Help! My Windows 10 Start Menu Disappeared!
Numerous times now, we’ve received emails from people wanting help because their Start menu on Windows 10 disappeared. Many times this will happen after an update, so it’s natural for people to think something went wrong and they start menu is gone forever.
But not so fast! Not so fast!
Have you ever heard of “Tablet Mode”? Tablet Mode on Windows 10 makes Windows 10 look like Windows 8.1. Tablet mode is made for smart phones, and, of course, tablets. So if you’re using a desktop or laptop PC and you switch it to “Table Mode” or it happens accidentally, your Start menu will be gone with the Wind…ows. And frankly Scarlet, you will give a darn!
Here’s what Windows 10 looks like in Tablet mode (the tiles on your computer may be larger & wider than mine, mine are all customized):
No. Not woe is you. It’s easy to fix, honest.
Just left of the clock (assuming your taskbar is at the bottom, if not you’ll get it) you’ll see an icon that looks like a callout or blurb or a shoutout – whatever. It’s circled in the screen shot above in green and red. See? Click on this icon and you’ll see a menu. The items that are turned on are brighter than the ones that are turned off. (Yes, EB! Like a light bulb. Light bulbs are not very bright when they’re turned off – no go back and sit down, EB!) So if you click the icon (circled above) and you see “Tablet mode” is brighter than some of the tiles, then it’s turned on.
It’s easy to turn Tablet mode off. Just click on it. See how the Tablet mode icon seems dimmer now?
Dim icon = turned off. Bright icon=turned on. See? And when Tablet mode is turned off, your Start menu and your taskbar icons are back in all their glory.
Sometimes we accidentally turn on Tablet mode without realizing it, and perhaps sometimes after an update it gets turned on by accident. Either way, if your Start menu and taskbar icons have disappeared, do take a minute to make sure Tablet mode is not enabled.
Now if you’re using a Windows 10 smart phone or tablet, you should be in Tablet mode. If you’re using a desktop or laptop PC you should not be in Tablet mode unless you are:
- A Masochist
- A big fan of Windows 8.x
- You don’t care because you’ve had too much wine.
Gosh I hope this works!! I cannot wait to get home to see if I can fix my laptop which I love but NO START MENU. It’s ben so frustrating. Thank you always for your wonderful advice.
This fix did not work with my laptop. I have tablet mode off and still shows minimual desktop. any other ideas?
No where could I see ‘Tablet’ Mode. No Fix for ME 🙁
I’m back and running after the 2nd advice sent to me about ‘tablet’ mode. Thank you for not giving up on me. You are wonderful and saved another senior a lot of money and the loss of a treasure given to me by my husband. Elf.
Try and check Event Viewer (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer). I had the issue myself and tried every solution (sfc, dsim, etc.) but nothing worked. In Event Viewer, I had lots of errors:
svchost (3016) TILEREPOSITORYS-1-5-21-1xxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx: Unable to read the header of logfile C:\Users\XXXXXXXXXX\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer\Database\EDB000xxx.log. Error -530.
I just delete the “LOG” file, rebooted and everything was back to normal.
Bad advice. It may be co-incidental but clearing the Event viewer logs does not fix your computer – more likely it was rebooting that fixed your computer. Clearing log files has no affect on your computer. Event Viewer will always show lots of errors since every error, even the most minor is logged. Event Viewer is meant as a tool for computer techs who are trying to trouble shoot a problem. So anyone reading this – if you clear your Event Viewer logs – it’s not going to fix your computer – but it does remove entries which may be valuable in troubleshooting. In this case, rebooting fixed the error – not clearing the Event Viewer logs. Rebooting your computer when you’re having a problem is always the first thing to do. There is so much misinformation on the Web, we wanted to clear up this stuff about Event Viewer.
After the latest windows 10 upgrade I lost my windows menu. I tried the tablet mode but that did not work at all.
I can right click on the start button an it works but not the left click to get the menu.
Any other suggestions I might be able to do would be greatly appreciated.
What do you see when you click Start —> Settings —> System —> Tablet mode? Can you post a screen shot?
To make a long story short I was at the end of my rope in trying to get my computer working again. I tried the repair angle an that did some good but still no menu at all plus some files would not come up either.
What I did was initiated a new restore point an restored my operating system to that point, which was before the big upgrade from Microsoft. Low an behold I got my computer back 100%. Everything seems to be working fine again. I am so grateful for that. Thanks guys for your help also believe me.
Yes! It worked!!!!!
Thank you much!
Fantastic! It worked for me. Many thanks.