Desktop & windows

When RECON boots, it presents a desktop shell — not a wall of text. It looks and works like a small, purpose-built Windows desktop so that a customer watching over your shoulder sees something familiar, and so you can keep several tools open at once.

What's on the desktop

• Brand lockup (top-left) — the RECON shield and name.
• Desktop icons — quick launches for Repair Center, This PC (Files), and a Command prompt.
• The dock (bottom) — a Start button, launchers, a taskbar of open windows, the PC name and mode, a clock, and a power button.
• The Start menu — opens from the Start button; lists the tools and, at the bottom, power actions (Restart / Shut down in WinPE, Close RECON on a booted Windows).

Windows

Each tool opens in its own window you can move and arrange:

• Drag a window by its title bar to move it.
• Drag to the top edge to maximize; drag to a side edge to snap it to that half of the screen. Double-click the title bar to maximize.
• Each window has minimize / maximize / close buttons, and appears in the dock taskbar — click its taskbar button to focus it, or again to minimize.

Two shells, one design

RECON's shell exists in two implementations during the current transition:

• HTA shell — the shipping shell today (recon-launcher.hta), rendered by WinPE's built-in HTML engine. Hardware-proven and in use.
• WPF shell — a native rebuild (winpe/shell-wpf) that reproduces the same desktop with crisper rendering. It is in development and selected with a build flag (Build-ReconPE.ps1 -Shell wpf); the HTA stays the default until the WPF shell reaches full parity.

Both present the same desktop metaphor and the same features, so the rest of these docs apply to whichever shell your image was built with.

If the shell can't start

The boot chain always falls back to a text menu if the graphical shell is unavailable, so a boot never dead-ends.