The First time I sat in front of the Windows 8 interface, I have to admit I was not thrilled. now Start button, I Could not find the control panel, things just were not what I was used to. That was over, two years ago in the early adopter program for windows 8, and now when I use Windows XP or Windows 7, I find it very inefficient to "have to click through so many menus" to find and do basic stuff.
The focus of this article is to share with you not simply how to make Windows 8 work like Windows XP/ Windows 7 "the old way", but instead to really focus on how to do things better and more easily, effectively helping you shortcut the learning process that makes Windows 8 actually extremely easy and efficient to use.
First of all, some basic terminology and "old way" of finding things so that I can take you through Windows 8 in a way you have learned how to use Windows. As I am sure you are aware, Windows 8 no longer has the "Start button" at the bottom left of the screen.Instead, Microsoft has the "windows 8 Style Menu". This is the menu that Windows comes up with.
The focus of this article is to share with you not simply how to make Windows 8 work like Windows XP/ Windows 7 "the old way", but instead to really focus on how to do things better and more easily, effectively helping you shortcut the learning process that makes Windows 8 actually extremely easy and efficient to use.
First of all, some basic terminology and "old way" of finding things so that I can take you through Windows 8 in a way you have learned how to use Windows. As I am sure you are aware, Windows 8 no longer has the "Start button" at the bottom left of the screen.Instead, Microsoft has the "windows 8 Style Menu". This is the menu that Windows comes up with.
If you are in the middle of an application and you want to get back to the menu, on a tablet, you press the "Home" button or from a keyboard system, you press the "Windows Key".
The "Start button" for the most part is called the "Charm" and it pops up on a touchscreen tablet when you swipe your thumb from right to left on the right side of the screen. On a keyboard system, the charm menu pops up when you move the move cursor all the way to the right bottom of the screen.
From the charm menu, you can click on the top most icon and it shows you all of your applications installed. You will see the search bar and on the left you can scroll through all of your apps.
When you search/find the app you want or simply just scroll through the apps off this Charm/Search view, you can right-click the application, and at the bottom of the screen you are given options to Pin to Start, which adds the app to your Windows 8 Style Menu. you can also Pin to Start things like Control Panel, Command Prompt, Run, etc. I usually Pin everything. I usually use/access to the Start which makes it easy for me to just go back to the main Windows 8 style menu to launch my apps.
Note:- You will also see when you right click an app, you can also Pin to Taskbar. I used to Pin stuff to the Taskbar, but now that more and more apps are coming out with windows 8 menu icons, I no longer find myself working from the older Win 7 "Taskbar". This is one of those crutches you can continue to use, or just move into the 21st Century and start using the native Windows 8 menu.
Note:- You will also see When you right click an app, at the bottom of the screen you can choose to run the app as an Administrator, uninstall the app, find the file/application location. These are helpful "things" we used occasionally in Win 7 in the past that you now have shortcuts to run.
Another option off the Charm Menu is the Settings options when you click on Settings....
..This is where a Lot of things are found, such as Control Panel..
....Power, Network, Change PC Settings where you can change other things that are not in the control panel like desktop background, the photo you associate to your logon..
...add Printer, etc.
Basically click on this Settings place and you will get to a lot of things you may normally access for configuration.
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