Operating systems

Windows 8 (or 8.1) is one of the not-so-popular operating systems. Even Microsoft employees admit Windows 8 is 'the new Vista'. Ok, they failed on that. Perhaps Windows 9 will be better.

Now that we have that out, there are a number of weird things in that OS. The one bugging me most is the fact that the full screen app icons that appear when you move the cursor to the top-left corner of your desktop are failing to display. This happens to me very often. It seems to have something to do with sleep/hibernate on my Win8 laptop. It should look like this:

But it looks like this instead:

Not cool.
There are some shadows from the icons, but nothing usable or nothing that I could use to identify which icon is for which app.

I don't know what's the problem, but I found a fix. The culprit is your classic explorer.exe. The fix is simple. Zap your Windows Explorer with a magic kill process -wand and create a new better one. The new explorer won't know anything about already running full-screen apps, but it will sure learn if you manage to get into one.

Here is the fix. First start the Task Manager. Since the idea is to kill explorer.exe, you'll need a tool to eradicate the old one and make sure you can start a new one. The sequence starts from Task Manager's Details tab-sheet:

After that your explorer will be back and your icons will be back after you visit all of your apps.