W11
I got my first W11 nag on Saturday on the opening screen when I powered up.
I shall be ignoring that for as long as possible, to see what horrors await.
As the latest twist in the Windows 11 saga appears to have turned the blue in "Blue Screen of Death" to black, a glimpse into the international world of bork shows that a black background has always been the harbinger of a poorly computer. A case in point is the sad screen in the doorway of the Salsa clothing store and snapped …
It's worth a look just to see what horrible design decisions are made when you try and shoehorn new ideas into an existing UI.
Central start button that moves every time you start a new app. Doesn't even look central as you still have the clock etc bottom left.
New Window management stuff looks nice if you have a really big screen.
I'm sure it will improve before release.
"think about the ecological cost"
and
"just hung a printed banner"
I've not weighed up the cost difference between a low wattage LCD screen powered on for 7-8 hours over recycling thousands of tons of carboard display banners every year, but that's where the real facts need to be brought to the fore.
Apparently you can have any colour you want, it's just a registry key value
I remember when the Green Screen Of Death first appeared in Windows 10 insider builds, and everyone was led to expect it to be in the final release but of course it wasn't, and the good old BSOD prevailed. I expect the same here with the black version confined to Windows 11 insiders (and green to W10 ones) with the final releases of both to remain blue.
For me it's the need for a series 8 or higher Intel CPU which was listed in the requirements last time I checked, but nobody is talking about it. Everyone is focused on TPM and the Start Menu which can be easily moved back to the left.
I'm here with my i7-7820hq which is a very capable CPU, more than good enough to run eight System Center VMs in Win 10 side by side (one with up to four more nested VMs), but apparently it's not good enough to run a shell facelift on what is basically the same underlying OS. I mean the laptop is three years old this month.
It used to happen a lot on my old desktop because I had a few 3rd party peripherals that needed drivers. I remember reading about how stable Windows is and that most BSOD are caused by bad drivers, and it's Windows trying to gracefully handle a driver failure from something that has way more system-level access than a user application crashing, but all people see is Windows crashing. OK the article was written by an MS guy but this has definitely been my experience too. When I removed the peripherals and drivers I got no more BSOD.
Now I only work on a laptop where all of the hardware and drivers are designed to work together. I get no more situations where the peripheral manufacturer and MS are blaming each other and nothing gets fixed. It's been so stable and I've never seen a BSOD in three years.
I love Linux but it's always funny when people say "just use Linux." My experience has always been it's better on desktops with vastly different hardware, as long as it's supported. But it's a right pain on a lot of laptops because of all the additional problems like function keys not working, bad power management, and fans running at max speed all the time.
Many many years ago you could buy(!) a TSR to recolourise the Blue Screen of Death. At the time it superceded the detector of "cat like typing" in my ranking of the most useless piece of software ever written.
Since then I have acquired a couple of cats and realised the cat-like typing detector might have been a good idea.
I'm still trying to understand why the CPU limit is currently gen 8 when gen 6 and 7 have the same security & virtualisation options as 8 (5 is where start having fewer). Also, not sure about them moving copy/cut/paste to a small series of icons (although you can click the more options item - but that's an extra step).