Stardock Software program’s Start11 utility is delivery at this time as a 1.0 launch, and in the event you hate the reductionist new design of the Home windows 11 Begin menu and taskbar, you’ll need to test it out. Start11, amongst different helpful methods, permits you to transfer the taskbar round your desktop and configure the Begin menu to emulate Home windows 10’s appear and feel.
Replace: On Jan. 13, Stardock shipped Start11 1.1, whose most important addition is the inclusion of folders, one thing that Home windows 11’s personal Begin menu lacks. You may as well add “fences” to the Begin menu, Stardock says, with help for its Fences app. We haven’t examined these new options.
Start11, priced at $4.99 as a standalone utility, doesn’t provide every little thing: it may possibly’t create any dynamic Home windows 10 Dwell Tiles, for instance, and your capacity to maneuver and resize the Home windows 11’s taskbar icons remains to be considerably restricted. However in the event you’d like a extra mild transition between Home windows 10 and Home windows 11, Start11 actually helps.
Start11 is the newest iteration of the “StartX” utilities from Stardock, which shipped related Start8 and Start10 utilities as throwback UIs to earlier variations of the Home windows working system after Home windows 8 and Home windows 10 launched, respectively. Start11 merely installs excessive of Home windows 11, presenting a extra acquainted approach to work together with the working system. This system itself consists of an easy settings menu, the place you’ll be able to tweak issues as you’d like. After that, Start11 makes Home windows 11 look as you please after which merely will get out of the way in which.
Right here’s get Home windows for reasonable (and even without cost)
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Tweaking your taskbar with Start11
As our Home windows 11 evaluation highlighted, Home windows 11 doesn’t allow you to to resize the taskbar or transfer it round your display screen. Start11 does, although not with the total flexibility of Home windows 10. Start11 lets you transfer the taskbar to the highest or backside of the display screen — not the edges — and resize the icons. (Doing so inside the Start11 Settings menu requires you to click on a button to manually restart the Home windows Explorer course of manually.)
You possibly can tweak the placement of the taskbar on every particular person show, and resizing the icons actually helps to maximise usable display screen area on each tablet-sized and 4K shows. It’s a giant enchancment over the default Home windows 11 expertise. However Stardock has but to repair a key annoyance of Home windows 11 — the Home windows system clock nonetheless solely seems on a single show. Start11 additionally doesn’t but permit you to resize the taskbar, nor drag and drop recordsdata on a taskbar icon to launch the applying, although these limitations little question come from Microsoft greater than Stardock.
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Nonetheless, it’s a strong begin, even when it’s not all that you just would possibly hope for fairly but. If it was, Stardock might have named it Taskbar11 as a substitute.
Home windows 11’s Begin menu is without doubt one of the extra controversial points of Microsoft’s new working system, however Start11 permits a lot of tweaks to make it extra acquainted. You can use the Home windows 11 Begin menu in the event you’d like — however decide to let Start11 permit you to resize it or open it in a full-screen mode, which Home windows 11 doesn’t but do. Helpful!
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Nonetheless, Start11 additionally permits you to open Begin as a Home windows 7-like interface, or use the extra tiled method of Home windows 10. Within the latter setting, you’ll be able to transfer and group icons, resize them, and usually make Begin appear like Home windows 10, however with out the animated “Dwell Tiles” that Home windows 10 supported. Stardock additionally has its personal “fashionable” model, which shrinks down the Begin menu into an ultracompact structure, and factors to your most recently-used recordsdata on an app-by-app foundation, fairly than the OS at massive.
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Start11 additionally gives some further choices for managing search, in addition to some further tweaks to launch Home windows 11’s personal Begin menu versus Start11’s personal. Nonetheless, if the working methods’s native appear and feel brought on you to carry off on upgrading to Home windows 11, Start11 certainly eases the transition.
This story was up to date on January 13 with further data.
As PCWorld’s senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft information and chip expertise, amongst different beats. He has previously written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.