Windows 11 - Who needs it?

Crashnburn

Crashnburn

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Crashnburn
I moved from Win 7 to Win 10 last January, and now Windows 11 is here. I lucked out and skipped the fiascos that were Windows 8 and 8.1. I only went to Windows 10 because Micro$oft stopped supporting Windows 7. I guess you can say I'm not an early adopter!
 
I'm the opposite. I'm in the Windows Sucker...I mean "Insider Program." I've been getting the updates regularly since the middle of Windows 10. 11 does have some definite improvements (though some recently added stupidities as well).
 
flyingron said:
I'm the opposite. I'm in the Windows Sucker...I mean "Insider Program." I've been getting the updates regularly since the middle of Windows 10. 11 does have some definite improvements (though some recently added stupidities as well).
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Thanks When does your NDA expire?
 
Crashnburn said:
I moved from Win 7 to Win 10 last January, and now Windows 11 is here. I lucked out and skipped the fiascos that were Windows 8 and 8.1. I only went to Windows 10 because Micro$oft stopped supporting Windows 7. I guess you can say I'm not an early adopter!
Click to expand...

Maybe you can dump NetZero this year.
 
MS stopped supporting windows 7? Huh. I’m loathing the new Mac os’s more and more, but they still don’t suck as much as windows. XP was the last windows that I could stand even a little.
 
Crashnburn said:
Thanks When does your NDA expire?
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Don't believe I am under one. The terms are I get the new releases and I take what I get. There's no obligation not to disclose what is in the release or how well it works.
 
Are there any indications out yet that you can get conned into updating like has happened before? I mean conned by Microsoft. Like you updated something you didn't think you were updating?
 
didn't the poor suckers using windoze go through this nonsense a number of years ago?
 
Why mediocre operating systems aren't all free by now is baffling to me. It's like someone renting you a license to use the doorknob on your house. (Now I know, these days there really are people doing that very thing, but it's still goofy.)
 
Albany Tom said:
Why mediocre operating systems aren't all free by now is baffling to me. It's like someone renting you a license to use the doorknob on your house. (Now I know, these days there really are people doing that very thing, but it's still goofy.)
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Funny you bring that up. Most automakers are moving to a subscription service so that you can do "luxury" tasks like opening the door or starting the car. Guess all of those people that bought the extended warranty got the automakers thinking they were missing out.
 
I've been using Win11 now for 3-4 months. I can hardly tell the difference from Win10. I suspect a casual user would be even harder pressed to notice more than a few superficial differences (like, the "Start menu"/"Windows menu" is now a few inches to the right from where it used to be--big whoop).
 
What is noticeably better? Can you move the start menu back to the old position?

I’m always hesitant to upgrade windows. They seem to love making UI changes for no apparent reason, moving where all the important settings are, and introducing new annoyances/complications.

My most major issues with 10 right now are all the screens I have to click through after an update that serve no purpose other than trying to sell me crap I don’t want and trying to force me to use their browser.

I really wish they’d dispense with the crap and focus on what users actually want. 10 is a decent OS overall if it wasn’t for all the spyware and marketing
 
I haven't noticed anything particularly "better". That doesn't mean there aren't 1000 things happening more cleanly and smoothly behind the scenes that I'll never be aware of.

No, the Start/Windows menu relocation is part of a look-and-feel change that centers the taskbar icons instead of left-justifying them, and I'm not aware of a way to revert that to be left-justified again. One other change they made to the taskbar that is a small disappointment to me is that you can no longer drag the taskbar to any edge of the screen--it has to be at the bottom. I have one monitor where I prefer to place the taskbar on the left edge, but I can live with it at the bottom so it's not a big deal to me.

"Spyware" isn't a big feature of Windows. The places where your data is escaping by the bushel barrel load are every web page you visit. Doesn't matter if you're using Linux, iOS, Windows, or ChromeOS. Doesn't matter if you're on an iPhone or Android. Doesn't matter if you're using Safari, or Edge, or Chrome, or Firefox. There is data pouring out of your machine and into the repositories of hundreds and hundreds of companies, and there's no practical way to prevent that today. There are some things you can do to partially limit or obfuscate what is collected, but that often comes with other "costs", like reduced or changed functionality of the websites you visit.

https://gizmodo.com/heres-all-the-data-collected-from-you-as-you-browse-the-1820779304

Microsoft wants you to use Edge because then they're also in that pipeline of web data flow/collection.
 
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cowman said:
What is noticeably better?
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They seemed to have locked down the pre-boot environment. Does more integrity checks via the TPM. Not sure you'd consider that "better".
Jim_R said:
the Start/Windows menu relocation is part of a look-and-feel change that centers the taskbar icons instead of left-justifying them, and I'm not aware of a way to revert that to be left-justified again.
Click to expand...
Settings->Personalization->Taskbar
expand TaskbarBehavior and then TaskbarAlignment=Left.
 
I have noticed one glitch: my shortcuts to my Office 2010 applications keep dissapearing.
 
asicer said:
They seemed to have locked down the pre-boot environment. Does more integrity checks via the TPM. Not sure you'd consider that "better".

Settings->Personalization->Taskbar
expand TaskbarBehavior and then TaskbarAlignment=Left.
Click to expand...

Yeah I can see where the TPM stuff would be useful. For my purposes and I think for the bulk of people out there it's an unnecessary complication- fortunately the Ryzen 7 desktop I'm currently running isn't even compatible with it so moot point. My laptop is eligible for the upgrade but meh, I think I'll keep 10 until I build/buy a new system.
 
cowman said:
Yeah I can see where the TPM stuff would be useful. For my purposes and I think for the bulk of people out there it's an unnecessary complication- fortunately the Ryzen 7 desktop I'm currently running isn't even compatible with it so moot point. My laptop is eligible for the upgrade but meh, I think I'll keep 10 until I build/buy a new system.
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The Ryzen 7 chip should work fine but you may have to do some configuration in your BIOS configuration before it will. That's what I did. There are some great Youtube videos telling you to configure your computer so that it will work.
 
Seems like Microsoft is in the business of making fast computers run slow. I have a couple of things that I use Windows for, but most of the time I run Ubuntu Linux on a dual boot machine. Linux is a lot easier to use and nothing in the OS robs your CPU resources for hours.

Whenever I know I'm going to need Windows I boot it up and let it sit for a few hours so it can do all the updates and crap that it needs to do because it's just fricking unusable until it gets through all that crap. It's so annoying. It hardly gives me any cycles at all while it's doing that stuff. I know if I kept in on all the time I wouldn't have this issue, but I don't like Windows.
 
asicer said:
Settings->Personalization->Taskbar
expand TaskbarBehavior and then TaskbarAlignment=Left.
Click to expand...

Thank god for that. Center-aligned start/home is a deal breaker.
 
I left Windows 7 for 10 not long after they discontinued support. Seemed like overnight I started having issues with 7...hmmm.

My wife just bought a new laptop that supposedly shipped with 10 but licensed for 11, but the second you turn it on it upgraded to 11 with no option to return to 10. After a little fiddling I go the start menu back where it is supposed to be a few UI things worked out. Overall it doesn't seem drastically different in user operation.

I don't like the start menu only featuring pinned apps versus all, unless you click another button. I haven't found a way to change that.

I also seemed a few steps harder to getting shortcuts to the desktop and pinned to the task bar for the apps we usually use.

Heck just changing terminology from Programs to Apps, guess I'm getting old.
 
If you're buying a new computer and it comes with Windows 11, then run Win11. If you have older peripherals, Win10. Basically, whatever the system shipped with is probably good enough.

Still chugging along with Win7 here and quite happy with it. "Not Supported by Microsoft" doesn't bother me -- ever call MS technical support over a bug in their software? I have tickets open with MS that are 12+ years old and unresolved. Bonus: The same bugs still exist in the most recent version of MS Office as well.
 
I upgraded to 11 on my desktop and it's fine. Doesn't feel like much of an upgrade - more like someone applied a skin to the UI - but I don't ask much of the OS so perhaps I just don't notice many of the new features.

Certainly didn't make anything better, but it didn't seem to make anything worse either. Just a little different here and there, but I run a bunch of various operating systems on my machines, so different doesn't bug me.
 
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