How-To

Windows 10 Tip: Make the Start Menu Space Efficient

By Brian Burgess

Updated September 25, 2023

Microsoft returns the Start menu in Windows 10, but it takes up a lot of screen real estate, especially on small monitors. Here’s how to resize it.

Microsoft has brought back the Start menu in Windows 10 which combines elements of the traditional menu in Windows 7 and Modern elements of Windows 8.1. While a lot of users are applauding the addition of the Start menu, it can take up an awful lot of space, especially on lower resolution monitors.

The cool thing is you can manage the size of the menu, as well as what’s displayed on it. And you don’t need a Start menu replacement like Start8 or Classic Shell – although those apps do offer a lot of skinning and other tweaks.

Make Windows 10 Start Menu Smaller

You can manage a lot of aspects of the Start menu in Windows 10, currently in Technical Preview. You can create categories, move and resize the modern tiles, or even get rid of them all, which is what we’ll look at here.

For example, the shot below shows the Start menu on a Lenovo laptop with a screen resolution of 1366×768. As you can see, with a lot of the app tiles displaying, it takes up a huge chunk of space – even the Action Center overlaps it.

If you do like the tiles, making them smaller will help with Start menu space management. Just right-click or tap and hold a tile to get the option to resize it.

After you clear up some space by removing or resizing the tiles, you can move the Start menu to a more reasonable width.

Here’s an example of how it looks after removing all of the tiles. It’s nice and clean and doesn’t take up the entire screen.

The main thing to keep in mind here is is you use the Start menu to launch programs or not, Microsoft does allow you to tweak it for what works best for you; just like in earlier versions of the OS, except, of course, Windows 8.

What’s your take on the Start menu in Windows 10, do you love it or hate it? Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts. And for a more in-depth discussion on the new OS, with like-minded users, check out the Windows 10 Forums.