marianne: All of my games, no matter where I get them, GOG or Steam, etc. ask if I want a shortcut to desktop, and I do. When I right-click on that short-cut, I get the same thing, no variations. no start.

Okay, I misunderstood you as to 8.1. I will not upgrade to 8.1. I'm not as knowledgeable as you are with PCs, and If I wanted to uninstall it, you would need to stay online 24/7 and walk me thru the nightmare step-by-step !! *joking, kinda*

marianne: You are very kind to spend all this time helping me...thank you, Marianne

Leroux: In theory, I love the metro screen, but only after customizing it with 3rd party software, and then I still dislike the way the tiles behave as opposed to how icons on the desktop behave. Updating to 8.1 did some cool things to the metro screen, like adding a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen and offering you four different tile sizes even for your custom tiles. But it still doesn't allow you to customize their look apart from that, and it also introduced a horrible automatic color scheme for them. So if you create a custom tile from a desktop shortcut, e.g. for a game, not only will it just be the small shortcut icon lost in a plain-colored box, but it seems the color is chosen depending on a dominant color of the icon, and instead of contrasting it, it tries to match it within the limited metro palette, so the icon is even harder to discern. And for some weird reason, in more than 50% of the cases the tiles turn out an ugly orange for me.

As for Office, I went to great lenghts to get a retail copy of 2010 instead of using 2013, partly for the look and the 'cool' new online mobile features that I don't need, partly for Microsoft's new license policies.

zeroxxx: No such thing as 'new' policy because they revised it already?

D-ROCK: This past weekend we upgraded our computer from Windows XP to Windows 8. Not only is our new computer faster in boot time, but is also much quieter. It will take some getting used to in regards to there not being a start button at the desktop. So I am just curious to what my fellow GOGer's experience has been so far with those of you who made the transition to Windows 8? We made the transition because of Microsoft ending patch support with Windows XP. One of the most popular OS in history comes to an end.

marianne: All of my games, no matter where I get them, GOG or Steam, etc. ask if I want a shortcut to desktop, and I do. When I right-click on that short-cut, I get the same thing, no variations. no start.

Okay, I misunderstood you as to 8.1. I will not upgrade to 8.1. I'm not as knowledgeable as you are with PCs, and If I wanted to uninstall it, you would need to stay online 24/7 and walk me thru the nightmare step-by-step !! *joking, kinda*

I need to go grocery shopping now, but I'm going to d/l the OblyTiles program when I get back.
You are very kind to spend all this time helping me...thank you, Marianne

marianne: However, you are using 8.1 with no real issues, altho we can't forget that Orange. But it can be fixed with OblyTiles.
Besides, if 8.1 is an issue, reinstalling 8 couldn't be that bad. How many times have we had to reinstall a game ?

thebum06: I'm not sure what this talk about the orange thing is. When I upgraded from 8 to 8.1 it kept my old colour scheme. Nothing turned orange for me.

ChrisSD: I do have some problems with the colours of tiles: Click me.

I find white text on light blue hard to read at a glance. And the orange background on orange icons is also difficult to see.

00dwan: I am not a fan of metro and it makes certain functions much more complicated like getting to advanced settings for wi-fi (e.g. adding invisible SSID manually). You can't just right click and go to properties, because anything like that simply takes you to the metro ui settings for wifi which has no advanced functions.

BoxOfSnoo: I have it installed beside Win7 in Parallels on my Mac. It works fine. The nice thing about Parallels is they made a deal with Stardock so you get Start8 and ModernMix for free. ModernMix is nice, you can use full-screen programs in a window.

Another tip is if you want to start with the Desktop, make it the first tile on your start screen. Hit enter and it should launch... or install Start8 and turn on that option...! Also the start screen has type-to-search so if you got used to doing that with Win7 (and you should have) it's almost the same thing.

DalekSec: With GOG games you need to see a "pin to start" option when you right click on then.
With steam games is another matter, since steam not create real shortcuts, instead steam create URL's that direct to the game, and you cannot pin URL's to the start screen if isn't trought the modern ui version of IE.
Is fault of both, Steam and MS, of Steam for not create real shortcuts, and of MS for stupid limitations.

ChrisSD: I do have some problems with the colours of tiles: Click me.

I find white text on light blue hard to read at a glance. And the orange background on orange icons is also difficult to see.

thebum06: That looks bad indeed. I attached what mine looks like. I do have one orange tile it seems, I forgot about that one. I haven't really used the metro screen for a long time. I mostly use winkey-s to run programs.

DalekSec: With steam games is another matter, since steam not create real shortcuts, instead steam create URL's that direct to the game, and you cannot pin URL's to the start screen if isn't trought the modern ui version of IE.
Is fault of both, Steam and MS, of Steam for not create real shortcuts, and of MS for stupid limitations.