You guys have knocked it out of the park with the start menu. It's wonderful. Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. I really like that you guys have downgraded the size a bit since earlier builds; really sleek and useful now.

> Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use.

Sigh.

You're talking about pre-release software.

I've had an odd bug where upon waking from sleep, my desktop displays the start menu persistently, without the ability to interact with it.

My current workaround is to lock the computer and unlock it again. This seems to work but it's really annoying.

It only occurs on my desktop PC and not my Surface (which has issues of its own).

Any clue if there's anything I can do here or should I just wait?

I think I recall seeing that one in the bug list. Sit tight.

And just FYI, we do look at the stuff that gets submitted through the built-in Windows Feedback app.

That's impressive. I've not tried Windows 10 yet but I hear nothing but good things about it. Keep up the good work!

What's happening with search? Is using Cortana mandatory? What's up with always using web search? Why can't I turn this web search off? Do I absolutely must block off bing and all Microsoft services at the network level to stop this?

Well it does help that you can just email the perf people in devdiv and have the single largest concentration of low level windows performance experts available for free

The start menu is great code but mom and pop dev shop doesn't have hundreds of top devs available :)

But in terms of the original comparison, it's not like Apple's UI team doesn't have access to the OS performance people, either...