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So far:
I dont like the taskbar. (the reg hack for going Windows 10 style dont work for me 🙁 )
Telling the difference betweeen empty and full folders is horrible, especilly with poor eyesight.
Other than that ... seems OK so far.
How are others getting on. Gripes and Good things I not aware of.
Right click menu hack works. Back to old style, so two clicks now gone. @microsoft why ?
Still holding a watching brief here, but it's very kind of you lot to do the beta testing, keep us up to date please.
I've been using it for a few weeks.
Downsides:
It's still a bit glitchy.
It can be a faf to upgrade to if you don't have an off-the-shelf PC, in fact it's not always straight forward if you do.
The roll-out, as ever wasn't great, we ended up with a lot of worried clients who thought their hardware had become obsolete over-night, when in fact 1) they could upgrade to Win11, even if the MS tool said they couldn't, it just needed some work 2) Win10 isn't going EOL for 4 years.
Upsides:
From a Cyber security point of view, ensuring everyone we manage has TPM and secure boot enabled it a big help and having MS do it, is a lot easier than us having to try to convince them.
From an end user point of view:
For most of the people we look after, their PC is a boring tool they can't wait to get away from at 5pm. They just want it to work/look exactly like it did yesterday and function with the minimum amount of faf. For them, change is never good, even if the wallpapers look nice.
Simple stuff like changing "Cut, Paste, Copy" from words to pictograms is a massive downside, and making them a bit more colourful isn't compensation enough for that. Same goes for the central icons on the task bar or the central start menu, few care that it's a bit sharper, it's just making a boring tool different and forcing them to relearn it.
Think I'm just going to wait for the time being.
Unless curiosity gets the better of me I can't see wow 11 is going to improve my life, haha.
I'm glad they've done something about the right click menu, it's a mess in 10 with too many items on it. Right-clicking a PDF for example gives 22 options on my current PC.
That said I think i'll let the brave souls do a bit more beta testing before I switch. 😉
They just want it to work/look exactly like it did yesterday
It was ever thus. There were hacks to install Windows 3.1's Program Manager into W95. The best thing you can do is spend an afternoon learning a new system rather than weeks trying to turn it back into a Casio calculator.
That depends if the changes are improvements or if they are just changes to signify its newer and different. The changes listed above don't sound like improvements, and that is particularly annoying for people working in mixed environments swapping between different generations.
They just want it to work/look exactly like it did yesterday
I was once sort of responsible for a corporate migration from NT4 to XP, having left long enough after the introduction of XP for it to be solid. The IT support team were convinced it would be a disaster as the users wouldn't be able to cope with the change and put in a training programme at great expense. As I'd predicted no-one turned up, because the users were delighted that the PC they used at work now behaved the same as their personal PCs at home, whereas previously they'd assumed that a corporate PC was a "special" thing that had to be awkward.
I no longer have the pleasure of dealing with corporate IT so I took the brave pill on my home W11 upgrade. My CPU wasn't on the supported list so I bought a Ryzen 9 and motherboard to replace an old i5, plugged in the old disk drive with W10 and fired it up, expecting at best BSODs. Much to my surprise it booted ok. I then did the W11 upgrade, which also went fine and has run faultlessly since. Says a lot for how robust the Windows core is now, I think. And I like the new start menu.
@MSP point is, it's changed. You can like it, you can not like it, but trying to make it look like the GUI from a Commodore Amiga is an exercise in futility.
Like it so far. Most of my software seems stable.
Thought windows 10 was a scruffy mess to be honest,this looks cleaner to me.
Too early to call yet but personally I couldn't wait to shed the overlapping styles of windows 10.
@MSP point is, it’s changed. You can like it, you can not like it, but trying to make it look like the GUI from a Commodore Amiga is an exercise in futility.
Whish is what people said about windows 8....
Whish is what people said about windows 8….
Which is what people said about Windows 95.
You can move the taskbar icons to the left instead of in the middle easily enough from the settings, no registry edits required.
I like it so far, working well for me at home.
You can move the taskbar icons to the left instead of in the middle easily enough from the settings, no registry edits required.
I like it so far, working well for me at home.
iOS 15 on the other hand…..
now i've got used to it(installed it at the weekend) i quite like the icons central.
no problems installing and so far everything has worked as it should.
i'll admit i was one of those who changed the start menu on 10 to be more like an older start menu(similar to 7 i think, or was it xp) but i wont be doing that this time.
Only one evening in with it so far.
Mixed feelings. Quite like the central icons and overall feel, but it doesn't seem to be playing 100% nicely with my laptop when in 'tablet' mode, and the Snipping Tool seems totally broken in both modes.
If only because I don't know if it will play nice with my laptop or 2015 software, I'll be holding off installing this for a while yet.
Interesting to hear others experiences.
Laptop CPU has TPM 2.0 but not compatible meaning it'll be landfill in 4 years. I mean, I could install it from an ISO as long as I don't want anything silly like security updates.
What happened to Windows 10 being the last OS they made anyway?
What happened to Windows 10 being the last OS they made anyway?
Yeah, that irritated me too. I can see why they'd do it, the PC platform has been trying to shed legacy baggage for decades. W11 looks to be a bold statement, "run modern hardware or get in the sea." Which is great but the problem is, legacy kit isn't going to go away any time soon. We still have engineers who (at least claim to) still need to run Windows XP VMs to access older systems.
My prediction* is that MS will relent and run W10 and W11 concurrently for some time. MS have put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility with W10 in order to get everyone onto a common platform and away from decades-old shite. Windows' hardware requirements haven't notably changed since the advent of Windows 7 in the late 2000s and that's just astonishing.
I ran a DOS game from 1999 under W10 just this weekend despite the games actual author telling me that it wouldn't work. From what I've read so far (which granted isn't a vast amount), I would be surprised if the same would work on W11.
(* - I have a woefully poor track record with predictions, I thought for ages that Savile was innocent. I'm like the Mirror Universe Nostradamus.)
I installed it on my personal laptop on the basis that I've got the work laptop to fall back on it it all went wrong.
I like it - to be honest it's not very different from W10 apart from being bit nicer looking. Some better functionality with window "snap" behaviour.
The use of icons rather than text for some of the right click isn't something I like, but that's pretty small beer.
The new start menu isn't great but I never used it anyway - typically I pin the commonly used application to the taskbar, or hit the "windows" key then type the first few letters of the program I want.
Can someone check which version of .net comes installed? Is it 4.8 or 5 (or both...?)
The new start menu isn’t great but I never used it anyway – typically I pin the commonly used application to the taskbar, or hit the “windows” key then type the first few letters of the program I want.
Yep, this always seemed like the obvious way to do it.
Laptop CPU has TPM 2.0 but not compatible meaning it’ll be landfill in 4 years. I mean, I could install it from an ISO as long as I don’t want anything silly like security updates.
What happened to Windows 10 being the last OS they made anyway?
Based on our experience here of upgrading 'incompatible' hardware, the MS health check is woeful and the upgrade service not much better. If you decide to upgrade, back up your data and do a fresh install and it will likely work, if your laptop has stated requirements:
1Ghz or faster dual-core 64-bit CPU from Intel, AMD or Qualcomm
4GB of RAM
64GB of Storage
UEFI Secure boot supported and enabled
TPM 2.0
DirectX 12
720p display larger than 9"
The windows 11 Healthcheck App and the Windows 10 to 11 update tool will usually kick off about TPM and Secure boot. Lots of Desktops don't come with a TPM chip and secure boot is often disabled by Tech guys when they're setting up new PCs because it stops them booting from a image.
Most of the time, whilst the hardware doesn't have a designated TPM chip, it's built into the CPU. pretty much every mainstream CPU from the Win8 era onwards (9 years ago now) has a TPM of some kind, but not always enabled.
Rebuilding a PC/Laptop from an ISO will usually fix either / both of the above and they'll be automatically enabled on set-up. It will run and update as well as any other. However, if mess around with it to make it not check for secure boot / TPM it won't.
As for Win10 being the 'last' Version of Windows, it's a bit of an urban myth. Jerry Nixon who's a senior Tech at MS said that, but his was his opinion, not MS Policy and also what I think he meant was an end to customers having to buy new OSs. MS continue to offer free feature updates and upgrading to Win11 is free. If it wasn't for the new security requirements, Win11 could easily be a large feature update for Win10.
@p-jay I know how easy it is to circumvent the health check, the issue is that once you have it installed there's a good chance it won't receive updates. Granted that was read on an article 2 months old but it doesn't seem to have been updated.
@p-jay I know how easy it is to circumvent the health check, the issue is that once you have it installed there’s a good chance it won’t receive updates. Granted that was read on an article 2 months old but it doesn’t seem to have been updated.
Yeah, that’s not what I’m trying to say.
Basically a few ‘red flags’ that the health check app will throw up, can be automatically resolved by just installing it as a fresh OS. You’re not circumventing them, just allowing the OS to configure hardware they way it ‘wants’ to. As you say, you can mess about with it to skip the hardware checks, but I wouldn’t advise that.
No, me neither. I think Cougar is on the money, if they play this sensibly they'll stop development of Windows 10 but retain it as a legacy system with long term security updates. Meanwhile 11 is their fresh start for hardware that makes the cut.
I'm pretty underwhelmed by it. I got a new laptop with it installed. The laptop itself is much better than the old one, which I bought in 2012 just as Win8 came out. Once Win11 is customized with common apps pinned to the taskbar, it's functionally just the same to use.
What does annoy me is that you can no longer put the taskbar vertically on the left, which I've been doing for over 20 years (with the taskbar set to autohide). Doing that puts the important bits of the taskbar at the top left, next to the menus on the app you are using so there's less moving around with the cursor if you're running multiple apps. Pretty minor thing but kinda annoying when you're used to moving the cursor left to pop out the hidden taskbar and it's not there.
I haven't tried it on my main machines, not sure how backwards compatibility with old apps will be so I'm in no hurry to switch those over. There's no functional benefit to Win11 for what I do at work.
Meh - my laptop's not "good" enough to run it.
Just runs Spotify / Apple Music through a DAC to my amp anyways so can't justify a new laptop.
I'm still pretty underwelmed by W10, they just made the UI a bit worse than W7.
I did think XP was an improvement on the one before but after that it's just one dissapointment after another.
Windows was great with W10, and I was using Linux Mint for ages so that's praise enough. Just installed W11 as an update and it went pretty fast. Things have speeded up a touch, but then it does after every major update. All drivers appear to be working fine. A number of network using software are working snappier now (particularly my VPNs)
ASUS gaming laptop, 3.5 years old. A couple of things didn't run after. ASUS Hotkeys (ability to change the fan speed for gaming) needs manually switching on even though set to automatic. Right clicking to get task manager up is gone, have to search in the menu. And the update to Classic Shell to get the start button back had to be manually tweaked afterwards to add the Start icon (and then had to pick the retro icon as the modern one was too far to the right and not easy to click at all!)
I’m still pretty underwelmed by W10
Win8 made sense if you had a touchscreen hybrid laptop but forcing the touchscreen interface on desktop users was a bizarre decision. It was easy enough to pin stuff to the taskbar, but users shouldn't have to do that. Win8.1 improved on 8. Win10 was what Win8 should have been.
Win8 made sense if you...
Pretty sure we went W7 Pro to W10. Don't ever recall using W8.
I remember Windows v1 - I saw it at the IBM offices in the 80s where my Dad worked. I'm pretty sure they still had punch card machines at the same time. My main memory of v1 is that it was lightening quick, everything was instant. It's got progressively slower since.
It’s got progressively slower since.
It hasn't - Vista was the slowest and most bloated, since then it sped up.
my earliest memory of Windows is v2.1. It ran off a 3.5" floppy and was INCREDIBLY slow.
As ever the mesaure of success is how my Mum adapts to it.
Honestly one of the most frustrating 'tech support' calls I've ever had, admittedly it's no exaclty my strong suit.
It seems to have left her with problems with her virgin router and cache clearance problems in browsers.
Honestly thought after a router reboot it seemed ok, so who knows!
I like it 🙂 Everything works, even Lotus Organizer.
The only thing I have changed is the right click menu. All my cascading pile of clutter is back to normal.
Recommended
4/5
For anyone interested in installing on unsupported hardware, there is now a workaround. All you need to do is open and save appraiserres.dll (back it up first) on the install media in Notepad (don't need to actually change any of the contents) - this appears to corrupt the file which the installer then ignores.
I've just upgraded my old Surface Pro 4 and it appears to work fine. As ever, caveat emptor - back up first in case something goes wrong and you lose everything. There's also a risk that MS may lock it down further in future so it stops working.
Will give it a few days to make sure it's ok and then try upgrading my desktop.
MS seem to have changed how internet connection sharing works. I use that at work to synch my laptop with Dropbox (technically we have WiFi, but it doesn't actually work in most places in the building and the IT department really don't care). I was silly enough to start the Win11 update before I left for the weekend last Friday, only to turn up on Monday needing to get my laptop synched in a hurry after doing some work at home over the weekend. Had to tether my phone to get that done, then rolled back to Win10 after a few futile efforts to get ICS working. Had work to do, I'll try Win11 again when I don't have any critical work to do.
So far a few week in with a new laptop.
I still think if the search bar is the easiest way to navigate the settings then you've ballsed up the UI. But I've had that complaint since 7 I think. And half the settings menus only have 3 settings in them, but still manage to need a scroll bar? Why cant they just fit them on half a page?