Personally, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of having Live Tiles there, I really like seeing Weather, Radar, News Headlines, Calendar, etc. etc. and all the things I want often that are not quite used enough to live on my taskbar.
Anyhow > right click the tiles one at a time and select "unpin from start" > once the expanded start screen space is blank > hover your cursor along the right edge until you see the double headed arrow (<-->) > left click at that point and drag the window left, collapsing the field until you have just the single Start column like Win 7.
Retro on.