Windows 8 - Any Way To Make Start Screen Not Create 2 Columns For 2 Icons?
Dec 22, 2013
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 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 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 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 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.
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?
Is there an app or a way to move/create shortcut tiles on Start screen for Wireless section for Modern UI settings. I just bought TF810 (YUPI!!!) and would love to have quick access to those parts of the system (sort of as in WP 7.x/8).
Battery level shown on tile/start screen (it is only shown in detail on task bar) would also be useful. I keep searching for it but no luck so far ....
How To create a start button shortcut to get to start menu in the taskbar. So that we don't need to click the invisible place in the taskbar And there would be a button on which we will click to go to the metro ui start menu.
If we will click on the start button Then We can get The Start Screen. Is there any way to create it??
I much prefer the "list view" in my folders but I don't see way to add "columns" to list view. The only folder view showing these sort tabs is "details" view. Can anything be done about this?
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?
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.
I just did the 'refresh without losing files or settings' after having Windows 8.1 for like 6 months to refresh. Well I lost pretty much every setting and basically started from scratch minus backing up my files to an external/cloud like a regular full reformat. This feature save maybe 5 minutes. and my monitor settings are all messed up, tiny text or scroll bar on the bottom of IE because pages wont fit if I make the text larger, the resolution was fine before I reformatted. What a POS OS. I can go on and on and on. MS should be sued for emotional distress for this faulty POS OS.
So my recents docs is gone we all know, but there are sort of workarounds. I want my recent docs, not recent 'Items' that I was able to pin to start but requires more navigating to get to recent word files etc.
I did this Just open the run dialog box by pressing Win + R and type in "recent". There you can see your recent activities.
Note: "Recent places" can be access under Windows Explorer's under "Favorite".
Also you can create a shortcut of the "recent" at your desktop and then pin it to start menu. For this just right click on desktop and seclect New>Shortcut. In file location type the path
well when I enter the copied path to the new shortcut, it says invalid. The path is:
C:Users ameRecent"C:Users ame ecentRecent"
Edit, after just noticing the link above actually doubled the path, I just deleted the duplicate second half and got the shortcut to create and made it work.
great program that it duplicated the path when I copied it once.
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.
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.
So let me start by saying that I have checked several things already. I have made sure that the brightness slider is all the way up, I have gone into advanced display settings and turned off any sort of auto dim feature and made sure that all brightness settings are turned all the way up.
I am on an old gateway Vista laptop (dual core cpu, 2GB ram) and I have Windows 8 release preview 32 bit installed on a separate partition on my HDD. When I installed it, everything went fine. Then after running 8 for about 10 minutes, all of a sudden a window popped up above my battery icon in the tray saying that I should replace my battery, and the screen went dim. It was as if I turned the brightness slider all the way down. Well all of the sliders and settings are still at 100% brightness, unplugged or on power.
When I boot back into Vista, everything works fine. There is no battery warning or brightness issues.
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?
Am "using new HP laptop 2000-2d27dx Windows 8.1. Only way I shutdown or restart is going to "charms" panel - Settings - then click Power off icon and choose Sleep, Shutdown or Restart. Is there a way to put a SHORTCUT for Shutdown and Restart on the desktop and/or the Start screen?
7stacks is a neat little program that tries to bring Mac OS's "Stacks" to windows. this is also an excellent way of making a rudimentary start menu that allows you to access programs.
Steps:
1. install 7stacks. there's no shovelware, and you can skip "create shortcut on desktop, because it'll ask you if you want to launch on completeion.
2. Enter data as shown, note the folder path and that the icon path is a little different. That path will lead to the main applications menu, which should work fine as long as you install applications so everyone can access.
3. click on the ellipses button after the icon path, which will bring up this window:
you actually have two icons to chose from, the one that is highlighted and the blue Windows 8 logo on the top. I prefer the older version myself, so that is what I used
4. Click "create shortcut on desktop," then pin to taskbar and move to the far left.
5. There you go. Feel free to tweak as desired. If you want, you can create a custom folder somewhere that has everything arranged to your liking. You can also create shortcuts to common functions such as sleep, shutdown, logoff, etc but I haven't looked yet how to do that.
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.
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?
