Quoting Kulju:

Quote:
Quoting Voltaire53:

Quote:
I think how you will want to set it up will very much depend on whether your new laptop has a touchscreen, which Win 8 is very much set up to work with, or not, in which case many people find it easier to make it appear and act more like previous versions

Touch screen doesn't have much to do with it. Win 8 is very easy to use with mouse and keyboard and it acts almost the same as Win 7. For example is you want to open a start menu in Windows 7 you eather click the Start icon or press Windows key. Exactly the same way as in Win8.1. The only difference is that the Start menu look a bit different. There are couple of new key combos that makes using Win8/8.1 much easier.

Win + C
Win + I
Win + X

That's about the all you should learn.

Well in my opinion the desktop mode does need a start menu.  I can fully see that the start screen is roughly the same, but it isn't.  It is a new screen.  When you are in trying to do things fast desktop mode it is very annoying to go to a new screen and not just a menu.

I found this one and installed it.

http://www.pokki.com/windows-8-start-menu

Pokki is actually coming installed on all Lenovo laptops.  In my opinion (so far) it is pretty good.  It is not look like the old start button menu, it has a flavor of the new interface as well.

But I would like to say I was not aware of those new KB sequences and that is helping!!