After 20 years of working with a Start menu, Microsoft had a great idea and left it out of Windows 8. They went so far as to remove all the code for Windows 8 to try and stop third party developers from developing Start button addons. They didn’t do a great job because in this article we’re talking about both paid and free third party applications that you can download and install to get your start button back.
As a whole, I will say that the paid versions of these applications run a lot better than the free versions. There may be little differences in how the start button works when compared to the original Start button in the paid and free versions. I am going to skip all the crappy ones that I worked with a go straight to the one that worked the best to save us both some time. Skip all the free Start button apps and buy Start8 from Stardock. It’s only $5 and from the comparison tests that we did, it works the closest to the original start menu. We know that paying $5 is a pain, but think about the functionality you’ll be getting back. 20 years of functionality is only $5. We worked with many free start menu apps, and while StartMenu8 is not bad, it lacks some prime functions of the original Start menu. I say, give StartMenu8 a try and if it doesn’t exactly work the way you want, just pay the 5 bucks and get the right software from Stardock.
