Yesterday I shared a tweak that allows you to get four rows of Start Screen tiles on the Surface RT and in the course of testing that registry setting it was discovered that it would not work on Surface Pro devices.

Well thanks to the continued testing of my friend @FreddyFuentes he has figured out how to get you either four or five rows of Start Screen tiles for your Surface Pro Start Screen.  So now all of you new Surface Pro owners can enjoy this tweak as well.

Now this is an easy tweak to insert because we have prepared the registry files for you but to reverse this would require that you manually edit the registry so make sure you are comfortable with that before you make the change.

Of course, I also recommend setting a Restore Point on your system to make reverting back easier if it is necessary.

As a reminder, just like the Surface RT tweak for this, your on screen keyboard will be slightly smaller but it is not at all unusable in comparison to the full size one.

Surface Pro with default three rows of Start Screen tiles

Surface Pro with four rows of Start Screen tiles

Surface Pro with five rows of Start Screen tiles

Just like with the Surface RT tweak you can do this two different ways – create your own registry file by opening notepad and inserting the text shown below and then save the file with a recognizable name and the .reg file extension.  After that just click the file to merge it into your registry and then reboot for it to take effect.

Here is what you will need in those files:

Four Rows of Start Screen Tiles for Surface Pro (Just insert the text that is between the lines)

—–

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionImmersiveShellGrid]
“Layout_MaximumRowCount”=dword:00000004

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerScaling]
“MonitorSize”=”13.1″

—–

Five Rows of Start Screen Tiles for Surface Pro (Just insert the text that is between the lines)

—–

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerScaling]
“MonitorSize”=”13.1″

—–

If you want to save the step of creating your own registry files then you can download our ready made files here:

• Surface Pro Display Four Tile Rows Tweak (400) (1KB)
• Surface Pro Display Five Tile Rows Tweak (412) (1KB)

Thanks to the WinSource and XDA Forums folks for the head start on this tweak which they figured out for the Surface RT. It helped us out a lot in getting this one sorted out.

Let us know how this works for you.