*** Microsoft Windows 11 Thoughts & Discussion Thread ***

I did an in-place upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 last week, and I have to say I'm very impressed with how smoothly well it all went. it's a 5+ year old Windows 10 installation so I was expecting a few hiccups with background processes, Asus motherboard applications etc but everything is working seamlessly and performance seems very good. All my installed applications work, my games work and run well and I haven't noticed any problems yet. The overall OS interface has a much higher level of polish than Windows 10 and the tabs on File Explorer are really useful too.

Few things I don't like so far are: the Start menu feels like a significant downgrade from Win 10, I had a few app tiles showing useful information like calendar, weather etc which are no longer possible and instead it devotes a huge section to recently-modified/accessed files with minimal options given for customisation, and instead they've offloaded the weather etc to the Widgets button on the taskbar which is filled with a load of other useless stuff. I'll check out StartAllBack mentioned above to see if I can get it back to something more usable.
Also for some reason it's renumbered my drives in Task Manager so my main system SSD is now Disk 2 instead of Disk 0. Makes no functional difference but it's an annoyance when using it to look at disk activity.
 
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I finally fixed my only issue with 11 ie " English US" issue to " English UK" in Time and Language, I had to download and install the text to speech language pack and handwriting pack (I don't use them btw), after that I had the option next to "English US" could be changed from "English US" to "English UK" for "Windows Display Language" in Time and Language. So anybody that may have the same issue you know what to do.
 
As time has gone on, and looking back since first installing w11 from when it released and various insider builds, I have to admit it’s been very stable, easy to install updates and over all has just worked reliably. I don’t really mind the new font and aesthetic look either.

But, the method and way its works is still utter pants in places such a step backwards it’s progressively turning me against windows and I’m daily finding I’m liking it less and less. The start menu and taskbar infuriates me daily. The incohesive ui elements stiiiiiiill unfixed etc etc etc .


Don’t start me on all the adverts and push for AI either.

Is it worth the upgrade ??? As above it’s not likely to break your machine, but I wouldn’t say it’s markedly better.


It’s funny, I can’t help feel that MS is losing its way somewhat with the OS.
 
When I say ads, I generally mean like the pushes towards other MS stuff, or features, or bing junk within edge . i.e. advertising/promoting something else that just takes up space where you dont want it to. I suppose overtime its gone down as I disable them as they come along as well. I think I'm just getting tired of the constant ramming of things at you.
 
Donnie Fisher said:
but I wouldn’t say it’s markedly better.
Click to expand...

Maybe they don’t want to make it better. All they need to do is make sure they sell licences albeit being OEM or retail, that’s how I perceive it.

If they show progression in terms of not working to working that’s something stable that’s all that matters right?

They have given a lot of licences away since w11 was first released.

mrk said:
Am I the only one that hasn't seen any ads in Windows yet? :p
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I haven’t seen an ad yet. Might be only aimed at home edition though.
 
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Figured it be ripe for this thread but I actually have decided that I like the WIn11 context menu for a number of reason, chief of which is the fact that right click requires less mouse cursor travel to cut/copy/paste/delete a file than the classic context menu :p

CXNAveh.png


vs

u1v3SXl.png


It's the little wins...
 
Man you have a lot of context menu entries for images, I'm guessing you don't edit them to remove superfluous entries? (Mine only has 11 entries for images).

e: To go off on one for a bit, that's one of the things that actually make no sense to me. MS said the reason for the new context menu was because third-party programs kept adding entries and cluttered it up, so i get that and other than most of the clutter being superfluous stuff that they've added i totally agree, however their solution just seems totally backwards. Instead of adding something in the control panel or settings app that lets people edit context menus they decided to just add another context menu on top of the old one. It doesn't even solve the problem they identified as third-party programs can still clutter up the new context menu with their own entries.

It's like the new context menu encapsulates everything that's wrong with MS, it's the why make something better when we can just make something new that's equally as bad just in different ways.
 
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Was going to create a new thread but seeing as it applies to W11 i thought here would be better, what's people's thought on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the changes MS intend to implement?
blogs.windows.com

Previewing changes in Windows to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the European Economic Area

[UPDATE 2/29/24] As the March 2024 deadline for compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) approaches, we wanted to provide an update on our plan to roll out updates to Windows for our customers in the European Economic Area (EEA
blogs.windows.com blogs.windows.com
From what i gather it's going to add 'system' to some apps, maybe make it easier to uninstall apps, be less prone to taking over user chosen file associations, and make the linking of the device with you MS account more obvious/easier to opt-out of (maybe).

Some media outlets are reporting that it's going to lead to a debloated version of Windows without Bing, Widgets, etc, etc. Personally i can't see that happening as i suspect MS will do the minimum work necessary to comply with the regulations, like just marking some apps as 'system' apps, what's your thoughts on the changes, will the changes even apply to the UK?

BTW: Can we please try to keep the politics of out of this.
 
Murphy said:
Was going to create a new thread but seeing as it applies to W11 i thought here would be better, what's people's thought on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the changes MS intend to implement?
blogs.windows.com

Previewing changes in Windows to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the European Economic Area

[UPDATE 2/29/24] As the March 2024 deadline for compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) approaches, we wanted to provide an update on our plan to roll out updates to Windows for our customers in the European Economic Area (EEA
blogs.windows.com blogs.windows.com
From what i gather it's going to add 'system' to some apps, maybe make it easier to uninstall apps, be less prone to taking over user chosen file associations, and make the linking of the device with you MS account more obvious/easier to opt-out of (maybe).

Some media outlets are reporting that it's going to lead to a debloated version of Windows without Bing, Widgets, etc, etc. Personally i can't see that happening as i suspect MS will do the minimum work necessary to comply with the regulations, like just marking some apps as 'system' apps, what's your thoughts on the changes, will the changes even apply to the UK?

BTW: Can we please try to keep the politics of out of this.
Click to expand...
For the UK, this does nothing. For the EU it should allow some of the bloat to be removed which is a good thing. Wish they would make it illegal to auto opt-in users, so the default is opt-out and users must manually opt-in to stuff. Also, ban forced telemetry (data mining). Apparently, setting the OS location at install will allow any user to get the EU version, think setting the location to Ireland for UK people will be the best option.
 
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Neil79 said:
Anyone noticed that games are not as snappy with this installed?
Click to expand...

That update killed CPU performance for me, it just took a couple of the usual benchmarks to notice. Cinebench, 7-Zip, Geekbench... 5-10% performance loss now on 23H2. I thought it was time for me to format my PC and clean install 23H2... but to no avail, the issue is still there as soon as you install Nov'23 update, GG Microsoft.
 
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I have trash apps marked as system on Windows 10, after an install yesterday. Will need to see if I change my region to Europe, if I can bin them off. As someone mentioned above, it's all the small things that Microsoft do that annoy me about the OS. As far as stability goes, 10 and a 11 have been rock solid.
 
GaryTheSnail said:
When I reinstalled 23H2 I just left the right click menu and everything else as default on both my desktop and laptop.

Trying to stop customizing things and use them as they are now.
Click to expand...

Far too much of the time it just causes extra steps for me.

Also I do a fair bit of shell hacking of my own to make Windows useful - for example I do a fair bit of older game modding where it is useful to be able to do different things with the raw datafiles, where double-clicking on them will launch the editor, but right clicking gives options to do other processing on them which isn't supported through the editor for example some older games you can't build AI navigation data from the raw world level file in the editor but have to use a separate console application to create it, etc. which doesn't play nicely with the context menu in 11.
 
Holy **** I just realised how ******* stupid Microsoft are - I straight up disabled the Widgets option on the taskbar as I have no use for that stuff but was just doing an upgrade on another system for someone and had a quick look at it... it is everything the Start Menu should be - aesthetically looks good, have group management and customisation options, etc. etc. sadly you can't really repurpose it as a Start Menu from what I can see at a quick glance... on the flip side as a news/information feed it is pretty bad...

How are the developers of this OS such incompetent clowns?

*facepalms repeatedly*
 
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