In Windows 10, Microsoft has removed the older Windows calculator application and has replaced it with a newer calculator app. The difference between the two is that the older calculator was a native Windows application but the newer calculator of Windows 10 is a Modern/Metro app. The newer calculator app takes a slightly longer time to start up while the older native calculator was lightning fast. If you want to switch back to the older calculator app, then you do not really have any choice. But if you have a Windows 7 or Windows 8.x PC, then you can copy some files from them to your Windows 10 PC and run the older calculator in your Windows 10 PC while still keeping the newer calculator app.
Here is how you can run older calculator from Windows 7/8.x in a Windows 10 PC:
- From your Windows 7 or Windows 8.x PC, copy these files to a USB flash disk drive:
C:\Windows\System32\Calc.exe C:\Windows\System32\en-US\Calc.exe.mui
- Copy these files to a folder on your Windows 10 PC. For example, I have copied these files to a folder D:\oldcalc\. You have to keep the Calc.exe.mui inside the sub-folder named en-US.
- Open Windows registry editor (press Win+R, type regedit and press Enter) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\.
- Create a sub-key named calc.exe and then create two String type values – default value set to the full-path name of the calc.exe file, and the Path value set to the folder path where you copied the calc.exe file.
- Now try to run calc from the Run dialog. Press Win+R, type calc and press Enter. You would see that now the older Calculator program is run instead of the new Windows 10 Calculator app.
If you want to use the newer Calculator app, then you can still launch it from the Start Menu or from the command prompt windows. The older calculator application is run only from the Run dialog. In case, you want to remove the older calculator application, then you can remove the registry key calc.exe that you created in the step 4 above and delete the files that you copied in step 2 above.