"s|b" wrote in message
...
My mother's new computer came with Windows 10 Home. She was using
Windows 7 Home Premium on her old laptop and to make the transition a
bit easer I want to install either Start Menu 8 or Start10. Has anybody
tried these programs? Which do you prefer and is there a Dutch
translation available?

Start Menu 8 (free)
http://www.iobit.com/en/iobitstartmenu8.php

Start10 ($4.99)
https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/

(I'm aware there's also Classic Shell. I'm not interested in Classic
Shell.)

What's wrong with Classic Shell - or what does it not do that Start 8/10 do?

I've found Classic Shell to be fine. Occasionally it gets turned off by a
Windows update, but it's easy enough to reinstall it when that happens. Are
Start 8/10 more resilient to being disabled by Windows updates?

Anything is better than the "mess of tiles" of the Windows 8 start menu. The
whole point of icons is that they should be easily distinguishable from each
other and that you should be able to pin them to specific parts of the
desktop so you can go straight to the correct icon by screen position as
much as by icon picture. The Mess of Tiles has icons which are not
sufficiently distinctive and icons which change place on the menu (maybe
depending on which apps you use more frequently).

The idea of pinning icons to the taskbar is one I find counter-intuitive: I
prefer to have two distinct places on the taskbar: one a set of links to
applications that I might want to run, and the other a list of the
applications that are actually running. Combining the two, with only an
underline distinguishing running from potentially-running applications, is
too confusing.

The problem with Windows 8 and 10 is not that they added the new features
like the "mess of tiles" and the combined taskbar, but that they *removed*
the older legacy features. I'm one of those people who believes in "get it
right first time so you NEVER have to change radically - evolution, rather
than revolution".

Classic Shell (and no doubt Start 8/10) restore the user *choice* as to
which UI is used.