I recently upgraded my main work machine, Dell Studio 1558, to Windows 8 Pro. Only had one issue, where my ATI display driver was making Windows 8 Pro to crash after few minutes into the start screen. Other than this no issues. Smooth sailing so far :)
There’s one thing that I realized after few hours of using Windows 8 start screen, the All Apps option is hidden under a right-click contextual menu. And I was accessing it a lot of times during the day.
I thought there might be a tile that I can place on the start screen, and can just place it on there and All Apps will be just a click away as compared to right-click then click All Apps button in lower-right corner. I’m a lefty, and the start menu we all are so used-to made me look for more apps button in the lower-left corner all the time :D
After some research, I found that there’s no built-in All Apps tile in Windows 8. So I made one myself. I don’t exactly remember where I found the snippet, but all credit goes to whoever found it. I just searched for it :D
All you have to do is make a New Shortcut on Desktop, and set its Target field to:
%windir%explorer.exe shell:::{2559a1f8-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0}
And Start in field to: %windir%. You can change the icon as per your liking of course. Click Ok to create the shortcut on your Desktop.
Now, right-click on this newly created shortcut, and select Pin to Start. Now you have a nice tile that you can just click to access all of your installed applications. Should be great for touch screens as well.
Please note that this is not a perfect hack, there’s a small visual hick-up, as if you click on tile, it will take you to the Desktop for a second, then back to All Apps list in modern UI. But it works :D
You can also download this shortcut file I created for myself, so you don’t have to go through all the hacking stuff ;)
Download: AllApps_Tile_Windows8.zip
// chall3ng3r //
