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The Start Screen may be a fancy new piece of UI that everyone is drooling over but there are people who would really like to boot straight to the desktop and start working on Desktop apps; this simple guide shows you how.

Bypass Start Screen On Windows 8 At Boot

There’s a simple and effective way to bypass the Start Screen at log on and go straight to the Desktop when you boot your Windows 8 machine. It does not change anything at a low level though. All it does is execute a command at logon that brings out the desktop, making it look like you have bypassed the Start Screen. Here’s how you do it: -

Step 1

Open a notepad document. Copy the following text in to the document

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=Explorer.exe,3

[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Now go to file and click on ‘save as’. At the save dialog, navigate to the Desktop and save the file as a ‘.scf’ file (everything without the quotation marks of course). You can name it anything, like desktop.scf.

To check to see if it is working correctly, click on the file from any location and it should bring the desktop to the front.

Step 2

Now go back to Start Screen and search for the ‘Task Scheduler’. Once the app opens, navigate to the ‘Task Scheduler Library’ on the left side navigation pane.

Now right-click on an empty area on the middle pane right below the scheduled tasks (if there are any). On the contextual menu that comes up, choose ‘Create New Task’.

On the dialog box that appears, fill in the name for the task in the general tab and then click through to the Triggers tab.

Step 3

Once on the Triggers tab, click on the ‘New’ button and choose ‘At log on’ from the ‘Begin the task’ drop down menu. Click Ok. Then click on the ‘Actions’ tab.

In the Actions tab, choose ‘Start a Program’ from the ‘Action’ tab then click on the Browse button for the Program/Script field and choose the .scf file that you created earlier.

Step 4

Now click on ‘Ok’ and go to the ‘Conditions’ tab. Here, uncheck the ‘Start the task only if the computer is on AC power’. Click on ‘Ok’ to exit the dialog box.

You have now setup your computer to go directly to Desktop. Check by restarting your system. If it does not work, go through all the steps carefully and see what needs to be done