Windows 7 Explorer Shell On Windows 8

[hoak]

Some guy here on MDL created a wrapper that gets the Windows 7 Explorer Shell working on Windows 8.

While more of an interesting experiment then something useful, it shows different shells can run fine on Windows 8, and by extension almost certainly Server 2012 and raises the question if various shell binaries and libraries from the PR and RC builds might be used to get a sort of ‘true‘ Windows 8 desktop experience that totally ditches and disables Metro…

The Developer Preview of Windows 8 even had a fully functional Start Menu that doubled duty as a much cooler and more functional Charms Menu, or even both and was just enabled or disabled in the registry so certainly food for thought, exploration and hacking!

😀

[Arris]

Thanks hoak, interesting! 🙂 Will take a look at it soon :geek:

[xxcom9a]

I still have that habit of looking for a non-existent start menu. 😕

[hackerman1]

@hoak wrote:

Some guy here on MDL created a wrapper that gets the Windows 7 Explorer Shell working on Windows 8.

😀

Hi !

Interesting info.
But, those screenshots from MDL & Neowin can´t be viewed !
You seem to need a membership to see them….
May i suggest that you post the picture here, or upload them somewhere, so we all can see them ?

[Arris]

@hackerman1 wrote:

May i suggest that you post the picture here, or upload them somewhere, so we all can see them ?

Neowin blocks direct linking to images, here is the full article including the image: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-8-how-to-re-enable-the-classic-start-menu/

And here you can view the image from MDL: http://i49.tinypic.com/2nn194.jpg

[hoak]

Tihiy has moved most of his most recent discussion about his Explorer 7 Shell Wrapper to this thread on MSFN; there have been a lot of updates, compatibility fixes, and features added to the wrapper; and he’s still working on it.

Also Stardock’s Start8 has seen a lot of updates, and now offers a standard Windows 7 Start Menu interface, a new compressed Metro interface, and its original twist on the Start Metro interface.

Lastly but not in last place by any means Classic Shell‘s Classic Start has also seen several Windows 8 compatibility and feature updates — that might be worth a look if this is still your favorite.

Right now I’d put Classic Shell and Start8 in a dead heat tie, that can probably be best decided based on which is the least invasive, uses the least resources, and behaves the best if you just want to add a Start Menu to Windows 8 at no cost.

Tihiy’s Windows 7 Explorer Shell Wrapper is a different animal, that can offer some enormous resource savings, totally obviates the Metro/Modern interface, and even allows disabling the OpenGL compositer which Windows 8 Explorer with any flavor of Start Menu won’t allow, and can easily be swapped with the native Windows 8 Shell…

🙂

[Author]

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