How To Get Windows 7 Classic Start Menu In Windows 8

Ever since Microsoft showed the tile based start page of Windows 8, all of us have been writing posts about how to get Windows 8 start screen in Windows 7. Thanks to all those people who made it possible. But today (I’m smiling while writing this blog post), I’m going to tell you about how you can get Windows 7 classic start menu in Windows 8.

Windows 8 has a metro style start screen. It appears when you click on the start button at the bottom-left of the screen. If you’ve used Windows 8 developer preview, you would have known that there is no shutdown tile on the start page. It might annoy you if you’re a die hard fan of Windows 7 start menu. Also, the search option is quite useful in start menu of Windows 7 which is not available in Windows 8 at the moment. Keep in mind that it’s just a developer preview. The stable version of Windows 8 probably gets all these features by default but you have to wait till fall 2012.

Re-enable Windows 7 Start menu in Windows 8

1) Open Regedit (win+r > regedit >enter)

2) Go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

3) Double-click on RPEnabled and change the value from 1 to (zero)

4) Close Regedit.

That’s it. The classic start menu should immediately appear on Windows 8. If you want to revert back to Metro UI, simply follow the above steps and at step 3, change the value from zero to 1. Note that when you set the value of RPEnabled to zero, it means you’re disabling metro UI on Windows 8. As it’s a dev build, changing registry values might cause bugs and errors. So try this trick carefully.

Also Check Keyboard Shortcuts of Windows 8

Update: You can easily create a Shutdown tile in Windows Metro style start screen. To do so, you just have to move the shutdown shortcut, which you can create simply by selecting ‘Shortcut’ from the right click context menu, to the programs\startmenu folder. Wesurfweb has a detailed post on creating Shutdown icon as a tile in Windows 8 metro style start screen.