Microsoft is now testing a new Start menu in Windows 10

Jul 6, 2020 15:38 GMT  ·  By

One of the best news that Microsoft shared recently concerns the Start menu in Windows 10, as the company has prepared additional polishing that’s now available for testing in the Windows Insider program.

The new Start menu isn’t a major overhaul, but it does include refinements that users have been waiting for already, such as theme-aware tiles. In other words, the live tiles no longer come with solid colors as their backgrounds, but they align with the visual style in the OS and thus provide a little bit more consistency overall.

Of course, the new design also means that Microsoft’s Fluent Design is expanding to a new part of the OS, and this is clearly good news moving forward, as the Windows 10 experience is getting another refresh.

“We are freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent background to the tiles. This design creates a beautiful stage for your apps, especially the Fluent Design icons for Office and Microsoft Edge, as well as the redesigned icons for built-in apps like Calculator, Mail, and Calendar that we started rolling out earlier this year,” Microsoft explains.

What’s very important to know, however, is that the new Start menu design isn’t available for all testers, but only for select users who’ve been picked by Microsoft.

This is because the company is rolling out the new design in stages in an attempt to collect feedback and improve the experience for more users. This is an approach that Microsoft has also used before, with the phased rollout currently employed for the May 2020 Update feature update that’s available for production devices.

As for the new Start menu design, Microsoft plans to enable it for more users in the coming weeks. But the good news is that anyone already running Windows 10 build 20161 can enable it using a small trick.

Windows 10 Start menu

The whole thing comes down to an application called ViveTool that allows you to enable experimental features (that haven’t been enabled by Microsoft itself) in Windows 10 preview builds. Once you download the app using the link here, you need to launch it from the command line with administrator rights – needless to say, this means that you must be logged in with administrator privileges in the first place.

So launch cmd.exe with admin rights from the Start menu, and then navigate to the location where you extracted ViveTool. Once you’re there, you need to launch the app with the following command (make sure that you also add the code at the end because this is actually the one that allows the magic to happen):

ViVeTool.exe addconfig 23615618 2 A reboot of the system is going to be needed when you’re done, and when logging back to Windows you should now see the Start menu.
Windows 10 Start menu

There’s one thing that you need to know, though. In some cases, devices where the new Start menu is activated, either by Microsoft or using the hack here, could end up hitting a color flash when launching Start. Microsoft has already confirmed the problem explaining the following:

“We’re working to fine tune the tile animations in Start to avoid flashes of color.”

A fix will probably be released when the new Start menu design is enabled for more users, so for the time being, make sure that you don’t mess with such changes on computers where critical data is available – as a matter of fact, you shouldn’t run Windows 10 preview builds on production devices in the first place.

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