Windows 7 Classic vs. New Start Menu

The way I see it the new start menu and the whole UI of explorer it's like is having a less advanced technology. Because it offers fewer customizing power then the older UI. The old windows explorer feels like amazing technology from the future in comparison. Yes the old graphics looks more cheap but since when the color and the look of something defined the power ?

With the old UI you could drag around the buttons and choose for yourself how many buttons you could have - like UP, COpy, Paste - even Undo and many more. Trivial things yes , which every modern software offers but somehow the new Win 7 and Vista are not powerful enough to give you that.

Well it's amazing that some users here are making and building programs designed to replace the start menu and giving new options. But I'm afraid there are many more things unacceptable on WIn 7. Small things yes (like the auto-refresh feature) but still they add up and seriously disable some work-flows types. Is it possible to program and customize all the annoying "features" of Win 7 ? If that would be possible than me and many other users could see the WIn Vista or 7 as a possible viable OS.

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I like the new start menu a lot. It looks much better than the old one though I can think of some improvements. One of them would be combining the items on the right and the left side into one menu, that way it would look less complex. Then it would be possible to add the fold-out feature that the items on the right side already have to the item called "All Programs" on the left side. The "All" could be dropped and it would be called just "Programs" instead. The other items that the user manually pins to the start menu could go on top of the new "Programs" item, seperated by a thin line. Specifically, the items that are "pinned" to the Start menu could then also have the fold out feature so that the user could build his/her personal menu structure on top of the existing one, making it a lot more configurable. That would make a really cool new menu.

The user wouldn't have to fool around in %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu all the time. Just add a junction there redirecting to a directory called %userprofile%\MyStuff for example, making it easier to find MyStuff. In MyStuff the user would then be able to create a directory called "Computer" containing junctions to the root folder of every partition on the system. That he or she could theoretically access every file on the whole system with just 2 mouse clicks. I suppose that would require major re-engineering though.

I think Microsoft is heading towards a major disaster here.
I've been trying this thing out for over two weeks now. All I can see up until now is fluff. At least Vista had something new, UAC, giving it more or less the same 'su' capability that Unix has had for at least 25+ years. The only "new" thing in 7 is a seperate boot partition, which can be usefull for the vast minority of users that have multi-boot configurations. But if you think about it, it isn't even new. It's something that could easily have been done in Vista and probably also in the versions that used ntldr.
Where is the new stuff ??? Homegroups ? Libraries ? Pinning shortcuts all over the place ? That's plain fluff. Windows file sharing is over 15 years old.

And while they were _finally_ splitting partitions, they could have done what many users already have been doing manually for ages: splu user data/profiles and the OS into sperate partitions thus greatly simplifying the process of making backups and reinstalling the OS. They could have created an option to have user account data (sid's etc.) in the boot partition so that all OS es could use the same data, even after being reinstalled. They could have ... added something really _new_. Or at least put NTbackup back to replace that unreliable piece of junk they put in Vista. Try using it to restore one of your .bat scripts and enjoy .... Instead they hired artists to add yet more useless fluff and further obfusticate any attempt by the user to configure the interface to his/her own taste. Even in SP2, Vista _still_ refuses to remember my folder preferences, reverting (or retarding) back to those ridiculous stars within days.
I still have to manually move my personal stuff off the C: partition and put a junction in \Users to redirect, only because Vista backup fails completely if I do that by modifying the profile list instead. It's academic by now because I stopped using that crap ages ago. They should have called it Backup and Pray Center. I'm not even going to waste time to see if that or the .bat thing has been fixed in 7.

That's great timing; i'm probelly going to finish the light-blue-3-d-colors for tommorrow then im going to add some animation as microsoft havn't added that yet

As I said. It's a shiny nice looking OS designed to attract beginners. But where is the "advanced" version ? We are not all beginners, right ? They like to make so many flavors of it (Home, Ultimate ...). Why not an Advanced version ?

Here is the source code Feel free to modify it in any way. If you re-release it, please mention my name somewhere Thanks! And I can't remember now, but the code to extract the icons might have someones name might be somewhere, they need crediting aswell

Thomas

EDIT: I've just noticed over the past week the downloads of the source has gone from 24 to 77.
The soruce code is for version 0.6. Since then a huge majority of the program has been rewritten!

If you re-release it, please mention my name somewhere

Click to expand...

Thanks for the for that u've practically done it for me,

Yes ill put you name on it and ill have a look for the other people who need creidting

Well, I read all this thread and I can see the points of both parts... As for me, I don't like things to "move around"... I don't like "smart menus" because they break my physical pattern memory of where the commands are, and I don't like one peculiar feature of Vista/7 start menu: the fact that when a program folder "unfolds", it does not open a side menu but instead shifts all other icons down... this annoys me a lot for the same reason explained above. I also don't like the fact that when I open the "all programs" sections, this takes over the pinned and recent used programs.

Anyway I'd like to point you to a nice software: FreeLaunchBar, I use it to organize all my shortcuts and never use the start menu since I installed it. The full version TrueLaunchBar also allows you to access the programs menu from a button on the taskbar, so it might work for 7

the new one is much more powerful

I like it.

Didn't you meant to say : more beautiful ? or much more shiny ? instead of powerful

niiiro said:

the new one is much more powerful

I like it.

Click to expand...

Hmmm "powerful" because it has more features? I only like the quicksearch of the Vista menu, for everything else I'd rather have the classic or XP menu anyday. TrueLaunchBar is "powerful", it has "a lot" of features that are missing in Windows menus, it is heavily customizable and is reliable, it looks and feels much much better even than the so called "superbar".

That said, I can see a step away from icon based gui in the 7 start menu: the list on the right pane of the menu has no icons, you have to read each caption to know what it is, I don't like it. To launch programs it is now easyer to input their name like in a unix shell with auto-completion, looks like that DOS is back in undercover work

The single thing I hate most of 7 start menu is the ">" to the side of internet explorer and other icons: that glyph has always been used to unfold a submenu of sort, but now it opens an action panel, not very consistent IMO

Voted to the New Style Menu, More attractiive and clean menu plus it is so simple one and has the all features and applications that, I want

Thanks four topic..

Thank you so much : this is exactly what I've been hoping and looking for everywhere !

I'll test it as soon as I'm back home this week end...

In the meantime, just a simple question : is french localization included ? if not can I help with it ?

How do I enable this new menu that everyone's talking about ? I can't find it, all I can see is the XP style menu.

Hello,

Which new menu would that be?

reghakr said:

Hello,

Which new menu would that be?

Click to expand...

The one everybody is talking about. I can't find it.

There are a bunch of them.

I'd suggest you go back through this thread looking for others.

here's one I just located:
Link Removed

You might want to translate that page in English.

reghakr said:

There are a bunch of them.

I'd suggest you go back through this thread looking for others.

here's one I just located:
UNAWAVE - Windows 7 Classic Menu emulation

Click to expand...

That's an even older menu. Besides, there are much better ways to get that ancient crap back in 7. You can add two junctions to your, for example, pictures folder and enable that as a menu in the start menu. Let the junction names start with an underscore, eg. _START and _USTART so that they appear at the top, above yout collection of Mickey Mouse pictures. Saves the space on the taskbar which you desperately need for pinning up your pin ups and other crap. I'm looking for the _NEW_ thing. How to enable ?