Windows 11

Ars piling on, possibly with more detail:

Since we are touching on Musk, look at pictures of him in his 20’s. A clear case of beginning alopecia areata. Some famous Swiss hair plug dermatologist has made a mint on his vanity.

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Or maybe it’s the bizarre tradition of Microsoft needing to release a new named OS version to fix the previous one.

If Blu-ray sales start to really slump, then I could see the licensors cutting or even dropping their fees.

I wouldn’t start going to down the route towards mocking people for their medical conditions. Since I started suffering from androgenic alopecia, this has really sunk in for me. No, it really isn’t fun and it takes quite a bit to keep my hair.

Musk isn’t the nicest person, is filthy rich, and has some very questionable beliefs. All those are good targets. His hair issue? That’s mean and petty.

I’ve never updated to 11, and I dont’ really plan to. It was one of those situations where there didn’t seem to be any upside. There weren’t really any new features that I’d use (except probably more advanced window snapping, supposedly better touch?), and they too away features I wanted (like being able to place the taskbar whereever you wanted).

I actually tried to update an older laptop of mine (2014/15 Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga) to try it out and see what I thought of it, but it didn’t meet their criteria. Then I was like- Meh, whatever.

If they’re going to continue, I’ll wait and see how 12 is. Windows is pretty developed as it is, and has what a person needs, in reality. It’s not like iPad OS, where there are basic features missing still, and every update adds something new that’s essential.

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The only ‘upgrade’ I’ve found after daily driving 11 for several months has been the improved window placement across multi monitor. Being able to plugin to a dock and have my original layout remembered instead of having to reorganize is nice.

Everything else is just a bit worse. Weird glitches with software licensing, worse implementation of windows defender (actively going into scanning when running any fullscreen program??..) to where I switched to 3rd party anti-virus for the first time, strange/nonsensical UI changes for the sake of change (why is the taskbar progress bar so tiny now?), the inability to move the taskbar left or right, the list goes on and on.
If you’re on 10, I’d say you’re doing just great. Heck, touch control and UI is better on 10. 11’s a dud and every update seems to add more bugs. If the SLS wasn’t a pain to downgrade to 10, I’d do it without a second thought.

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You make me happier and happier that I hung back on 10.

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Interesting, my experience both personally and professionally is that Windows 11 is a significant step forward generally. It certainly is more secure and the improvements to VM and graphics performance in the UI are meaningful.

I hate to be “that guy” but by a huge margin, the “problems” with Windows 11 are almost always app related (using older libraries for instance) or driver related again with them not being up to date with MS spec.

That being said, I’m also a believer in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought.

Plus as a tablet centric user I find the improvements to the tablet UI significant (though not nearly enough).

The other factor to consider given the general makeup of this board, is that as soon as this year you are going to see new apps and hardware that require Windows 11 either to function at all, or at least optimally. Intel’s 12 gen core I being the most notable recently which requires the windows 11 only, new thread director to work optimally with its heterogenous cores structure.

And yes I realize that might come across as rationalization to some, but everyone here should recognize that tech has always been a treadmill relentlessly moving forward and leaving older stuff behind.

Of course, there’s always Linux, with some distros even being made to work with a 486 processor and 2GB RAM .

My $.02 for the morning

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Fair enough. I think you’re also coming from a very different use-case than I. I can’t really comment on the improvements to VM usage such, as I’ve never had to use those aspects, but it’s good to hear there’ve been some benefits.

I’ll give the changes to security and scheduling the nod, though those feel like more long term trends that will only become more widely felt as people start needing to upgrade hardware. None of my computers (a shameful amount…) have 12th gen chips, and while the change to TPM is probably definitely a long overdue necessity, it’s also not something most people notice day to day.

Can’t say I agree on the tablet usability, but I’m also that freak that prefers Windows 8.1’s UI and touch interface best, so I’m not exactly unbiased.

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It continues to drive me crazy how godawful slow the new File Explorer is. As I sit here with 20 documents to rename, it literally is taking 1-2 seconds after I hit F2 for the file name text selection box to show up. :rage:

I used to have the same and I would complain loudly about how Win11 sucked. But now that I have a fresh install and the latest updates, it’s snappy enough that I don’t notice any sluggishness. So maybe the upgrade process is the problem, not Win11 in general?

FWIW, the upgrade versus fresh install argument continues to rage among our engineers. With the fresh install camp arguing that’s the only way to remove the cruft that accumulates and possibly hurts performance in all Windows installs.

OTOH. Many users , myself included, spend so much time installing/configuring/optimizing their device, it just seems more trouble than it may be worth.

On the third hand, it’s standard practice with our lab devices to wipe and clean reload before any extensive new app testing

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I’ve never seen nor used ANY Windows device that couldn’t be improved by a fresh install…:vb-headbang:

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Put me squarely in the fresh install camp. Not enough down-time in the office to routinely fresh install Windows.

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Yeah, that’s totally me. Which is why it took until I got a new machine (my SLS) for me to try a fresh Windows 11 install. :slight_smile: The difference was substantial.

Ars Technica today has a remarkably detailed review of the Surface Laptop Go:

Not quite sure where to place this, it’s not a tablet, it has no pen support, come to think of it, it basically has no business being on this forum. So that’s probably why. :slight_smile:

For a little less, one can get the base Surface Pro 7+ with the keyboard, which also has the 11th gen i5 & 8gb of ram standard.

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Just turned on my Samsung Galaxy Book2 (WOA tablet) and see that Windows 11 ARM is finally being offered. Anyone here with the book2 that tried it out?

I’m thinking I’ll still hold off since I actually use that device as a tablet occasionally. Without keyboard it’s very handy to be able to edge swipe to the task switcher and to get to brightness/volume sliders.

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Cool ! I’ll have to let our lone corporate Book 2 user know. She’s actually been wanting it for awhile.

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Let me know how it goes, if that’s allowed. Knowing myself I’ll hit that button anyway at some point, despite knowing better. :slight_smile:

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So she installed it yesterday and so far no obvious issues. The one thing she did observe is that the install took an exceptionally long time. About twice the typical Intel 10-11 update