How to manage tiles or rows in Windows 8?

The most prominent feature of this latest and cool Windows 8 is its Start screen, also known as the Metro screen. The proper layout of the tiles on it makes it much more feasible and flexible as you can arrange the tiles as you need.

Depending on the screen resolution, Windows 8 determines how many rows of tiles will be displayed on the start screen. In case of displays with low resolution, you get three rows while higher resolutions can accommodate 5 or more rows. You can reduce these value or increase them if you want to. For this purpose, you will need to edit the windows registry through the Registry editor.

Change the desktop view and press [Win] + [R]. Then enter “regedit”, press the [Enter] key and confirm that you are an administrator check with ‘Yes’. Navigate to the key ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current version\ImmersiveShell\Grid’. Here search for the DWORD value ‘Layout_MaximumRowCount’. If you can’t find it, create it with the command ‘Edit| New | DWORD value’. Open the value by double clicking it. Then enter the desired maximum set as the decimal value (for example, 6) and confirm this with ‘OK’. In order for the changes to reflect, close the registry editor and restart the computer.

Also note, for screens with high resolution, you can set the value to the maximum of ‘6’ against the standard setting ‘5’. Windows will not support values over 6, but you can always reduce the number of rows down to the minimum value of ‘1’.