Windows 8 Annoyance (part 2)

Yikes, the Start button is gone. Ok, maybe the huge, at-your-face Start screen is even better than the good old Start button since Windows 95. Ok, HOW do I go to the plain desktop. Ah there is an Desktop icon. Ok, it looks much like Windows 7 without the Start button. Waita minute, the Windows have a flatter layout. That Aero and beveled look are gone. But I see a beef-ed up Windows Explorer (that's good news). Other than this I do not see anything too exciting yet. Ok I need to tweak things... without the Start button how the heck am I supposed to go to the Control Panel? Oh, you go Windows-C to bring out the Charm Bar. (Is it charming to you?) Charm Bar->Settings then the Control Panel. Oh, and it is looks slightly different from previous versions of Windows. Ok, let's personalize it, let's see what kind of backgrounds do I have? Just a handful of pictures... Note: If you use a colorful desktop background, you will hide the word "Desktop" on the Start page that you may not be able to find it.

What about changing the background of the Start page... oh you can only use a handful of pre-defined patterns, can't put your own image there.

Now, that Metro page... it looks like made of elementary school construction paper... flat, single color tiles. The icons can only be 1 square box, or 1x2 wide fat box. That's about all the tweaks you can do. Horizontal scroll with squares is the interface that Microsoft calls "Modern" (or "Metro"). There are some basic things such as news, weather and sports apps built in. Alas, each time I click it shows me a paper made huge icon followed by a WAIT. There are NO GAMES! Not even Solitaire or Minesweeper. Seems like you need to sign up to xbox to play anything. Now that sucks. Ok, how do you find your programs on Metro? You type, RIGHT on it! No prompt for search.

Ok, done playing, how do you turn the computer off? You'll need the charm bar again with Windows-C->Settings->Power. This is not even obvious unless someone tells you. And it is so many steps to get there. In Start button, at least there is one place to start looking for options, and the option to turn it off is not far away. Another thing, the good old Alt-F4 (since Windows 3.1 or perhaps even earlier) still works.

This is requiring people to remember keyboard short cuts. (Windows-C for charm bar, or Alt-F4). Now that's POOR design, Microsoft! There are plenty of Start button apps for Windows 8... Just why the heck people need to write such programs? Because people NEED it, Microsoft you hear?

Ok here is what I want: a shortcut on the desktop to shut down... I do not need ANYTHING on the Metro UI. Heck, the option to shut down isn't even there.

There is a DOS command you can run to shutdown Windows (since the dawn of Windows I suppose): shutdown /s /t 0. Go shutdown /? to see what else this can do. Now you can create a desktop shut cut to that DOS command.

Ok, that's nice. But that command will shut it down right away. I want to have a prompt like "Are you sure?". Batch files won't give you a dialog, good old VBScript is still available.

Here we go:

' This script displays a prompt then calls the shutdown command
' Find a nice shutdown icon in %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll
'

Dim i
i = msgbox ("Are you sure?",vbYesNo,"Shutdown Windows 8")
if i=vbYes then
   Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") 
   WshShell.Run "shutdown /s /t 0"
end if