anywhere from a span of 2 minutes to half an hour.
I have a Windows 8 tablet/ultrabook (Lenovo Yoga). I primarily use the desktop to operate and have many icons and shortcuts arranged to facilitate the use of my computer.
When I use my PC in tablet mode, sometimes I rotate the screen to read PDFs, certain webpages, etc. When I rotate the screen back to a horizontal mode, all my carefully placed icons and shortcuts are shuffled around the desktop. I realize that when I rotate the screen the icons move because they have to temporarily reorient themselves to portrait vs landscape, but shouldn't they return to their original position when I rotate the screen back to the horizontal mode?
Is there a way to lock icons in place with Windows 8?
I went to power up my PC today and after welcome screen the screen started flickering and no icons or anything was on the screen except start tray which only had start button, touch keyboard button and address bar, none of which were responding.
I managed to launch task manager through ctrl-alt-delete (that didn't flicker, but taskmgr did). I launched cmd through taskmgr and managed to stop the flickering by terminating endless stream of svchost.exe processes. Couple of seconds after I do this, BSoD appears giving 0xc000021a error. Msconfig can't configure the PC to boot in safe mode. What do I do?
I've tried just about everything, but can't seem to find a setting to stop this action. The screen on my laptop (Sony Flip 15A, intel4400/geforce735) seems to increase and decrease in brightness between screens. It's rather annoying not just because of the change, but also because it takes several seconds to occur and it occurs in discrete steps. I'm running the latest drivers from both intel and nvidia. I've tried turning off adaptive brightness and disabling the sensor service, and all effects (fade in, UAC, etc) have been turned off. A video of the condition is shown below:
(Vimeo was taking forever to process)
It even happen when no programs are opening/closing - for example, if I view a dark background web page and then a lighter background, the brightness shifts. I can't imagine how awful this will be in photoshop.
In Windows 8.1 do the on screen notifications only show on the Start screen?
I'm talking about the big ones I see with the black bar, such as low battery warning.
Twice I've been on the desktop and I never got a low battery warning. To test I made sure I was on the Start screen and sure enough the warning popped up. Also, when I switched over to the desktop the battery icon showed the exclamation point where I don't think it ever did when always on the desktop.
As I understand it, when I it the Windows key or mouse-click lower left while in the desktop, it is supposed to take me to the Start Screen. Indeed, it did work this way for some time. However, now, when I do either, it takes me to the Apps Screen and I have to do something (one of several) to switch to the Start Screen. Once there, if I hit Windows key or click lower left repeatedly, it goes Start Screen -> Apps Screen -> Desktop -> Apps Screen -> Desktop, etc. I think this is wrong. It is certainly not what I want; but my searching has not run across any other mention of this behavior. I don't want it to go to the Apps Screen when I hit Windows key or click in lower left. I only want to go there if I specifically do something to get there from the Start screen. (E.g., little arrow, Ctrl-Tab) How do I get back to the Start Screen being the default choice between these two?
The behavior changed some time after I upgraded to Windows 8.1; but I am not sure if it was immediately after. I suspect not. I've only had the computer for a week, so I am still becoming accustomed to Windows 8. (Coming from XP and 7 and having read a lot of negative comments, I was expecting that I would hate Windows 8. As it turns out, I don't understand the presumed problems. The functionality of Windows 7 is still there. The Start Screen is actually nicer than the Start button
When I try to add a shortcut to the start screen I get a message 'No such interface supported' When I install a new program or game it wont add the shortcut to the start menu even if I have ticked 'add shortcut to start menu. All games and programs run fine, I just cant add a shortcut. How to solve it?
I can't seem to find any way to lock my start screen once I get my apps organized and just the way I want them. Is there no way to lock your apps so that they can't be rearranged by someone? If not then that seems like a glaring omission. I spend a great deal of time arranging it and then my three year old comes along and messes it all up. I would like to prevent this. I know I can create a user password and just not let any use on it.
At least Windows 8 makes it easy to create a Start Screen tile for a program, or for a folder. But if you have a FILE that you open often (like a Word file, a Notepad file, or a PDF) and you want a tile to open it, there's no ready-made way to create one.
But you can do it this way. Open your Start Menu folder, which is C:Users(Your Username)AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsStart MenuPrograms (It's a hidden folder, so just paste the above path into the File Explorer address bar.)
Then open the folder containing your file. Right-click the file's icon and select "Copy." Then right-click in the Start Menu folder and select NOT "Paste," but "Paste Shortcut."
This makes the shortcut look like an "App" to Windows 8, so if you then go to the Metro Search Screen and search for "Apps" it will come up there, and you can right-click it and "Pin to Start."
When I am away from the computer for maybe an hour or more and come back, the Start Screen will not operate, I have to keep rebooting my machine. It is getting frustrating. I have changed the settings to NOT allow hibernation of the computer to include the hard disk drive when not in use; however, the Start Screen after non-use does not want to work, freezes. What can I do?
I was hoping to get the start screen to be transparent so that it simply overlays the traditional desktop and windows. I think this would give win8 on a desktop a much more complete feel.