I bought a gaming laptop late last year that came with Windows 10 pre-installed and one of the first things I did was install two Stardock utilities that I found indispensable for routing around the UI horrors from Windows 8.
Start 10 replaces the Windows 10 Start Menu with something that is actually usable (the Windows 10 Start Menu is better than the one from Windows 8, but is still a pain to use in my opinion). Start 10 offers a number of customization options that let you mix and match different Windows 10 options, but I prefer the classic Windows 7-style as in this screenshot.
Life is too short to constantly be screwing around with Microsoft’s poor design choices. Start10 offers a 30 day free trial, and costs only $4.99.
Fences is the sort of utility program that always makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn’t include it’s featureset out of the box rather than waste time on implementing tiles and other nonsense. The main feature is to allow users to better organize shortcuts, folders and files on the desktop as in the screenshot below. Fences also enables multiple desktop pages, so users can easily organize programs, files and folders logically on the desktop.
As with Start10, there is a 30-day free trial for Fences, and the program costs just $10.
