- Hello, everybody,
and welcome back to another video.
Now, in today's episode,
I'm gonna be showing you how you can make Windows 10
look and feel a little bit more like Windows 11.
Perhaps you're thinking about upgrading to Windows 11,
but you're not really sure about the new interface,
the new Start Menu, and you would like to get used to that,
or at least try it out,
before upgrading to Windows 11 on your main system.
Well, today's program might be right up your alley,
it's called Start11.
Now, this may ring a bell to some of you guys
who saw this video that I made a couple months ago.
Start11's main functionality is to bring the Windows 10,
or even the Windows Vista/Windows seven style Start Menu
to Windows 11.
Well recently, Stardock took Start11 out of beta,
and it's now fully released version 1.0 is out,
and it adds a neat ability
to bring the Windows 11 style Start Menu to Windows 10,
so that's what we're gonna be talking about today.
Now, I feel it's important to mention this,
just like in that video, the original one,
this video is not sponsored by Stardock at all,
I purchased this program myself.
So, let's dive right into it,
and be sure to stick around to the end of the video,
because this is a giveaway video,
and I'll be talking more about that later.
But I'll have a link down below
to where you can download Start11, it costs $5.99,
but there is a 30 day free trial available.
Now, when you start the program on Windows 10 here,
it will ask you two things.
Number one, it'll say,
"Do you wanna move the Taskbar to the center of the screen?"
Like it is in Windows 11 by default.
Then it will ask you, if you wanna hide the search bar,
which if you're gonna have it at the center of the screen
is recommended, because,
well, the search bar is going to take up
a ridiculous amount of space,
and it would look pretty weird,
and that's obviously not the way that it is in Windows 11.
In fact, there is no search button at all,
because it's now integrated into the Start Menu,
and Start11 has that functionality too,
and that's why it gives you the option
to completely hide the search box, or even the search icon,
if you chose to display that instead.
So, we're going to enable the Start Menu here,
and you've got four Start Menu styles to choose from,
though, obviously, the one we're most interested in
is the Windows 11 style.
So when you select that, and click on the Start Button,
this is what you're going to get.
So yeah, it looks very, very close
to the Windows 11 Start Menu, just with a Windows 10 twist,
like we don't have the rounded corners,
like we do in Windows 11.
It fits more in with Windows 10's design language here,
though they have brought over the gap that you have
in between the Taskbar and the Start Menu.
You don't have that in Windows 10,
so here's what the default Start Menu looks like.
The only thing that stands out to me
are these icons down here.
These are essentially all of your options
where you have the ability to open up your folders here.
So, you got Documents,
you have Downloads, Music, Pictures, your User Folder.
This right here is for Control Panel.
This right here is the Modern UI settings, or UWP Settings,
whatever you wanna say.
And this right here is the run prompt,
so you can get to that here.
So it adds some additional functionality
that you don't have in the Windows 11 Start Menu,
but you can modify these.
So, if all you want are the power options,
like it is in Windows 11,
you just select the gear icon here,
and it brings up this list here.
These are all your shortcuts,
so you can go through,
and you can delete everything that you don't want.
So, we can go through here
and get rid of absolutely everything in here.
So we'll just bring it down to,
actually there isn't even an option
to disable the power options,
those are just there regardless.
We can remove everything,
and now when we open the Start Menu,
all we have are the power options.
Now, let's talk about moving the Taskbar to the center.
That's very easy to do as well,
so we just go down here to Taskbar,
and you scroll down here,
and you change it from left aligned to center aligned,
and it will move the Taskbar to the center.
Now removing the search box
is pretty much a necessity here.
You could leave it, but it just,
it really just looks out of place,
so we're going to right click on the Taskbar, go to search.
We're going to hide that,
and we will also hide Cortana
and the task view button as well, why not?
Now, you can see that it does keep it over here,
so you kinda have to go back in here
and re-select center aligned
for it to properly update there.
And yeah, now it's in the center, isn't that awesome?
Now, you can also change the Taskbar color
and the transparency settings from here,
so if you wanted to turn off blurring the wallpaper,
you can turn off using automatic color
and select the color yourself.
When I'm in dark mode here,
and I select white for the color,
everything is still white here.
You got all this text and the icons here,
it just doesn't really show up as well.
If you were to change that from the settings, you know,
it would change all of this to black text,
so it would fit in better on the white background.
So, you can do that, we'll just leave it as the default,
you know, automatic color for now,
but it's nice that you have that functionality,
and you also have the ability
to change the Start Button icon.
In fact, the default icon is this one right here,
and yeah, it's not the actual Windows 11 Start Menu icon.
They can't really distribute that with this program anyways,
but you do have a ton of options in here to choose from,
and on top of that, you can select your own image,
if you created your own,
and you can download other user created images.
And this will take you to a page on WinCustomize,
which is a Stardock site, and in fact,
somebody has created a Windows 11 themed Start Button
that you can use with this program.
So, you can download that,
and make it look even more like Windows 11, and, of course,
it wouldn't really be complete
without changing the background as well.
So, I've got the Windows 11 default wallpaper here,
and we can set that as desktop background,
and, there you go.
Let's talk about that giveaway,
so even though Stardock is not sponsoring this video,
they saw my original video,
and someone from Stardock reached out
and offered to send me three Start11 product keys
to give away to you guys.
So that's what we're going to be doing
in this video right now,
So if you want to get in on a chance to win 1 of these 3 keys
All you have to do is click the link in the pinned comment down below.
And that will take you to a page that looks like this.
And from here, you just want to do what it says
and enter your name and email address
so I can contact you if you win.
And by the way, it doesn't have to be your actual name
if you aren't comfortable with that
that's totally fine. Using a username is totally cool.
Then just do what it says and click the button that says "Click Here".
And that will take you back to my channel page.
But in doing so, you will be entered into the giveaway.
And that's it!
I'll draw the winners in one week.
Here's the official end time:
And the winners will be contacted via the email address that they provide.
That's it, guys. That's all you have to do.
Huge thank you again to Stardock for providing me with those 3 keys
Really awesome of them.
And huge thanks to all of you for watching!
If you enjoyed this one, be sure to give it a thumbs up and get subscribed.
And as always, I will see you in the next video.
(outro music)