With the installation of Windows 8 there comes an end to the ‘classic’ start menu era. Off course you can put all the programs you want on the start screen. However, things like the control panel, command prompt or the computer management snap-in might be things you want to access easier and quicker. Fortunately for us power users there is another way.
Windows 8 comes loaded with predefined hotkey combinations. The windows key plays a huge role in these hotkey combinations.
One of these combinations might just be the most useful of all. Win + X. This will bring up a menu with the most used Control Panel and administration tools. You can also reach it by right clicking in the bottom-left corner of your screen. In windows 8 missing the start menu can be annoying if you need to get to these features often, but with this menu it is really easy. You can also reach it by right clicking in the bottom-left corner of your screen.
The shortcuts in this menu are in a folder inside the user profile:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WinX
Inside you will default find three group folders corresponding with the groups, separated by lines in the Win+X menu.
A couple of months ago I migrated my work laptop to Windows 8 Enterprise. As I already had played around with it, a lot, not a lot of new things to discover there. So, as any It-Pro would do with a new operating system I went for the Control Panel to customize to my preferred settings
Right click in lower left-hand corner and….nothing happened. I tried again to no avail. Pressing the Windows-key and X at the same time (hence the name: Win-X Menu) did not bring up the menu either.
| When I Checked the location mentioned above I noticed that there where no folders present. This can be due to a profile migrated from a previous version of windows or something with a mandatory profile in where the files are not present.To solve this, just copy the files from a computer with a working Win-X Menu into the folder mentioned above and you should be good to go. You might want to restart after you put the files in the correct location. Inside there should be folders and within those the correct shortcuts. The images show how they should look. |
   
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if you want to modify the menu there are other blogs written about that.