Walt Mossberg

When You Don’t Want a New Start

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With Windows 8.1, the setting to bypass the new Start screen is buried.

Microsoft’s new Windows 8.1 will now let users bypass the new Start screen and boot right into the usual Windows desktop. But the setting to do this can be tricky to find.

It isn’t in the Control Panel, or in the settings section of the Start screen.

To find and use the hidden setting, first go to the desktop, not the Start screen. Then right-click on an empty area of the Taskbar at the bottom.

In the first menu that comes up, click “Properties.” Then click the tab called “Navigation.”

Go to the section called “Start screen” and check off the first item, which says: “When I sign in, or close all apps on a screen, go to the desktop instead of Start.” Then click “OK.”

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik