Windows 11

[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