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

Man of Honour
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I'd image that 90% of the development effort is fixing or working around the absolute abomination of a codebase that is Windows. If it weren't for all the legacy garbage that they had to support, Windows would be a much better platform.

It's probably hard to believe, but a lot of their more recent software is of a really high quality.

Seems to me from the insider emails, etc. that 90% of their efforts seem to be on features no one has ever asked for or needs and end up abandoned before they are fully implemented.

No doubt there are a lot of legacy issues and code no one wants to touch/people who originally worked on it long gone along with the documentation, etc. but there are so many areas they never even get the basics right, etc., for instance updates for issues which should never have existed - often bringing more problems with them, I don't believe that is the major stumbling block.

But it isn't always about the quality of the product itself in terms of programming competency, etc. but that obviously no one has ever considered it, of if they do don't give a ****, from the perspective of the end user.
 
Associate
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Seems to me from the insider emails, etc. that 90% of their efforts seem to be on features no one has ever asked for or needs and end up abandoned before they are fully implemented.

No doubt there are a lot of legacy issues and code no one wants to touch/people who originally worked on it long gone along with the documentation, etc. but there are so many areas they never even get the basics right, etc., for instance updates for issues which should never have existed - often bringing more problems with them, I don't believe that is the major stumbling block.

But it isn't always about the quality of the product itself in terms of programming competency, etc. but that obviously no one has ever considered it, of if they do don't give a ****, from the perspective of the end user.
Agreed, it's one of those situations where if they are focused on visual and feature changes to give the perception of improvement vs cleaning up the back-end to make the actual experience better. It's typical sales-driven BS.

It's a pity because Windows is actually a great OS.
 
Man of Honour
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It's a pity because Windows is actually a great OS.

I find it very frustrating as on the one hand you have 7 which is a bit dated in some respects but overall a solid OS, you have 11 which IMO in concept is what a modern OS should be like but the execution is exceedingly lacking and they obviously don't understand the design language of 11 as a team - if anyone does at all rather than it being borrowed without a proper understanding of the concept.

Another thing I find frustrating - while the tabbed explorer in 11 is a nice idea and useful for some people, a lot of people intentionally work with multiple explorer windows and moved away from stuff like file manager for a reason - while sure you can drag and hover/drop over the explorer entry (or entries if not combined) on the task bar it would be very handy to have a list of open explorer windows in the navigation pane like you can have other groups to drag and drop into.
 
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I find it very frustrating as on the one hand you have 7 which is a bit dated in some respects but overall a solid OS, you have 11 which IMO in concept is what a modern OS should be like but the execution is exceedingly lacking and they obviously don't understand the design language of 11 as a team - if anyone does at all rather than it being borrowed without a proper understanding of the concept.

Another thing I find frustrating - while the tabbed explorer in 11 is a nice idea and useful for some people, a lot of people intentionally work with multiple explorer windows and moved away from stuff like file manager for a reason - while sure you can drag and hover/drop over the explorer entry (or entries if not combined) on the task bar it would be very handy to have a list of open explorer windows in the navigation pane like you can have other groups to drag and drop into.
Yea, I don't think it would be a stretch to have it under the quick access/recent files as it's something they already do.

I'm way more forgiving of Windows after suffering through MacOS for the past couple months.
 
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Sadly far from hyperbole. I can't say I'd say any of my 10/11 installs "work great" some are passable, after a cocktail of programs like Shutup10 and WUB but still have a level of background activity which isn't ideal.

Even after 7 years!!! they haven't managed to make one unified, well designed, settings/control panel system... let that sink in. (Even the redesigned one in 11 is a ******* abortion and that is putting it politely).

Ah right, no hyperbole then. :cry:
 
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OP
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That is why you have settings and options and don't ignore how many users use the OS - it isn't like most of these features are mutually exclusive. One of the things earlier Windows did not terribly was acknowledge you can't cater for every user and leave some things a bit open ended so people could mess around a bit and at least get something close to what they needed.

You can mess around with as much of the OS you want. There's no limits as long as you know where to look. Endless of 3rd party apps to mess about with it. By default is where people are crying because they can't have it the way they want. :D

It's all up to Microsoft. Don't like it just use another OS. There's loads of things I don't like about it but I'm not going to mess about with it. I'll use it the way it is. Nothing worse than loosing all your settings after a format.
 
Soldato
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When i build my new PC can i upgrade my windows 10 without installing it first?
My current rig cant upgrade (6700k no TPM), Can i install windows 11 and then upgrade my license or do i have to go through the pain of installing windows 10 first and then upgrading.

Once upgraded I assume my old windows 10 license would be deactivated.
 
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When i build my new PC can i upgrade my windows 10 without installing it first?
My current rig cant upgrade (6700k no TPM), Can i install windows 11 and then upgrade my license or do i have to go through the pain of installing windows 10 first and then upgrading.

Once upgraded I assume my old windows 10 license would be deactivated.

You can either do a fresh install or an in-place upgrade. I use a new drive when installing as it makes it easier to go back to the older OS. I test it for a while and wait until it's stable.
 
Soldato
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This is doing my head in. On my laptop I have taskbar set to autohide. Whenever I am in Chrome it stays there and obscures parts of the webpage (it draws over it) so I have to enter fullscreen to do some stuff. Why wont it **** off?
 
Soldato
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Agreed, it just works. One of the best decisions Microsoft has made on their browser war.
"It just works" is something Todd Howard from Bethesda also says (i trust that man less than one sheet of bog roll to clean my butt).

All the browers just work, with varying degrees, i'd agree to take it over Chrome though.
 
Man of Honour
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All the browsers seem on a somewhat downward trajectory lately - though Edge is an improvement on older MS offerings but like a lot of MS software of late it does some things very well or is a very good idea in concept let down by things like stupid background tasks or the implementation of other features in an undesirable/disruptive manner.

I've a light weight system I use for syncing backup pools running Windows 10 where I'm just using Edge rather than putting Firefox on, which I largely use. And it just makes me facepalm at times as on the one hand it is often very fast, possibly faster than FF, but then other features must have been implemented by a complete idiot.
 
Soldato
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Bit late to the party on this.... but just got a new dell laptop which means windows 11 is forced on me.

First impressions - not good.... I liked windows 7, I liked windows 8, I like windows 10, I don't like windows 11....
It feels like a budget os-x but worse.... if I wanted to use os-x, I'd use os-x :rolleyes:
Start menu... downgrade in usability for me, I group my programs into categories and the 'wasted space' at the bottom for 'adverts' is annoying...
I want task manager, now it's a search from start...
I want to change the power settings... it's now randomly split into 2 locations which don't do the same things but at the same time are linked together....

Tomorrow (today) is not going to be fun, got to figure out why I've got really low battery life, even with everything set to 'low power modes' it can't decide if I should get 12 hours of 1 hour of the laptop 'idle'. I know it's a 12700h but it's got an 86wh battery, it should be closer to that 10 hour mark.... it's going to be fun finding the stuff that's been hidden away behind multiple layers of clicks.
 
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Initial starts of windows will spend a lot of time thrashing background processes to build indexes and other stuff for a good while. Might explain your poor initial battery life. It should settle down.

Task Manager - Right click start button and its the near the bottom of the pop up menu.
 
Man of Honour
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Windows 10/11 with laptops especially seem to have some problems with certain background tasks not working properly like the memory scanner malfunctioning and either running always or kicking off when it thinks the system is idle and never completing - sitting there using all of one CPU core either indefinitely or while the system is "idle" which drains battery fast.

Windows 10/11 are a ****** joke when it comes to power use though - average power consumption for a mini PC with 10 pro on I use for some backup services is approx. double that of any other OS I've tried on there - unfortunately it has to be 10 really for hardware compatibility and software compatibility.

Use task manager/process explorer to see what is happening when the system is in use and "idle".
 
Associate
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Bit late to the party on this.... but just got a new dell laptop which means windows 11 is forced on me.

First impressions - not good.... I liked windows 7, I liked windows 8, I like windows 10, I don't like windows 11....
It feels like a budget os-x but worse.... if I wanted to use os-x, I'd use os-x :rolleyes:
Start menu... downgrade in usability for me, I group my programs into categories and the 'wasted space' at the bottom for 'adverts' is annoying...
I want task manager, now it's a search from start...
I want to change the power settings... it's now randomly split into 2 locations which don't do the same things but at the same time are linked together....

Tomorrow (today) is not going to be fun, got to figure out why I've got really low battery life, even with everything set to 'low power modes' it can't decide if I should get 12 hours of 1 hour of the laptop 'idle'. I know it's a 12700h but it's got an 86wh battery, it should be closer to that 10 hour mark.... it's going to be fun finding the stuff that's been hidden away behind multiple layers of clicks.
Intel are doing very poorly in terms of battery life; still need a couple patches before the cores behave themselves. I recently bought a laptop with the 5825u for that exact reason.
 
Soldato
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Intel are doing very poorly in terms of battery life; still need a couple patches before the cores behave themselves. I recently bought a laptop with the 5825u for that exact reason.
The annoying thing is I know there is 'good battery life' in there, there's just something getting in the way. Having spent today playing around with stuff (more to do tomorrow), I'd say it's down to windows thinking it knows best, some background task I haven't found yet (I kept seeing random p-core spikes just sitting on desktop) or just good old dell bloatware (mcafee went day 1 lol).

I went and used powercfg commandlines to set the laptop to 'power save mode', which is annoyingly missing (still got to fix that and other bits) from control panel options, and it went from the more common 1-2 hours up to 12+ and then settled at around 8 hours (still not great but quite a big improvement), until I turned on battery saver mode which then took the battery life down to around 5 hours (yeah I don't understand that one either)

Initial starts of windows will spend a lot of time thrashing background processes to build indexes and other stuff for a good while. Might explain your poor initial battery life. It should settle down.

Task Manager - Right click start button and its the near the bottom of the pop up menu.
Kind of ruled the 'initial tasks' out, it's not thrashing the ssd or anything for example and I went and turned a lot of that off anyway...hell I even went and turned down the wifi output power lol

Task manager, nice to know but still prefer the 'windows 10 way', old habits die hard lol

Windows 10/11 with laptops especially seem to have some problems with certain background tasks not working properly like the memory scanner malfunctioning and either running always or kicking off when it thinks the system is idle and never completing - sitting there using all of one CPU core either indefinitely or while the system is "idle" which drains battery fast.

Windows 10/11 are a ****** joke when it comes to power use though - average power consumption for a mini PC with 10 pro on I use for some backup services is approx. double that of any other OS I've tried on there - unfortunately it has to be 10 really for hardware compatibility and software compatibility.

Use task manager/process explorer to see what is happening when the system is in use and "idle".
Been using that and the daft thing is everything seems to be less than 1%... I've still got more digging though admittedly but windows 11 is slowing me down. It's surprising how often you use the notification side of the task bar in windows 10 and then find they're missing in windows 11, not to mention things just being in the wrong place or even worse split over multiple places. The changes would have been fine on the neo (like originally intended) but they don't work on mouse and keyboard imo.


The funny thing is, I bought the laptop as a 'lower power' light gaming alternative (it's got a 60w rtx3060, I've set default to igpu so it shouldn't be that) to my 5950x rig (hopefully rtx4080) for when the nights draw in and the electric prices go up, it should still do that, even plugged in, but it would be nice to be able to run it from battery for things like browsing the internet lol
 
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