Booting Directly to the Desktop
If there’s one question we get asked most often about Windows 8, it’s this: “How can I bypass the Start screen and boot directly to the desktop?” No other question comes close, and it’s yet another indication that many folks are going to spend time using the Desktop app more than any other Windows feature.
The bad news is that Windows 8 doesn’t offer any built-in option that you can set to boot directly to the desktop. There’s no setting, no Registry value, no group policy. We experimented with various startup and logon tweaks, but we found them to be flaky and slow. Then we discovered an interesting fact about the Start screen. When Windows 8 first loads and displays the Start screen, pressing Enter automatically ...
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