I’m playing around with Windows 8 on desktop PC – first impressions pretty good, but I’m not convinced of the value of Metro UI on a desktop yet (although it is beautiful). Metro would be great on a touchscreen, but that’s far from the dual monitor Dell PC I’m using here. So I might want to be able to turn off Metro – here’s how:

Quick hack

Rename X:\Windows\System32\shsxs.dll to shsxs.old or similar

or

Turn it off in the registry

• Run regedit
• Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
• Change the RPEnabled to ‘0’ instead of ‘1’

To re-enable Metro UI, change the value back to ‘1’

More Windows 8 thoughts later.