Windows 11

[Mike Henderson]

Anybody download and install Windows 11? If so, what do you think of it?

Mike

[Warren Lake]

you mean there is something higher than Windows 98?

[Doug Garson]

I'm still waiting for Windows 9

[Warren Lake]

think there was a leap year

[George Bokros]

Probably sucks worse than Win10

[Dave Fritz]

I'm watching this tread. I got the prompt last night and couldn't believe it. I recently changed from Windows Seven and struggle with Windows Ten.

[Rob Damon]

I won't be using it. I have 4 computers that have never been connected to the internet and they run blazing fast like new and they have never hung up or crashed.
Rumor has it it requires you to be connected to the internet and reconnect to stay running similar to MS Office. So, if you buy a new laptop with Windows 10, you never need access to the internet to install and use for the life of the laptop. If you buy a laptop with Windows 11 and you don't have or ever want it to connect to the internet, you have a door stop.
There are a number of articles on the I.T. website www dot theregister dot com. They have good articles on IT related stuff that have been reading for decades.

[Jim Becker]

I have not yet downloaded it to my VM but did setup Parallels 17 to be compatible with Win11. Win11 requires a boot security chip setup which is why it's not going to work on some older machines ... anything with "traditional BiOS" is toast for example. I'm holding off briefly in upgrading my primary Win10 VM to Win11, but I may setup a dedicated Win11 VM to play with it. There's nothing radically different...Win11 is an iterative upgrade to Win10. The UI is a lot more Mac-like including the dock at the bottom, center and the ability to setup multiple screen/application profiles which allows, for example, one arrangement for "day work" and another for "personal endeavors" outside of the work day. My only hesitation for diving right in is just being sure that the one application I use on Windows (Vectric's Aspire) has had a little experience on the public release of Win11. That's for my VM. For my CNC controller, it will likely stay on Win10 for the foreseeable future because I would need to know that the WinCNC hardware and software had been fully vetted on Win11 before transitioning. There's no really need for that given the more dedicated use of the only dedicated Window computer I own)

[Don Coffman]

I am on Win11 and have been using it for several weeks. It is seems more stable, smoother operation and laid out much more user friendly. To date I haven't found any compatibility issues with applications. Microsoft is still tweaking and I receive a revision update every couple weeks, none of which have created issue.

[Kev Williams]

3 of my 8 running computers are XP's, and way back when I swore I'd never change-- However, doing my own taxes & such forced me into moving on to Win7- and I must say 7's improvements over XP are great, at least those I like ;) --like the fact that no matter the folder you just closed, it'll open the same way (as in, newest files first, or alphabetically, etc), the better file-access system in general (lots more default files when opening), and the folder search is wonderful. BUT, when it comes to stability, XP is the hands-down champion. All 3 of my XP's never get shut down unless the power goes out. And they never 'change their attitude', they operate today just like they did last April. My win7's on the other hand, for some reason just get slower and slower and slower and slower as the day progresses. Don't know if memory is leaking or what's going on. 'Pro' computer guys look at this thing (a Dell Precision T5400, 2 Xeon processors, 8 cores, 32g ram, SSD) and after an hour tell me 'it's working great!" --So then, why is it that 10 hours into day two of no reboot does it take 20 seconds for a 3k Corel file to load off the SSD? I'm surprised the words "(not responding)" aren't etched into the screen... And even after I close all running programs, kill any services I don't need at the moment, and run my 'memory dump' program for good measure, I can't even watch a video without it breaking up into rapid on/off chunks. In case any cares to watch a demo: https://youtu.be/rzIfJFU74zs

I have a laptop with Win10 on it, ONLY because I can't run TurboTax without it. This laptop so ridiculously slow it's totally useless to me for anything else...

Having said all that-- I'm seriously hoping that, just possibly, Win11 will be to 10 and 8 what XP was to 95 and 98, or at least act somewhat like 7 does. But I'm not holding my breath...

[Myk Rian]

Remember when Win 3 was the thing? A cleansing of Win 1 and 2.
All the odd numbered versions seem to be the most stable. 5 was skipped for Vista and some other mess MS invented.
Then 7 came out, and it works. Win 8. What can I say. It's an even number.
Windows 9 never came out because it was too good. MS buried it because updates would never be needed. It runs smooth on any machine, forever. :rolleyes:
Win 10 gets some serious complaints, but it's an even number.
Now Win 11 is coming out. It's an odd numbered version. What can go wrong?

[Ed Fang]

i usually wait 6 months before adopting any new release. Even if they are windows 10 H1 type of releases. Gives everyone else a chance to work the bugs out first.

[Ronald Blue]

I will likely upgrade in the near future to 11. I've been happy with 10 however and they say 11 is more user friendly than 10. I forgot about Windows 8. It wasn't around to long. I had an 8 year old laptop that was sluggish in everyway. I purchased a new laptop a couple months ago and it's very quick. Boots up in 15-20 seconds. Regardless of whether one likes Windows or not it's what the world runs on.

[Brian Elfert]

I've been running Windows 10 for so long that I barely remember Windows 7 anymore. It just runs. My personal laptop is ten years old now and Windows 10 runs just fine on it (I put an early SSD in the laptop when I bought it.). My only issue with Windows 10 is all the stupid crap Microsoft adds to it that needs to be removed.

Now, I am running only the Pro or Enterprise versions of Windows 10. Every time I touch a Windows 10 PC running the Home version it almost feels like a different OS.

[George Bokros]

I downloaded Win10 only because H&R Block tax software required it. The computer running Win10 must be rebooted about every other day or it is slower than 1 cylinder VW. The computer it is runningg on is only five years old. Glad I didn't down load it to my laptop.

My impression of Win10 is it stinks worse than a backed up sewer.

[Jim Becker]

Kev, interestingly, I had horrible instability with WinXP and Win7 that all went away with Win10. I was constantly having to rebuild them on a variety of machines, both personal and corporate. (that actually is why I switched to MacOS in 2010...) I expect that Win11 will be a continuation of Win10 as I mentioned earlier...a few new features and an improved UI, but nothing major is reinvented with the exception that there is that BiOS requirement that rules out a lot of older machines from running it, even if they have the computing capacity to handle it.

[Mike Henderson]

Maybe I don't use my computer as hard as others do, but Windows 10 has been very good for me - stable, fast, and the updates go on with no issues.

Looking at the requirements for Windows 11, I'd have to purchase a new computer to run it on my main unit so I'll stick with Windows 10 until I upgrade. My travel computer can be upgraded to Windows 11 but I'll probably stick with Window 10 just so the interfaces are consistent.

Mike

[My main unit is an i7-3720QM which is about 2012 so it's way out of spec for Windows 11. But it runs well so I'm not in a hurry to replace it. Microsoft is going to keep supporting Windows 10 with updates.]

[Lee DeRaud]

Looking at the requirements for Windows 11, I'd have to purchase a new computer to run it on my main unit so I'll stick with Windows 10 until I upgrade. My travel computer can be upgraded to Windows 11 but I'll probably stick with Window 10 just so the interfaces are consistent.I was in roughly the same situation: 2020-vintage Dell laptop is ok, but the big desktop I put together in 2019 failed one of the compatibility checks.

A bit of sleuthing revealed that, while the hardware was ok, the NVME SSD main drive had somehow gotten its root partition configured incorrectly during the initial Win10 install. But Microsoft has a command-line utility to fix that, took about a minute to download and run, so now I'm ready whenever they decide to push it. (It works in-situ, no reformat/reinstall required, so I'm not sure why they don't just make it part of the upgrade.)
[EDIT] Here's what I'm talking about, in case anyone else needs to do it:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-11-prep-how-to-convert-mbr-hard-drive-partitions-to-gpt/

[Brian Elfert]

My work laptop is a 2014 15" dell laptop with quad core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM along with a GPU. It runs Windows 10 just fine even with all the management stuff we have running on the background. I will usually leaving it running for a week between reboots unless there is a forced reboot from our security group due to a security patch. I have have pretty much the oldest laptop at work. I keep it because it still runs great. It was a one off purchase that ended up in my hands after the initial need for the laptop was done.

I wanted to keep this laptop because the screen is 15" while the newer ones are 13", but I rarely use the laptop screen carrying it between home and the office. I have dual 27" monitors at home and in the office.

[roger wiegand]

So happy I no longer have to mess with anything Windows! Time spent on household "desktop support" to keep DW up and running has dropped to near zero.

[Alex Zeller]

I have a couple laptops that came from a very large computer company I was working for at the time so they are stuck with & unless I want to pay to upgrade. I finally got a laptop with 10 on it and find it sucks down the battery like crazy. With 7 I just left the computer on all the time and on occasion I would charge it. With 10 no matter which sleep/ hibernate setting I use I get only a couple days of non use time before the battery needs to be charged. Other than that 10 sucks simply because I knew where everything is with 7. Now I have to search the internet. I really wish M$ would just make it so users could pick the style they like, say the 7 format but with 11's OS.

[Rush Paul]

Anybody download and install Windows 11? If so, what do you think of it?

Just installed it yesterday on a desktop PC. So far, running smoothly with no issues. Seems to be a bit cleaner interface than Win 10 (which I liked) and perhaps running a bit more crisply. Good so far.

[Lee DeRaud]

I really wish M$ would just make it so users could pick the style they like, say the 7 format but with 11's OS.A quick google of "windows 7 ui on windows 10" coughs up dozens of suggestions on how to do exactly that.

But in any case it's certainly not as extreme a learning curve as some previous updates, or, for that matter, going from Windows to Mac/Linux/whatever.

[Ronald Blue]

I installed it today and it's running fine. As Rush says it might be a little more crisp but seems very similar to 10. It does have some touch screen functions added if you like that. As far as seeing what programs are open etc.

[Curt Harms]

Kev, interestingly, I had horrible instability with WinXP and Win7 that all went away with Win10. I was constantly having to rebuild them on a variety of machines, both personal and corporate. (that actually is why I switched to MacOS in 2010...) I expect that Win11 will be a continuation of Win10 as I mentioned earlier...a few new features and an improved UI, but nothing major is reinvented with the exception that there is that BiOS requirement that rules out a lot of older machines from running it, even if they have the computing capacity to handle it.

The speculation is that there will be a hack to get around the TPM and 8th generation Intel Core processor requirement. There already is, sort of. There's a registry hack that permits installation on otherwise unqualified machines. There's no update/upgrade path though. It was the case - don't know if it still is - that if Windows 11 is installed fresh from an .iso as opposed to an inplace upgrade, it didn't do hardware checks, just installed like Windows 7 or 10. Windows 10 is supported until October 2025 - and maybe longer than that, only Microsoft knows.

[Jim Becker]

Yes, I suspect that there are folks working hard to find a way around the BiOS issue for hardware implementations. The nice folks at Parallels do have an emulated security "ship" in the virtualization engine so that those of us who run virtualized instances of Windows on MacOS can do the upgrade. I actually turned that on the other day to prepare for the upgrade, but am waiting, as noted, for confirmation from Vectric that there is support for Win11. (which I cannot imagine will be an issue)

[Scott Donley]

Any one have a link to a page I can test my computer to see if I can run 11,? Thanks

[Mike Henderson]

Any one have a link to a page I can test my computer to see if I can run 11,? Thanks

Just google "how to test if my computer will run windows 11" and you'll get a link to the Microsoft page.

Here's a link - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11 Go to the bottom of the page.

Mike

[Don Coffman]

There are work arounds to the TPM and secure boot for incompatible machines. It requires modifications in the system's registry which is dangerous & can easily disable your computer.

[Ron Selzer]

Just google "how to test if my computer will run windows 11" and you'll get a link to the Microsoft page.

Here's a link - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11 Go to the bottom of the page.

Mike


Thanks
downloaded and ran this. Says processor is not compatible

Ron

[Scott Donley]

Just google "how to test if my computer will run windows 11" and you'll get a link to the Microsoft page.

Here's a link - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11 Go to the bottom of the page.

Mike Thanks Mike, I passed !

[Jason Roehl]

I downloaded Win10 only because H&R Block tax software required it. The computer running Win10 must be rebooted about every other day or it is slower than 1 cylinder VW. The computer it is runningg on is only five years old. Glad I didn't down load it to my laptop.

My impression of Win10 is it stinks worse than a backed up sewer.

I had a Win10 Enterprise desktop at work that was slower than molasses in Antarctica for about 18 months. Horribly frustrating to use. I complained to our IT department multiple times, and they made several attempts to fix it. I even let my son take a look at it while I was remoted into it from home (son also works in IT, but for a different entity). He laughed because the processor was 10+ years old. Finally, the IT department got a new guy, and I mentioned it to him. He jumped right in. After I left work one day, he swapped the HD for an SSD, and dropped in a bunch of memory. Now it’s a whole new computer. Moral of the story: regardless of the stability of newer Windows versions, more memory never hurts.

[Jim Becker]

More memory is a good thing, Jason. But that SSD is what really kicked things up a notch. Operating systems do a ton of storage access and old-time spinning platters just cannot keep up with that. I've personally experienced the rejuvenation thing on a couple of my own systems. It's really not about processing anymore for most common computer uses...it's about I/O.

[Alex Zeller]

I worked for a very large "computer company" that use to have it's own brand of computers. They sold that division off so they had to source laptops from other companies. At first it was from the company that bought the computer division but in time it was buying them from the low bidder. Of course when it comes to computers "low bidder" means lower quality or speed parts. My last work laptop (about 4 years old now) had a HD in it when almost nobody was still using them. Turn it on was supper painful. I timed it at more than 7 minutes to get to the point where you could actually get on the internet. When they sold off our division the new company just laughed and replaced all those laptops with newer ones with SSDs. The IT guys let me keep that laptop since I had some custom software on it. I swapped out the HD for a SSD and made it actually useable. It amazes me that a company would save a few bucks on equipment yet not care about the fact that they are throwing away tons of money having employees sitting idle because that equipment is slow.

[Brian Elfert]

The round of PCs my employer purchased in late 2014 still came with HDs. Within a year or so of purchase we bought a whole pile of SSDs and started swapping the HDs with SSD. (We also put SSDs in laptops purchased in 2013.) It made a noticeable difference in performance. I occasionally would run into PCs that had not been upgraded with an SSD and were slow. By that point we were simply giving users a different PC that had an SSD installed with a new software image. We started replacing the 2013 laptops in 2018 and a number of them still had HDs that had not been replaced. The new laptops have SSDs of course. We still have a number of new SSDs in storage for PCs that never got SSDs before they got replaced.

I can't believe there are still laptops and desktops shipped with HDs. If a new Windows PC still comes with an HD that is a sign it is a cheap low end PC that will likely never perform well and should be avoided. Although. I bought a Dell desktop PC in 2017 that was pretty high end that still had an HD. I bought an SSD and put it in before I ever used the PC. That PC performs just fine to this day.

[Jim Becker]

Brian, I agree...even for the most basic usage, I wouldn't suggest anyone buy a computer that's still using spinning platter hard drives. They just cannot keep up with the I/O of current operating systems. And the prices of reasonably sized SSDs is pretty darn low these days, too.

[Mike Henderson]

Brian, I agree...even for the most basic usage, I wouldn't suggest anyone buy a computer that's still using spinning platter hard drives. They just cannot keep up with the I/O of current operating systems. And the prices of reasonably sized SSDs is pretty darn low these days, too.

You can get a used 4TB SSD (Samsung) for about $100/TB. And with Crystal disk info you can see how many TB have been written to the disk. The Samsung SSDs have an amazing write specification.

If the seller won't give you the Crystal Disk info, don't buy.

Mike

[Jason Roehl]

More memory is a good thing, Jason. But that SSD is what really kicked things up a notch. Operating systems do a ton of storage access and old-time spinning platters just cannot keep up with that. I've personally experienced the rejuvenation thing on a couple of my own systems. It's really not about processing anymore for most common computer uses...it's about I/O.

Yeah, I had told them it had something to do with the HD early on—when I would first log in, the computer would be virtually unusable for 5 minutes or so. During that time, the HD access light on the front of the CPU would be on solid, with only an occasional flicker. After those 5 minutes, it would go back to the occasional access and flicker/blip, but the computer was still slow, especially whenever I tried to do too much at once.

Now, my 27” Mac at home..that has a hybrid drive in it, and I’ve noticed with each OS upgrade since I got it 3-ish years ago, it gets a little slower. But I think it only has 4 GB of memory, with room for a lot more—that may be a winter project if memory is cheap and available.

[Brian Elfert]

I personally would not buy a used SSD when new ones are so cheap. It is very rare that anyone needs a 4TB SSD. I am still using a 250GB SSD, but I don't store a lot of data.

[Mike Henderson]

I personally would not buy a used SSD when new ones are so cheap. It is very rare that anyone needs a 4TB SSD. I am still using a 250GB SSD, but I don't store a lot of data.

Ah, I have two 4TB Samsung SSDs. I bought them used. If you check the write specifications on Samsung SSDs, you'll see that it takes a LOT of use to even reach the warrantee write count point. And they generally go well past that point before failure.

It's essentially impossible for a home user to get to the warrantee write count. About the only application that will ever get to the warrantee write count is use in server farms.

I simply mention all of this because (I feel) it's a fairly safe way to save some money if you use big SSDs. If you use small SSDs, the savings are not very large. A new 250GB Samsung SSD is about $50-65 today.

If you buy a used SSD, make sure to get the write count which can be obtained with Crystal Disk Info or Samsung Magician (if the SSD is a Samsung).

Mike

[I just looked it up. The specifications on the Samsung 860 4TB SSD is 2,400 TB written. The one I have in the machine I'm working on now has 37 TB written and I've had this SSD in this machine for a couple to three years now. I'll never even get close the 2,400 TBW. The 250GB SSD is warranted for 150 TBW.]

[Alex Zeller]

I have a large, I think 2TB SSD connected to my Dish Network receiver. I could easily fill it up. The old HD died after a few months even though it was rated for use in a DVR. I think the motor inside it went or it overheated. Not a lot of people need that much space but there are lots of uses where large amounts of data are normal.

[Derek Meyer]

I did a check for updates on my home desktop PC Saturday night, and it said that Windows 11 was not compatible. There was a link to the Microsoft Health Check app, so I downloaded and ran it. It told me that my machine lacked a TPM. After a BIOS update to my motherboard and a quick Google search on Firmware TPM, I had the firmware TPM provided by the processor enabled. My machine then passed the health check in the app, but Windows Update still said that the machine was incompatible and would not offer Windows 11 as an update. I decided to wait a couple of days and see if that changes, so I will check again tonight and see if I'm able to update now.

My desktop is an Intel i9-9900K on an Asus Prime Z390A motherboard, with 64Gb of RAM, a 1Tb Samsung NVMe SSD and a Western Digital 4Tb black hard drive for data. I built it a couple of years ago so I won't be replacing it anytime soon. If it will upgrade to Windows 11 I will, if not, then I will wait until I build a new machine to get 11.

[Jim Becker]

Derek, you should see a change to the note in Windows Update in a future session after one or more new updates are installed and a reboot occurs. That's how it worked in my Parallels VM this week. The "not compatible" message stuck until I did the next Win10 update and then it cleared. (I had enabled the emulated TPM feature in Parallels and was in the same situation as you)

[Mike Henderson]

This is a late follow-up, but I upgraded one of my computers to Windows 11 and found that it's not much different from Windows 10. Seems to work fine with all of my software.

Mike

[Brian Elfert]

I plan to hold off on Windows 11 at least until it gets the first big update to take care of the teething problems with any new OS. My 10 year old laptop still runs Windows 10 just fine, but it may never qualify for Windows 11. My 2017 desktop is more likely to qualify and the desktop is what I use most of the time anyhow. I have two 27" monitors connected to my desktop.

[Jim Becker]

This is a late follow-up, but I upgraded one of my computers to Windows 11 and found that it's not much different from Windows 10. Seems to work fine with all of my software.

Mike

That's actually how it really is...incremental functionality/tweaking of Win10 with an updated UI. I wouldn't be worried about moving from Win10 to Win11 for that reason if the machine can support it.

[Lee DeRaud]

Huh. Just looked at the update page on this machine and found that both Win11 and Win10 21H2 are available.

I know that "quality" updates will continue for Win10 going forward, but I sort of expected that "feature" updates would end with the Win11 roll-out.

[Kev Williams]

What a letdown. I was hoping 11 would be to 8 and 10 what XP was to ME and 7 was to Vista...

So if Win 11 is just going to be basically 10.1, then I guess I'll be replacing the blown HDD in my old 8.1 to do internet and taxes. That turd was at least fast enough to get out of its own way, unlike my win10 laptop, and I at least knew how to work it.

[Jim Becker]

That's interesting, Kev...I found that v8.x was a total pig on the machines I had it on while Win10 has been a good and reliable performer with a lot less of the issues I experienced with XP and Win7. V8.x wasn't used very long, however, in my environment. (I think I had one machine on Vista years ago, but never used ME to the best of my knowledge)

[Brian Elfert]

The big thing with Windows 10 is it really needs an SSD to run at its best. My employer's earliest PCs with Windows 10 were pretty slow until we started replacing HDDs with SSDs. Most PCs have been replaced with new PCs that came with SSDs. We probably still have a full desktop PCs with HDDs that got missed during the transition to SSDs. We also have dozens of brand new SSDs intended for PCs that got replaced before being getting an SSD.

[Kev Williams]

Speaking of win8's and sorry for the hijack- Took me about an hour to find online a way to get my dead 8.1 to do ANYTHING except say 'preparing to repair' followed by an endless black screen-- the trick was to smack F2 repeatedly... What I got was a system diagnostics setup, where I started a system quick check..
468474
--when I got done here, it showed the Hard drive short DST test resulted in SOFTWARE FAILURE--

Yet, when the short test was finished, the test logs showed 3 system tests and 2 hard drive tests, all of which PASSED. So should I assume the drive is okay and only the Windows software is toast?

I still can't figure out how to get a command prompt screen, or a way into the drive any other way, which I need to do to attempt to find the recovery file, or the Windows key, which I'll need if I can figure out how to reinstall windows 8--

I'm thinking about putting 10 or 11 on this thing, which might be the best approach? But I'm not sure how to get the machine to BIOS either, from what I read you get to BIOS from Windows, a neat trick if it won't boot up...

[Mike Henderson]

I'm fairly sure that you can download a version of Windows 10 that can be booted from a USB device, such as a thumb drive. I don't know how your BIOS is set up, but most have a sequence of devices that it will boot from and the first thing on the list is your main disk.

I'd remove the existing hard drive and replace it with an SSD (without an operating system) and see if it will boot Windows 10 from the thumb drive. It will try to boot from the SSD first, then go down the list. Hopefully, a USB device is specified in the list. If so, install Windows 10 on your SSD.

Then, you can access your old drive as an external disk (assuming it's operational) and move your data to the new SSD. You'll need a USB enclosure for the old drive but they're not expensive.

If you have a Microsoft account, they probably have the serial number of your old Win 8.

Mike

[Kev Williams]

Thanks Mike- I ran an extensive test of the hard drive, it failed this time, so I'll probably just get an SSD for it. No MS account...

[Mike Henderson]

Thanks Mike- I ran an extensive test of the hard drive, it failed this time, so I'll probably just get an SSD for it. No MS account...

If you go to Win 10 you may have to get a Microsoft account. I have one so I don't know what effect not having one is. I know that I had to connect to Microsoft after I installed Win 10.

In my opinion it's a good thing to have a Microsoft account. All of your Microsoft software is registered there. If you lose your disk, as you did, you can re-install all your Microsoft products and they will work under your account.

Most third party software people have all of your license numbers in your registration page. Of course, you had to register your software and create a password and ID for that company.

Mike

[Kev Williams]

Good to know, lord knows I got tons of Microsoft stuff...

So I installed the dead win8 drive into my new computer-- management console says there's 5 partitions, all 'healthy', first is the recovery partition which I was hoping to access- but alas, in CMD trying to access the drive gives me "data error <cyclic redundancy check>" --

I'm assuming that drive is now good for target practice...

[Curt Harms]

I have a large, I think 2TB SSD connected to my Dish Network receiver. I could easily fill it up. The old HD died after a few months even though it was rated for use in a DVR. I think the motor inside it went or it overheated. Not a lot of people need that much space but there are lots of uses where large amounts of data are normal.

DVRs in one place where the old style HDD is better than SSD. DVRs involve a lot of writing, not a strength of SSDs. I'm not sure that the superior data throughput of the SSD is required by a DVR. Video surveillance recording and DVRs seem to be one of the strengths of the spinny HDs.

[Curt Harms]

Huh. Just looked at the update page on this machine and found that both Win11 and Win10 21H2 are available.

I know that "quality" updates will continue for Win10 going forward, but I sort of expected that "feature" updates would end with the Win11 roll-out.

Some view the end of "feature" updates as a feature. :)

[Scott Kilroy]

Is anyone else concerned that the home addition requires a Microsoft account? This alone is keeping me away from windows 11. But then again I only a few steps away from wearing a tinfoil hat so maybe it's just me.

[Derek Meyer]

Just a couple of notes related to questions people have asked. You can download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool, which will allow you to create a bootable USB drive with the most recent version of Windows 10. This is what I use when I'm setting up new computers for work. You can also use the tool to perform an update install on the computer you download it on. I used this recently on a computer that had Windows 10 version 1803 and was stuck in an endless update loop, where the updates would start to apply, then fail and roll back. Using the tool fixed the issue by bringing the system up to version 21H1.

Regarding the Microsoft Account, it is required for Windows 11 Home, but not Windows 10 Home. Windows 10 tries to push you into signing up for one, but you can opt to use a local account with a couple of clicks. That said, there are some nice benefits to using a Microsoft account, escpecially if you use multiple computers. It can sync Edge bookmarks across computers, and if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription those settings are synced as well. It also means you have one account to secure across all your machines, and if you change your password it only needs to be done once.

[Curt Harms]

Is anyone else concerned that the home addition requires a Microsoft account? This alone is keeping me away from windows 11. But then again I only a few steps away from wearing a tinfoil hat so maybe it's just me.

At one point if you did a fresh install from a USB with all internet access disabled, it would install with a local account, no Microsoft account required. I don't know if that's still true or not and don't know if home & pro are different in that respect. I did a search for Windows 11 download and because I wasn't using Windows, Microsoft tools were not available. I was however able to download an .iso file and with the help of Balena Etcher now have a bootable Windows 11 USB if I decide to try it.

[Derek Meyer]

There is a media creation tool from Microsoft for Windows 11. Search for "Windows 11 Media Creation Tool". It was the first link that popped up for me.

[Ronald Blue]

Is anyone else concerned that the home addition requires a Microsoft account? This alone is keeping me away from windows 11. But then again I only a few steps away from wearing a tinfoil hat so maybe it's just me.

I must be missing something here. You have to have accounts for many things so I'm not sure why a Microsoft account is more worrisome for you. Unless your cell phone isn't a smart phone you have an account with it. Just curious why this one is a bigger deal for you.

[Scott Kilroy]

I don't like having to have a Google account on my cell either but I started that when I was to young to know better so now I'm trapped.

[Lee DeRaud]

Is anyone else concerned that the home addition requires a Microsoft account? This alone is keeping me away from windows 11. But then again I only a few steps away from wearing a tinfoil hat so maybe it's just me.


I don't like having to have a Google account on my cell either but I started that when I was to young to know better so now I'm trapped.
If having to have Google/Microsoft accounts is high up on your list of problems, you have to admit you've got a pretty good life.

So start paying cash for everything, switch to a flip-phone, run Linux on your PC, and hook to the net through a VPN.
When you get tired of sweating the small stuff, reassess your priorities. Or not.

Thus endeth the Thanksgiving Day sermon. :)

[Scott Kilroy]

I do run Linux for the most part. I've got a Mac I use for audio editing.

[Kev Williams]

I've had an LG Rebel smart phone for several years. No google, no i-anything, and for those choices, I get nary a scam phone call.

[Brian Elfert]

I've had an LG Rebel smart phone for several years. No google, no i-anything, and for those choices, I get nary a scam phone call.

Doesn't the LG Rebel use Android OS which is a Google product? I don't know how the OS on a phone has anything to do with scam calls. My parents still have a landline and they won't even answer the landline these days due to all the scam calls they. (I always call my father's cell phone.)

[Jim Becker]

Yes, that's an Android device and Android is Google's adaptation of Linux, more or less, for portable devices. With the exception of Google branded devices (Pixel) and a very rare third party device, the Android on a given phone may have been altered by the phone manufacturer or the carrier or both. At this point, you either use Android or iOS if you have a mobile device, outside of the rare but deadly "it only makes calls" phone that's hard to come by. Windows Phone is "gone" as is Blackberry's mobile OS.

[Kev Williams]

yeah, my phone uses a google OS but nothing else. Google tried its damndest to get me to turn on my microphone. One of my kids disabled the 'ask' and it's left me alone ever since. :)

My needs are simple: I use my cell maybe 3 times a week, if that. I take pics and video, call the wife and sometimes the kids, I occasionally send/get texts. Pics and vids I offload to a hard drive, not some cloud. The creek, some boaters and some RV'ers via online forums account for 100% of my "social media", absolutely none via 'portable device'...

[Lee Schierer]

I just got a new laptop with Win 11. So far I like the laptop, but I hate Winn 11. Where can I see a list of all the apps (programs) that are installed? How do I add another Icon to the tak bar at the bottom. So far it only lets me have 5. I can open the program and move the icon into the task bar, but as soon as I close the program, the icon vanishes.

[Jim Becker]

Center icon on the dock at the bottom should be the similar to the menu function on Win10, if I'm not mistaken, and you likely can right click on any app to put it on the dock. I'm speculating as I don't have Win11 yet in a VM, but that would make sense based on things I've read about the new version. Or...I could be completely wrong. :)

[Lee Schierer]

Center icon on the dock at the bottom should be the similar to the menu function on Win10, if I'm not mistaken, and you likely can right click on any app to put it on the dock. I'm speculating as I don't have Win11 yet in a VM, but that would make sense based on things I've read about the new version. Or...I could be completely wrong. :)

Not exactly.....first you have to add the app to start, then open the app and right click on the icon to select that it is added to the task bar. Some apps seem to do this automatically others not so much. Microsoft wants you to stay strictly with their approved apps from their store, which has a very limited selection of apps other than social media.

[Lee DeRaud]

I just got a new laptop with Win 11. So far I like the laptop, but I hate Winn 11. Where can I see a list of all the apps (programs) that are installed? How do I add another Icon to the tak bar at the bottom. So far it only lets me have 5. I can open the program and move the icon into the task bar, but as soon as I close the program, the icon vanishes.
Windows button or the leftmost taskbar icon is the old 'Start' menu...main change is that you have to click 'All apps' to get the list. Find the app you want, it should have a 'Pin to Taskbar' option to get it there, plus a 'Pin to Start' to add it to the first page of the "new improved" Start Menu. There's a whole bunch of similar things that used to be available, either in the top-level Start Menu or the right-click option menus, that are now one level deeper. Nonfatal, but annoying enough in a "they moved my cheese" way that I reverted to Win10. At least you can move the icons back to the left edge using the 'Taskbar Options' dialog.

That's as much help as I can give you, since I'm now trying hard to forget I ever saw Win11. :)

[Lee DeRaud]

Microsoft wants you to stay strictly with their approved apps from their store, which has a very limited selection of apps other than social media.Um, not really. That's true if your laptop came with Win11 in "S" mode ("safety"?), but it's easy enough (and free) to change it to the "real" Home version, and install apps from anywhere.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of-s-mode-in-windows-4f56d9be-99ec-6983-119f-031bfb28a307

[Mike Henderson]

I haven't used it a lot, but I don't find Windows 11 to be that difficult to get accustom to. From what I understand, it provides enhanced security so I'm willing to adapt to the changes they made.

However, I have two other computers that won't run Windows 11 so I'm going to be on Windows 10 for a while. They're good, powerful computers and I have no reason to purchase new ones.

Mike

[Lee DeRaud]

I haven't used it a lot, but I don't find Windows 11 to be that difficult to get accustom to. From what I understand, it provides enhanced security so I'm willing to adapt to the changes they made.

However, I have two other computers that won't run Windows 11 so I'm going to be on Windows 10 for a while. They're good, powerful computers and I have no reason to purchase new ones.
Exactly. My main desktop can run Win11, but I have no clue when that'll happen. It's not that hard to get used to, but switching back and forth between 10 and 11 reminded me of my sporadic attempts to use Linux. I can do it but it's just not worth the aggravation until I can do it on all the machines...I suspect I'll wait until my next hardware refresh cycle.

[Jim Becker]

Not exactly.....first you have to add the app to start, then open the app and right click on the icon to select that it is added to the task bar. Some apps seem to do this automatically others not so much. Microsoft wants you to stay strictly with their approved apps from their store, which has a very limited selection of apps other than social media.
My bad...I meant to say 'start the app' prior to the right click operation. BTW, I use that technique on MacOS, too.

[Derek Meyer]

I have just completed 3 installs of Windows 11 Pro on three Intel NUCs (10th gen i7 machines). Here is what I have found so far:

1. The install process is pretty much identical to the Windows 10 install, except that some screens have nicer graphics. Boot times (power on to login screen) seem a bit faster.
2. Hardware detection is better - Windows 11 had drivers for most hardware, including the wired network controller, which Windows 10 did not. This meant no connecting to wireless during install.
3. If not connected to internet, I had the option to use a local account. If connected, choose Work or School account, then Domain Join, and it will allow you to create a local account.
4. The update process was faster than Windows 10. There are fewer updates, of course, but they installed faster and with fewer errors.
5. Having the start menu in the center is different, but not too bad.
6. Changing the default web browser from Edge to Chrome is much more annoying. You now have to change it for each file type, of which there are about a dozen.
7. Adobe does not have a Windows 11 selection when downloading Acrobat Reader. I chose Windows 10 and it installed and ran just fine.
8. Text size is not consitent between menus. For example, right-clicking on the desktop brings up the context menu at a reasonably large font, but selecting 'Show More Options' brings up a menu with noticably smaller text.
9. No issues with networking - seems to connect to all network resources just fine, and access is very fast.

I've had no issues with any driver or program installs yet, but I have no exotic hardware and the programs I've installed so far are pretty run-of-the-mill. I'll know more when I start installing the industry-specific software we use on these machines, likely next week as I put them into production. I will then get user feedback on the whole Windows 11 experience as well.

Derek

[Lee Schierer]

My bad...I meant to say 'start the app' prior to the right click operation. BTW, I use that technique on MacOS, too.

What I was trying to say was you have to add the app to the start menu then actually open the app before you can see the option to add the app to the task bar.

I still haven't figured out how to open a file that shows up on the recommended list. Apps shown there open, but not files.

[Jim Becker]

I'll have to check that out when I do a Win11 install...debating on a clean VM or upgrading my Win10 VM for that. Probably the latter, honestly, as I can make a backup copy of the existing Win10 VM in about ten seconds.

[Curt Harms]

There is a media creation tool from Microsoft for Windows 11. Search for "Windows 11 Media Creation Tool". It was the first link that popped up for me.

Windows Media Creation Tool only works on Windows machines. On any other OS it offers to download the .iso which works for me.

[Derek Meyer]

What I was trying to say was you have to add the app to the start menu then actually open the app before you can see the option to add the app to the task bar.

I still haven't figured out how to open a file that shows up on the recommended list. Apps shown there open, but not files.

I looked at this, and it looks like, for Microsoft apps, you can add then to the task bar from by right-clicking on the icon on the Start menu, but not for third-party apps. I tried it on Office, Solitaire, and Calculator (actually, all the apps on my Start menu) and they all gave me the option to Pin to Task Bar. The third party apps, including the ones that came installed as part of Windows like Instagram and Spotify, do not have this option. I wonder if this is something they will address in a future update.

I copied a file down from our network drive (a PDF) and opened it, closed it, clicked Start and saw that the file had been added to the Recommended list. When I clicked on it it opened right away. Could it be that you don't have an app associated with the type of file you're trying to open?

[Ronald Blue]

What I was trying to say was you have to add the app to the start menu then actually open the app before you can see the option to add the app to the task bar.

I still haven't figured out how to open a file that shows up on the recommended list. Apps shown there open, but not files.

Do you have something disabled in settings? I just tried opening a file in the "recommended" group on the start menu and it opened right up. When I mouse over it highlights it and when I click on it the file opens.

[Lee DeRaud]

I looked at this, and it looks like, for Microsoft apps, you can add then to the task bar from by right-clicking on the icon on the Start menu, but not for third-party apps.That's odd: when I tried it, it worked for Quicken, Photoshop, and Chrome.

[Mike Henderson]

On Windows 11 on my computer, I can right click on any program in the "All Apps" list and it will give me a "Pin to Start" option. Right under that "Pin to Start" option is a "More" option. If I click on that, I get an option of "Pin to Taskbar".

Mike

[Lee DeRaud]

On Windows 11 on my computer, I can right click on any program in the "All Apps" list and it will give me a "Pin to Start" option. Right under that "Pin to Start" option is a "More" option. If I click on that, I get an option of "Pin to Taskbar".That pretty well sums up my objection to the (semi-)new UI: a lot of things I use constantly are one level deeper than they were in Win10. Very useful utilities like BulkRename and 7-Zip add entries to the Explorer context menus, but they end up in the normally-invisible "More..." overflow.

If the user could rearrange/prioritize system/context menus, that problem would go away.

[Kev Williams]

These recent posts sum up my utter contempt for computer design engineers who can't seem to see or think past their own egos, like for example, the clowns who thought that, because THEY thought it was a great idea to just do away with the START button (remember win8?), that EVERYONE would think it's a great idea!! **BBZZZTTT!!** FAIL!!!
--Ok, so we'll fix everything with 8.1. Heavy sigh... 469139

Me, I still can't even figure out what is and isn't the dam scroll-bar in win10...

[Jim Becker]

Then again, those of us who don't have "start buttons" haven't missed them. :) I don't even use it on Windows except to get to the reboot/shutdown. And my screen is "clean" with only a dock/taskbar at the bottom. So I can understand why designers might do the things they do but I also appreciate that many don't like or are not comfortable when things change. Not much we individually can do about it...

[Lee DeRaud]

...I also appreciate that many don't like or are not comfortable when things change.
Could you dial back the condescension about 10dB? It's not "change" as such that's the problem, it's making things less convenient/intuitive/efficient for no apparent reason.

Yeah, you can had-wave off the whole thing as "they moved my cheese" (as I myself described it earlier)...the problem is that they moved it further away.

[Brian Elfert]

Microsoft desktop operating systems seem to alternate between bad and good. XP was good, Vista was bad, 7 was good, 8/8.1 were bad, 10 is good, and the jury is out on 11, but seems to be leaning towards bad.

Part of it is just familiarity. We get used to where everything is and when it moves in the next version we get frustrated. I have been using Windows 10 for at least four or five years. The rare times I have to use an old Windows XP or 7 PC I have to think for a minute where stuff is in the old version.

[Kev Williams]

Nearly every day I use a Win98 computer. Not because I enjoy the nostalgia, it's because I HAVE to for my Job. Nearly every day someone emails me photos or drawings of artwork they need engraved on something. I have several scanning/digitizing/vectorizing programs designed to convert customer artwork into vectors/toolpaths that I can "paint" for use with laser engraving, and/or for my rotary machines to follow. Coreldraw comes with a "Trace" program. To put in bluntly, it sucks. I paid hundreds of $$ for VectorMagic. Better than Corel but it too is worthless to me. What DOES work for me are the 3 versions of a long ago defunct program called CasMate. It was designed in the early '90s when vinyl sign plotters became popular. Worked great for engravers too, it would do in seconds what used to take me many minutes to hours to do with a digitizing tablet and a mouse. In 1992 I paid $10,000 for the original DOS version of CasMate and a shiny new 480 computer, with a 5-1/4" floppy drive and a whopping 140meg hard drive to run it. TO THIS DAY CasMate's digitizing routine runs circles around any newer program I've tried. The reason is simple: The program simply traces what it sees as black, and it's wonderful at it.

The catch? Each program comes with a security lock, aka dongle, that plugs into a parallel port. Seen one of those lately? ;) -- But they won't work with just ANY parallel port, they only work in computers where DOS is/was the operating system. Win 3.whatever, 95, 98, 98se and ME ran off DOS. XP incorporated the operating system unto itself, and thru the magic of "improvement" this newfangled OS was now somehow divorced from the parallel ports. While XP is perfectly capable of running CasMate, it can't run the program because XP has no provision to "read" the parallel port. Any computer newer than ME is completely useless to run the best graphics digitizing program I've ever found.

And pretty soon, parallel and serial cable connections have followed suit. Most 10 year old computers, and even some new ones, still have a serial port, but not parallel ports.

Computer design engineers keep phasing out 'legacy' stuff that I RELY ON every day. And I'm not alone. I have 18 various CNC machines in perfect working order in my house, and only 7 of them can be run by a USB connection.

I would pay good money for a SHOP BASED computer that someone has the audacity to build with many of the newer security and actual useful improvements, MINUS all the social-media specific garbage, and using a very-similar-to-if-not-identical-to Win7 user interface, lots of memory, drive space, etc., that will run virtually ANY Windows program that EVER worked in any other PC, with a motherboard, peripherals and device connectors that would accommodate ANYTHING that has ever been plugged into a computer.

Microsoft? Dell? Anyone?

[Mike Henderson]

Maybe my Windows 11 is different from what others have but I have a "Start button". It won't be in the lower left hand corner unless you set your task bar to left justified. The default seems to be "centered".

Also, I don't mind some options that I don't use often, such as "pin to taskbar" being in the "more" menu. For my use, I only pin a program to the taskbar or start menu one time. It's pretty rare that I change that.

I don't even mind the "All apps" sub menu. I'm going to put my commonly used programs in the start menu so I won't go to the "All Apps" menu too often. One thing I didn't like about Windows 10 was having to find a program on the list of programs. I have a lot of programs on my computer so there was a lot to scroll through looking for a program.

I understand there may be other menu options that fell into the "more' sub menu that you use often and have valid objection to. But, so far, for me, Windows 11 has not been a problem either using or getting accustom to.

Mike

[Lee DeRaud]

So far everything we've been discussing is on the "minus" side...I'm still waiting to hear what Win11 brings to the table on the "plus" side.
(Bonus points for things that couldn't be implemented just as easily in a Win10 update.)

[Jim Becker]

Lee, I meant zero offence and my words were not sent with any intention of condescension. My apologies if you took them that way. That's not me and never has been.

[Derek Meyer]

I pointed out earlier the main thing I've found so far - updates are much faster on Windows 11 than they are on Windows 10. Windows 11 does simultaneous downloads of multiple updates, and can install an update while downloading another.

I just finished building a new desktop computer for a user here, and this one has a new Intel Core i7-12700K processor. It is noticibly faster than the i7 Windows 10 and even Windows 11 machines of previous generations of processor. Intel has a new method of routing tasks to the processor cores, called the Thread Director, and Windows 11 is optimized to take full advantage of it. Let me just say, it works, and it works well. This is easily the fastest, most responsive computer I've ever built, and it is still using the onboard graphics - I haven't had a chance to install the nVidia graphics card yet (I have to pull it from the old computer). I'm having computer envy for my home machine, which is a Core i9-9900K. I may have to upgrade with this generation. It really is that good.

I likely won't get a chance to directly compare Windows 10 on the exact same hardware, but from what I've read, the combination of Windows 11 and the Thread Director makes a difference in performance. I believe it.

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee, I meant zero offence and my words were not sent with any intention of condescension. My apologies if you took them that way. That's not me and never has been.No harm, no foul. Just getting fed up with people implying I should just "adapt" to what I consider inferior design.
(Note that, among other things, I designed UIs in my former life.)

[Lee DeRaud]

I would pay good money for a SHOP BASED computer that someone has the audacity to build with many of the newer security and actual useful improvements, MINUS all the social-media specific garbage, and using a very-similar-to-if-not-identical-to Win7 user interface, lots of memory, drive space, etc., that will run virtually ANY Windows program that EVER worked in any other PC, with a motherboard, peripherals and device connectors that would accommodate ANYTHING that has ever been plugged into a computer.The long pole in that particular tent is probably the need for direct application program access to hardware interface memory/ports in things like parallel interfaces.

(Been away from it for awhile, but did anyone ever come up with a 64-bit parallel port driver that worked with Mach3?)

[Lee DeRaud]

I pointed out earlier the main thing I've found so far - updates are much faster on Windows 11 than they are on Windows 10. Windows 11 does simultaneous downloads of multiple updates, and can install an update while downloading another.

I just finished building a new desktop computer for a user here, and this one has a new Intel Core i7-12700K processor. It is noticibly faster than the i7 Windows 10 and even Windows 11 machines of previous generations of processor. Intel has a new method of routing tasks to the processor cores, called the Thread Director, and Windows 11 is optimized to take full advantage of it. Let me just say, it works, and it works well. This is easily the fastest, most responsive computer I've ever built, and it is still using the onboard graphics - I haven't had a chance to install the nVidia graphics card yet (I have to pull it from the old computer). I'm having computer envy for my home machine, which is a Core i9-9900K. I may have to upgrade with this generation. It really is that good.

I likely won't get a chance to directly compare Windows 10 on the exact same hardware, but from what I've read, the combination of Windows 11 and the Thread Director makes a difference in performance. I believe it.
I can believe Thread Manager is a game-changer...if you have a 12th-gen CPU. They're not exactly thick on the ground at the moment.

Not sure how much difference the update thing makes in normal use, but I can see how it would matter to someone trying to install/configure a bunch of machines one after another.

No bonus points for you, sorry about that. :)

[Curt Harms]

....................................
And pretty soon, parallel and serial cable connections have followed suit. Most 10 year old computers, and even some new ones, still have a serial port, but not parallel ports.

Computer design engineers keep phasing out 'legacy' stuff that I RELY ON every day. And I'm not alone. I have 18 various CNC machines in perfect working order in my house, and only 7 of them can be run by a USB connection.

I would pay good money for a SHOP BASED computer that someone has the audacity to build with many of the newer security and actual useful improvements, MINUS all the social-media specific garbage, and using a very-similar-to-if-not-identical-to Win7 user interface, lots of memory, drive space, etc., that will run virtually ANY Windows program that EVER worked in any other PC, with a motherboard, peripherals and device connectors that would accommodate ANYTHING that has ever been plugged into a computer.

Microsoft? Dell? Anyone?

I have a fairly recent MSI motherboard. It has a serial port header and a parallel port header. I can't say if the parallel port would recognize a dongle, I don't have one. I have booted freeDOS on it and that seemed to work, it booted from a USB drive. I didn't check further hardware compatibility. This is why I don't buy the enchantment with notebooks unless I need the portability. The lack of backward compatibility and expansion is good for manufacturers, not so good for me.

[Brian Elfert]

No harm, no foul. Just getting fed up with people implying I should just "adapt" to what I consider inferior design.
(Note that, among other things, I designed UIs in my former life.)

The problem with UI design is everybody's taste in UIs is different. Some people love the iOS UI because it is clean and simple. Others hate the iOS UI because it is so simplistic and can't easily be modified like Android.

[Alex Zeller]

One thing I just found out is that Windows 10 doesn't have an easy way to set updates to manual. The past couple weeks I have been using my cell phone for internet so being limited on how much data I can use it matters. I've never had an issue with the cap before but when the update for 11 came out all of a sudden it was checking for new updates every few seconds even though I repeatedly declined to do the update. After about 2 weeks I had used up 15GB of data. After resetting the data monitor in 2 days I used almost 2GB of data but the largest two users that showed up (chrome and firefox) totaled less than half and totaling up the list was about 750MB. Since forcing Windows update off I'm now using a fraction of the data. Not really an issue when you have unlimited data. With 7 it was easy to set to manual. Does anyone know if 11 can be set to manual?

[Brian Elfert]

I would pay good money for a SHOP BASED computer that someone has the audacity to build with many of the newer security and actual useful improvements, MINUS all the social-media specific garbage, and using a very-similar-to-if-not-identical-to Win7 user interface, lots of memory, drive space, etc., that will run virtually ANY Windows program that EVER worked in any other PC, with a motherboard, peripherals and device connectors that would accommodate ANYTHING that has ever been plugged into a computer.

Microsoft? Dell? Anyone?

No software developer is ever going to make what you want because it would extremely hard to do. Windows 10 already has all kinds of bloat to support old 16 bit and 32 bit Windows applications. Microsoft wants to remove that bloat, not add to it. It would cost a ton of money to make a version of Windows that would support every Windows application and probably wouldn’t sell enough to be profitable.

Software developers want to keep selling you new versions of their product. They don’t want to sell you something once and then you run the same thing for 20 years or more. They tend to like when their product doesn’t work on the next version of Windows because they can sell an upgrade.

Industrial PCs still have old ports. My employer just bought some new industrial PCs from Advantech. They still have ISA card slots for some really old interface cards. Luckily, the software developer finally came out with a Windows 10 version of the software.

This is like asking an engine manufacturer to develop an engine that works on any liquid fuel ever made and also being able to switch it between a carburetor, mechanical fuel injection, or electronic fuel injection.

[Lee Schierer]

I have one computer with windows 10 and a laptop with windows 11. Is there a way to have one particular file saved to oneDrive in each of those systems so the file is always the latest version whenever it is opened in either computer if changes were made on the other computer?

I don't want all files saved to oneDrive, just the one.

[Jim Becker]

Lee, I'm guessing, but I suspect you need to keep that file in a separate folder so you can sync "just" that folder...that's how most of these systems work. But I don't use automatic sync with OneDrive currently so I cannot confirm that. I pretty much only do manual uploads/downloads to OneDrive.

[Mike Henderson]

One thing I wish Microsoft would do is to offer an optional update to Windows 10 that converts it to the same UI as Windows 11. That way all my computers would have the same interface - since I can't convert two of them to Windows 11.

I can live with just about any decent interface. Once I get accustom to Windows 11 it will seem as natural as Windows 10 does today.

Mike

[John Terefenko]

Well I just bought a new desk top computer 2 days ago because my old one got messed up by me. I was running windows XP and loved it. But my wireless mouse locked up and it has happened before and I went to reboot tower and you need to hold for a few seconds and my finger slipped off and must have cause to reboot in the middle and corrupted things. Could not fix. The sad thing is I lost all my photos and info stored on that computer. I had over time used a device called Clickfree to back up my stuff. I tried installing that on the old computer and it must have corrupted it also because the device lost all files. So lost all. Tried to have hard drive downloaded but was told it does not spin so that is a total loss.

This computer is loaded with Windows 10 and it is a different learning experience now.Yes it is much faster and had the option to upgrade to 11 but guy said to wait and play with this one. The one thing I miss is my old computer I had original version of Picture It on it and ran all my photos through it to fix and store. Microsoft sold that off and I am leary about downloading a third party version of it. Has anyone done that and what do you think? Did microsoft replace with a different version and if so is there a free download and what do you think of it? Thanks.

[Mike Henderson]

Well I just bought a new desk top computer 2 days ago because my old one got messed up by me. I was running windows XP and loved it. But my wireless mouse locked up and it has happened before and I went to reboot tower and you need to hold for a few seconds and my finger slipped off and must have cause to reboot in the middle and corrupted things. Could not fix. The sad thing is I lost all my photos and info stored on that computer. I had over time used a device called Clickfree to back up my stuff. I tried installing that on the old computer and it must have corrupted it also because the device lost all files. So lost all. Tried to have hard drive downloaded but was told it does not spin so that is a total loss.

This computer is loaded with Windows 10 and it is a different learning experience now. Yes it is much faster and had the option to upgrade to 11 but guy said to wait and play with this one. The one thing I miss is my old computer I had original version of Picture It on it and ran all my photos through it to fix and store. Microsoft sold that off and I am leary about downloading a third party version of it. Has anyone done that and what do you think? Did microsoft replace with a different version and if so is there a free download and what do you think of it? Thanks.

Some advice about backup: There are companies who sell backup. I use Carbonite but there are others which might be cheaper. You install their program on your computer and after that, every file that you want backed up is automatically sent to their server. If you make a change to it, it will automatically be backed up almost immediately. What I mean by immediately is that you don't have to run a backup - their program monitors changes to files that they are asked to backup and the changed file is sent to their server. With Carbonite, the files are encrypted during transmission and storage on their server. One nice thing is that if you're traveling with a different computer, you can access their server and grab the file you need.

If you had that on your computer, all of your files would be safe on the company's server. A good thing about cloud storage is that if you house burns down, and you lose your computer and local backups, you still have your files.

Mike

[Jim Becker]

One thing I wish Microsoft would do is to offer an optional update to Windows 10 that converts it to the same UI as Windows 11. That way all my computers would have the same interface - since I can't convert two of them to Windows 11.

I can live with just about any decent interface. Once I get accustom to Windows 11 it will seem as natural as Windows 10 does today.

Mike
I wonder if a third party could "skin" Win10. Not sure if that's as easy as it might have been in earlier times.

[John Terefenko]

Some advice about backup: There are companies who sell backup. I use Carbonite but there are others which might be cheaper. You install their program on your computer and after that, every file that you want backed up is automatically sent to their server. If you make a change to it, it will automatically be backed up almost immediately. What I mean by immediately is that you don't have to run a backup - their program monitors changes to files that they are asked to backup and the changed file is sent to their server. With Carbonite, the files are encrypted during transmission and storage on their server. One nice thing is that if you're traveling with a different computer, you can access their server and grab the file you need.

If you had that on your computer, all of your files would be safe on the company's server. A good thing about cloud storage is that if you house burns down, and you lose your computer and local backups, you still have your files.

Mike
All good thoughts. Thanks.

[Kev Williams]

John, if the pics and data on that bad drive are important enough to you, there are some companies that, as I understand it (<dumbutt disclaimer), they can take the platters out of your drive to read them some other way(?), or they may be able to fix your drive to spin again, if only for long enough to transfer the data-

I had an older 1tb 'My Book' external drive that went bad on me, got ugly noisy and wouldn't work. I emailed one of these places, it could get spendy but there was 15 years of pics, work and personal files on that drive. I kept messing with it and found that OCCASIONALLY it would spin up and work... During one of the 'it's working' times I plugged another 1tb drive the wife got for me into it, lo and behold I was able to transfer everything over. I felt pretty lucky :)

[Mike Henderson]

I wonder if a third party could "skin" Win10. Not sure if that's as easy as it might have been in earlier times.

Of course, the easier thing to do would be for Microsoft to allow Windows 11 to run on older computers. They'd just have to bypass the part that requires the trusted platform module. I don't think there's any other special hardware requirement but maybe there is.

But perhaps this is Microsoft's way of helping the computer manufacturers sell new equipment.

Mike

[John Terefenko]

John, if the pics and data on that bad drive are important enough to you, there are some companies that, as I understand it (<dumbutt disclaimer), they can take the platters out of your drive to read them some other way(?), or they may be able to fix your drive to spin again, if only for long enough to transfer the data-

I had an older 1tb 'My Book' external drive that went bad on me, got ugly noisy and wouldn't work. I emailed one of these places, it could get spendy but there was 15 years of pics, work and personal files on that drive. I kept messing with it and found that OCCASIONALLY it would spin up and work... During one of the 'it's working' times I plugged another 1tb drive the wife got for me into it, lo and behold I was able to transfer everything over. I felt pretty lucky :)
I am going to play around with it some. I will order the jumper cables needed. Maybe get lucky.

[Lee DeRaud]

I wonder if a third party could "skin" Win10. Not sure if that's as easy as it might have been in earlier times.
Pretty sure the answer is to that question is 'yes': there was a utility early on that made Win10 look/feel like Win7. (And I very dimly recall similar things to make 7/Vista look/feel like XP.)

That said, for me the real question is whether they could skin Win11 to look like Win10. :)

[Jim Becker]

Pretty sure the answer is to that question is 'yes': there was a utility early on that made Win10 look/feel like Win7. (And I very dimly recall similar things to make 7/Vista look/feel like XP.)

That said, for me the real question is whether they could skin Win11 to look like Win10. :)

One has to wonder if with Win10 and Win11 if there's enough of a remaining API that it can support "a good skinning". :)

[Lee DeRaud]

One has to wonder if with Win10 and Win11 if there's enough of a remaining API that it can support "a good skinning". :)
A truly frightening amount of that sort of stuff is controlled by registry keys.
Whether that's a bug or a feature is left to the imagination of the reader.

[Kev Williams]

"Classic Shell"-- it's what made my win8.1 usable ;)

Seems the original Classic Shell went out of development in 2017, and has since been worked on by 'Git Hub', whoever that is... Some googling shows not much action going on...

[Curt Harms]

I wonder if a third party could "skin" Win10. Not sure if that's as easy as it might have been in earlier times.

There are a couple companies that make add-ons to make newer Windows have the same interface as older versions. I don't use Windows much at all so can't say if or how well they work. One is Start10/Start11. The one I remember is Classic Shell but that hasn't been developed since 2017.

[Jim Becker]

Yes, skinning has existed for prior versions. I'm just wondering if that kind of adaptation is a lot harder with Win10 and Win11. They got rid of a lot of old stuff in that transition. But I'm not a programmer and I don't play one on YouTube. (TV? What's that? :D)

[Mark Bolton]

So there is a hack out there to delete TMP entries in source/appraiserres or something to that effect. Im a new software junkie. enjoy all new. no spare machine... work pc, cant risk being down. Tons are running 11 on fossil machines.

[Jim Becker]

I went ahead and upgraded my Win10 VM to Win11 today. Very easy process and it seemed to keep all my settings, including default programs...IE Chrome instead of the MS browser. :) MacOS left monitor, Win11 right monitor. Aspire loaded lickety-split faster than Win10. I have not done much exploring yet, however.

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[Curt Harms]

One thing I just found out is that Windows 10 doesn't have an easy way to set updates to manual. The past couple weeks I have been using my cell phone for internet so being limited on how much data I can use it matters. I've never had an issue with the cap before but when the update for 11 came out all of a sudden it was checking for new updates every few seconds even though I repeatedly declined to do the update. After about 2 weeks I had used up 15GB of data. After resetting the data monitor in 2 days I used almost 2GB of data but the largest two users that showed up (chrome and firefox) totaled less than half and totaling up the list was about 750MB. Since forcing Windows update off I'm now using a fraction of the data. Not really an issue when you have unlimited data. With 7 it was easy to set to manual. Does anyone know if 11 can be set to manual?

Do you know the trick about metered network connection? Earlier versions of Windows - don't know about 11 - if you were using a mobile data source, you could tell it you were using a metered connection (even when you weren't) and it would pause updates until you were on an unmetered connection.

[Derek Meyer]

Do you know the trick about metered network connection? Earlier versions of Windows - don't know about 11 - if you were using a mobile data source, you could tell it you were using a metered connection and it would pause updates until you were on an unmetered connection.

Windows 11 does have the ability to set up metering on the network connections. However, as I understand it, Windows Update will still download critical updates over a metered connection, just not recommended updates or updates for other programs (like Office).

[Lee Schierer]

I tried to set up our network printer with Windows 11 today. The printer is a brother HL-2040 and it works through our desktop computer. Window 11 can find it, but says it can't connect.
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The printer and attached computer are both on.

I had to let windows search for generic printers and a whole list of printer brands and machines came up after several minutes. I found the HL-2040 in the brother list and after doing the installation and walking back through the add a printer steps it finally found the printer and printed a test page. It only took an hour.....

[Kev Williams]

Check the names <plural of the printer, as in, the printer's name in the list of printers and its shared name may be different...

[Lee Schierer]

Check the names <plural of the printer, as in, the printer's name in the list of printers and its shared name may be different...

Windows found the printer but refused to connect. Once I clicked Generic printers and then on "Update Drivers" and it found a list of manufacturers and selected the correct Brother printer the printer worked.

[Kris Cook]

This thread has inspired me to revert my old Panasonic Toughbook to Windows 7 that it came with. I took the free download when MS was pushing it and have regretted it ever since. This machine can only take 8 MB of RAM which I upgraded from the 4 it came with. I have three other computers and only really use this one for music in the shop, searching the interweb, and reading posts on SMC.

Sure do miss XP.

[Jim Becker]

Lee, is the printer connected directly to the network in addition to another computer? The former is usually a lot easier to deal with. The latter gets you involved with sharing security. Both printers in our home are directly connected to the network and all computers, regardless of OS flavor and version saw them immediately. (Two recent Epson EcoTank type printers)

[Myk Rian]

Oh how I miss OS/2.

[Lee DeRaud]

Oh how I miss OS/2.
You probably miss floppy discs and dot-matrix printers too. :)

[Curt Harms]

Oh how I miss OS/2.

OS2 is still around, sort of.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/19/new_version_of_os_2_arca_os_5/

The problem would be applications. I don't have any Windows 3.1 programs left.

[Lee DeRaud]

Real programmers use Apple DOS3.3.

[Kev Williams]

Real programmers use Apple DOS3.3.


---right up until they hit that 64,000th keystroke!
I still remember writing basic on a 4k Ram Trash-80 :D

[Brian Elfert]

Sure do miss XP.

I don't miss XP at all. I had to do some work on a Windows 2003 server the other day which has the same GUI as XP. That GUI just seems so outdated.