The Core

Are you using it?

I was an early adopter of Win8 because of a computer meltdown that happened just as it became hard to get Win7 on a decent machine.

I tried Classic Shell and a couple of other things and they all wreaked havoc, but as I say, Win 8 had been commercially available for only a month or two at the time. So perhaps they've gotten better.

I don't actually miss the start menu - I've used Launchy ever since XP and have long launched apps as done in Win 8. The problem I have is Win8 is constantly removing things from my start items and so the type-to-find function for that app stops working too.

 But the directory/file tree --I live by the file tree.

You mean for organizing Start Menu items? You'll pretty much have to give that up and it's one of the thing that bothers me. I have a lot of apps that do one small thing very well, but very rarely. By having categories to my start menu, I can alsways find that odd network monitoring or file processing app that I use every couple of years.

In terms of the standard Windows Explorer, there are some nice enhancements over Vista (I've never been a Win 7 user so I can't say). Overall there are still a small number of things that I find annoying with Win 8 on a laptop, but none of them rise to the point of installing something that takes over the shell and interferes with default behaviors in unpredictable ways (which was how I felt about the ones I tried).

I think you just have to go into it with an open mind. Ultimately, I'm not that picky. I've been happy with every version of Win since XP and am happy enough with Ubuntu and would probably be happy with a Mac if I wanted to spend $2500 on a laptop!

It did occur to me that if a Mac let me bill another 20 hours per year because it made me more efficient, I would pay for it in a year.... but I'm not there yet, so I tried Win 8 and it's okay.

>organizing Start Menu items

No, standard Win Explorer. I launch routine .exe's from shortcuts at the start of a session but any files I happen to need (jpg, txt, open office docs) I launch from the win explorer tree.  I need to see the file extension and details, too.

It was the weird file tree that threw me off vista.

I had to mess around with a new Windows server the other and it had this 'nazzy' new Win8 interface thingymagig.
- OMG what a PITA that was. First time I've used Win8 type of thing and hated it, nothing was where I wanted it, I had to dig around to find the stuff, then when I did find it I forgot where it was because I was on a mission to find something else.
Why on earth they would put it on Windows Server is beyond me, it has no place in the business world.

/rant over

Completely used to the OS now, the metro gui and apps stuff are useless, but it's easy enough to ignore.

>Apparently that is being fixed in the upcoming Blue update, which I'm guessing will be out end-of-Summer or so. There's also chat of the return of the Start menu and skipping Metro by default.

Just read that today:
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-windows-8-plan-blue-bring-back-the-start-button-boot-to-desktop-7000014075/

So can I eventually drill down to something similar to the Win Explorer directory/file tree?

Yes, with enhancements. It's actually a minor improvement over what I had in XP/Vista if I recall correctly

For instance, under the "View" menu you have a toolbar that

- has several choices of icon sizes. So on a high-res screen I need medium icons or larger to see what Dropbox is doing. For choosing photos I might need large or extra large. But if I only hover over the choice it gives me a preview so I don't actually need to change the setting, just hover for a second

- it has a Group By function so I can group by file type and then sort alphabetically, for example

- I think this has existed since Vista (not in XP though) - when looking in the address bar for file location, hover over any folder in the path and it gives you all subfolders, so you don't need to locate yourself in the folder list or navigate back up through the tree.

Several minor UI improvements like that when I have to go back to an XP machine (and if you have a need to test IE8, which I do lately, you need access to an XP machine, whether physical or VM).