Hack Your Way Through Windows 8 Start Screen

Hack Your Way Through Windows 8 Start Screen




The Windows 8 Start screen is eminently hackable. Here’s how to bend
it to your will.

The Start screen is the most important location in all of Windows 8. Even if you mainly
use Desktop apps like Office, you’ll still spend plenty of time there. It’s command central,
and also the place you’re automatically sent to when you log into Windows. (Unless
you use Hack “Bring Back the Windows Start Menu to Windows 8”, which lets you head
directly to the Desktop instead.)

Here’s a handful of hacks that will help you get the Start screen working exactly the
way you want it to.



Add and Remove Tiles

The apps you see when you log into the Start screen are probably not the apps you
want to see there. No worries: It’s a breeze to add and remove tiles from the Start
screen.


First a little background about which apps show up on the Start screen. Not every app
appears there; there are plenty of others buried on your computer that don’t show up.
Exactly why some apps show up and others don’t is a bit of a mystery, but in general,
the apps there are the ones you use frequently, or that Microsoft thinks you’ll use
frequently, or, more likely, wants you to use frequently.

Say there’s an app whose tile you want to remove from the Start screen. Simply rightclick
an app and select “Unpin from Start” from the menu that appears at the bottom
of the screen. You can select multiple apps this way and remove them in one fell swoop.

Tip: You can also use a keyboard to select an app to remove (Figure 1). Get to
it by using the arrow keys, and when you’re there, press the space bar. If you’re
using a tablet, drag down on the tile to select it.


Figure 1.
Selecting an app to remove from the Start screen

Adding tiles takes a little more work, but it’s still quite easy. If you know the name of
the app you want to add, when you’re on the Start screen, type its name. You’re sent
to the search screen, with the app on the left part of the screen. Right-click it, and from
the menu that appears at the bottom of the screen, select “Pin To Start.”

Tip: If you search for a Desktop app and right-click it, you can also pin it to the
Taskbar from the menu that appears. If it’s already pinned to the Taskbar, you can
unpin it.


If you’re not sure which app you want to pin and want to see what’s available, you can
see a list of every app you have (Figure 2). Press Windows key+Z, select the “All
apps” button, and you’ll see every app on your PC. Then select it and add it as outlined
in this hack.


Figure 2.
The whole shebang: seeing all the apps on your computer

Tip: To add a Desktop app to the Start screen, see “How to Force Desktop Apps to Show up on the Start Screen in Windows 8”.



Customize Tiles

When you right-click an app to pin it to the Start screen, you’ll notice you have many
more choices than just pinning it. The choices you get vary according to the app you
select. Here’s the list and what each does:

• Pin to Start. You already know all about this one.
• Unpin from Start. If the tile’s pinned to the Start screen, you can unpin it.
• Pin to Taskbar. You know this one from the tip earlier in this hack.
• Unpin from Taskbar. Simple and straightforward: it does what it says.
• Uninstall. Uninstalls the app.
• Larger/Smaller. Tiles in the Start screen are either large or small; this selection
makes a small tile larger, or a large tile smaller.
• Turn live tile on/off. Live tiles grab information from the Internet and display
that information right on the tile. For example, the Mail app displays the number
of email messages in your inbox, and also displays the sender and basic information
from each. If you don’t want that tile to be live like that, turn it off. If you
come across a live tile that isn’t on, you can turn it on from here.
• Clear selection. If you choose more than one tile, the Clear selection option appears,
and most other options go away. Selecting this clears every app you’ve
selected, not just the last one.


Create and Customize Tile Groups

The apps on your Start screen are roughly organized into groups—ten grouped into
their own large rectangle, for example. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason
to these groups. Why is Maps grouped with Store and Mail, for example?

You can easily customize the existing groups and create groups of your own. And you
can also more logically organize which apps go into which groups as well.

Creating a new group is easy. Drag a tile away from an existing group. When you drag
it far enough away from the group, and it’s also far enough away from other groups,
a vertical bar appears (Figure 3). When you see the bar, you can drop the tile, and
a new group is formed. Now just drag other tiles into the group, or add them using the
techniques described in this hack, and you’re done.

That’s just the start, though. You can do more with the group as well, like giving it a
name (Figure 4). Hover your mouse over the bottom right corner of the Start screen
and click the – icon. All of your groups and tiles will minimize to small thumbnails.
Right-click a group and a Name Group icon appears at the bottom of the screen. Click
the icon, type the group’s name, and you’re done. You can also move the group to a
different location on the Start screen. Just drag it where you want it to be and drop it.


Change Your Theme

Your Windows 8 theme is really nothing more than a combination of two colors—
a background color and a foreground color. You can change it when you want, although
Microsoft plays design police, letting you choose only from certain pre-built
combinations.

To change the theme colors, press Windows key+I, then select Change PC Settings at
the bottom of the Settings pane. From the right section of the screen, select Start
Screen and select the color combination you want. As you choose the color combination,
you see it reflected in the preview screen above it.

Figure 3.
Creating a new group

Figure 4.
Naming a new group

You can also choose the kind
of background patterns you want from the choices just above the color strip and below
the preview (Figure 5).


Figure 5.
Changing the Start screen’s colors

Note: Changing the theme affects only the Start screen, not the Desktop.


Controlling Live Tile Behavior

Windows 8 gives you some control over how Live tiles behave. To do it, display the
Charms bar by pressing Windows key+C, and then clicking Settings→Tiles. If you’d
like to clear all information currently displayed on your tiles, click Clear (Figure 6).
The old information vanishes, and only new information will show up.


Figure 6.
Among other things, you can wipe your Live tiles clean and start fresh

If your service provider charges you for bandwidth or has a bandwidth limit, you can
save on bandwidth by limiting the amount of data Live tiles use. Go to the “Data used
for tile updates” section, and from the drop-down menu, choose how much data you
want to allow for updating your tiles with new information. You can choose from 50
MB, 100 MB, 200 MB, 300 MB, 400 MB, and unlimited. Those numbers refer to the
amount of data use in a given month. Once you reach the limit for Live tiles you’ve set
for that month—100 MB, for example—the tiles will tell you that there’s new information,
but won’t display it.


Tip: On the top of the Tiles Settings screen you’ll notice an odd option: “Show
administrative tools.” Normally it’s turned off. If you turn it on, a whole host of
Windows 8 administrative tools show up as tiles on the Windows 8 Start screen—
Disk Cleanup, Device Manager, and many others. And if install you the Remote
Server Administration Tools to use Windows 8 as a management workstation for
your networking environment, this folder gets filled with even more tools.




See Also
• “Hack the Windows 8 All Apps Screen”