Start Killer

Start Killer is tiny and very simple application that removes the Start button from the desktop. The Start button may still be opened by pressing the Win key.

It includes several intuitive options that can be easily tweaked.

After a brief and uneventful setup procedure, Start Killer immediately starts, hides the Start button and creates an icon in the system tray area.

As far as program preferences are concerned, you can double-click the tray icon to bring up an options panel and set the program to automatically run at system startup and hide the system tray icon.

You can disable the Start menu and deactivate the Windows 8.1 Metro UI. Some hotkeys are listed for opening the respective dialog box and the Start menu; they cannot be changed. There are no other notable features provided by Start Killer.

The software utility immediately applies the new modifications to Windows and runs on a very light amount of CPU and RAM, so it does not hog system resources. We have not come across any kind of problems throughout our evaluation, since the app did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. Overall, Start Killer gets the job done and can be used by anyone.