back to article Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Microsoft is again releasing a video to entice more Windows 10 users to make the leap to the brave new world of Windows 11, with market share figures indicating the majority of customers are still reluctant to do so. The upbeat narrator of the latest video expresses their worries about learning to use Windows 11, but "actually …

  1. cornetman Silver badge

    Honestly, that kind of over-the-top, artificially up-beat, valley-girl style video narrative just turns me right off.

    I'm glad they managed to find someone that doesn't overdo the vocal fry. That would just make my skin crawl.

    Are they really trying to appeal to real people?

    1. aerogems Silver badge
      Joke

      Like, oh-em-gee! What is your damage!? That is sooooo uncalled for!

      1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge

        Grody!

        Gag me with a spoon!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Artificially up-beat, valley-girl style video narrative

      > .. that kind of over-the-top, artificially up-beat, valley-girl style video narrative just turns me right off ..

      It's called Vocal Fry tones /s

    3. Snake Silver badge

      I wouldn't worry about it

      Every-other release of Windows is, pretty much, dismissed and quickly forgotten about. At least that's been proven history for what, 2 decades now?

      So Windows 11 followed up the very popular Windows 10. And will be just as quickly dismissed and forgotten about whilst the world gears up for the 'real thing', Windows 12. By Win12's time, upgrading hardware will be more likely in most people's agenda anyway, so Win12's hardware requirements won't seem as onerous as Win11's at this point in time. The world will (hopefully) be less of a disaster zone as well, with people less anxious about, well, everything, and recovering from the pandemic will be a given.

      Win11's time never really came, from hardware requirements to world angst, and I believe nobody will really miss it anyway. Don't worry, just await 12 and consider 11 as 12-Alpha.

      1. Adelio

        Re: I wouldn't worry about it

        As a non-business user (I am a retired IT dev) I see very little use for "AI" for the average person.

        Anyway, AI is a misuse fo what Microsoft etc atr trying to offer.

        1. Snake Silver badge

          Re: very little use for AI

          I wouldn't say that, the under 30 crowd is already pretty heavy into AI's hype (remember The Reg's article about AI-improved dating profiles just 2 days ago), and college students are using AI assist to help write their essays.

          AI is, sadly, seen as a lazy cheat, and people are jumping in with both feet. Never you mind the outcome, all they're seeing is "Easy!" and they're more than happy to buy into the hype cycle.

          We, older techies, see the bullshaite in it all but less experienced and jaded believe what they are told in the adverts: Believe in AI, it'll help! :-( It's the same cycle, repeated: gullible, meet stupid. I'm with you, I prefer no "AI" (neural networks) in my life but people are always looking for cheats nowadays.

          1. Sam 15

            Re: very little use for AI

            "AI is, sadly, seen as a lazy cheat, and people are jumping in with both feet. Never you mind the outcome, all they're seeing is "Easy!" and they're more than happy to buy into the hype cycle."

            There will always be lots of people with rusty snakes.

        2. Handlebars

          Re: I wouldn't worry about it

          Ai allows us to make funny cat videos without even needing to get a cat. If you don't realise the size of the audience for funny cat videos I can only assume you've never surfed the information superhighway

          1. tiggity Silver badge

            Re: I wouldn't worry about it

            @Handlebars

            "Ai allows us to make funny cat videos without even needing to get a cat."

            I have cats and so need for funny cat videos as plenty of daily funny stuff in real time. Thus no need for "AI". Real cats for the win - even ."AI" must bow down before our cat overlords.

            1. mcswell

              Re: I wouldn't worry about it

              "AI" must bow down before our cat overlords.

              Indeed: all your bases are belong to us.

      2. tekHedd

        Popular

        Wait, what? "Windows 11 followed up the very popular Windows 10" Where's the #sarcasm hashtag?

        Very Popular? I guess that depends on your definition of "popular". If by this you mean the entire world has no choice but to use it because it's a monopoly platform forced on us, then sure, it's super popular. If you mean years of outrage at the forced updates, resistance, and foot dragging, by this metric, also, Windows 10 is indeed "very" popular.

        Oh my oh my. "Popular."

        1. Snake Silver badge

          Re: whinging

          Just stop it. Every OS gets updated and you're then expected to update - macOS, Linux, Windows, whatever. You're expected to keep up or fall behind. You're free - you were ALWAYS free - to stay with Windows 7. Or Windows 2000. Or Windows NT. Or whatever. Just don't expect never-ending support.

          Win10 is being used by over 70% of the world's market, to this very day, as I speak that fact. I know people here hate that fact but the fact still stands.

    4. jmch Silver badge

      Not to mention it's "over-the-top, artificially up-beat" promotion of (a) having a secure system and (b) being able to find things.

      That gives the game away that neither of those 2 extremely basic functions of an operating system was the case with Windows 10, and does not fill one with confidence that they have got it right in 11.

    5. Jurassic.Hermit

      It's worse than that, they're outright lying, at least from the perspective of most consumers.

      Why? Because they promised, until the cows came home, that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows, ever!

      Once a supplier breaks a contract with their customers, or makes their lives harder, the latter get upset and dig their heals in.

      Windows 11 is an abomination, and to be honest, I even preferred the terrible Windows 8 compared to 11. Windows 11 is a total mish-mash of different GUIs. And as far as the Start Menu is concerned it's a total disaster. Stardock and similar may give you a near approximation to 10, or 7, but not entirely the same.

      But why should we have to struggle with a sub-standard GUI and then decide to find a third party app to provide an alternative? Surely, MS should be smart enough to leave the Windows 10, or 7 GUI fully available and selectable on future versions of Windows, not least that most business users are hardwired over years to interact with exactly the same interface and any changes dramtically hit their productivity...same goes with Outlook and other Office programs. Outlook new version is now totally dumbed down, and no longer handles IMAP and other non-365 accounts from what I've read on Technet.

      MS, you are really showing that you are taking your customers for granted, no understanding their real needs, even hating them.

  2. karlkarl Silver badge

    Can they shut up, release security backports for Windows 2000 and be done with it?

    1. aerogems Silver badge

      Why would you want that? Windows 2000 doesn't understand the difference between multi-core and multi-CPU setups, just as one major technical deficiency. It's a subtle, but very important, distinction on the performance front. The driver model on 2000 was also about as secure as a leaky sieve, which is why MS has worked on hardening with every release starting with Vista. It still had a shitty 2D software rendered GUI instead of a 3D hardware accelerated one like every version of Windows since Vista. It had a lot of issues dealing with apps that weren't written for a multi-user environment.

      I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income that if you loaded Win2K into a VM, you'd find it's rather clunky and not at all like you remember it. It's like how people romanticize the 1950s, but you had diseases like Polio running rampant, racism was socially acceptable, sexism was socially acceptable, people didn't know the dangers of smoking, cars didn't necessarily have seatbelts, and if you lived to be 70 it was like the equivalent of living to 100 today. The past is never as good as you remember it.

      1. Necrohamster Silver badge

        "...diseases like Polio running rampant, racism was socially acceptable, sexism was socially acceptable, people didn't know the dangers of smoking, cars didn't necessarily have seatbelts, and if you lived to be 70 it was like the equivalent of living to 100 today."

        Apart from the bit about cars not having seatbelts, you could be describing the 2020s.

        1. aerogems Silver badge

          I would love to be able to dispute that, but the best I can do is quibble that racism and sexism are seeing a resurgence in certain quarters as opposed to being considered universally acceptable.

          I'm reminded of something I saw, given that I'm a Warhammer 40K fiction fan... In the 40K lore, they say how 2,000 people are sacrificed every day to keep the Emperor in his lifeless state. This was intended to be a shockingly horrific figure, but more people than that were dying every day because a few assholes couldn't be bothered to wear a mask and take a few other basic precautions during a global pandemic.

          1. Necrohamster Silver badge

            Hey it wasn't a criticism of your comment, just my own tongue-in-cheek observation. Please feel free to dispute my comments whenever and wherever you see them :D

            1. aerogems Silver badge
              Joke

              Don't tell me what to do!

          2. This post has been deleted by its author

          3. jmch Silver badge

            "more people than that were dying every day because a few assholes couldn't be bothered to wear a mask and take a few other basic precautions during there was a global pandemic."

            Very off topic, but here goes: People were catching covid mostly because it was a highly contagious disease, and it was being transmitted at high rates even in hospitals and nursing homes where mask usage (and, one would hope, hygiene) was strict. People were dying from covid mostly because their age and/or other medical conditions made them more susceptible to it. Death rates did nor relate to how many people were masking up - if you have any doubt about that, just check the timelines of surges of cases and deaths by state in the US - All states follow almost identical timelines even when some states had mask mandates and some didn't.

        2. jmch Silver badge

          Polio has a slight uptick vs being a serious public health concern.... racism being acceptable in a limited (though, concerningly, widening) circle vs being in some cases still the law of the land, life expectancy having a slight downtick but still being vastly higher.....

          I get that Windows 11 has a lot of shitty things about it, and there are many superficially better things about Win2000, or at least we remember them being so. But any careful analysis of the details would show you that Win 11 is technically far superior to Win 2000 (and I wouldn't expect anything else given the more than 2 decades between them). Of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't protest, loudly, against the data-slurping, the stuff-AI-in-everything, the cloud-centric bollocks etc in Windows 11, just as we shouldn't stand for backsliding in public health, life expectancy etc in recent years even though it's much better than the 50s

      2. karlkarl Silver badge

        > I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income that if you loaded Win2K into a VM

        I do all of my office work on an offline Windows 2000 VM (and RDP). The office 2007 ribbon was a broken concept and adobe pdf tools were better around this era.

        I recommend (everyone) giving it another shot.

        > It still had a shitty 2D software rendered GUI instead of a 3D hardware accelerated one like every version of Windows since Vista

        Removing the blurry effects on any version of windows (under accessibility settings) make any version of windows feel more snappy and responsive. This just comes default in 2000. It also means RDP can work more effectively in enterprise / office settings.

        1. aerogems Silver badge

          I do all of my office work on an offline Windows 2000 VM (and RDP). The office 2007 ribbon was a broken concept and adobe pdf tools were better around this era.

          I recommend (everyone) giving it another shot.

          Aside from sounding like it's ridiculously and needlessly complicated, I'll take you at your word. So, feel free to take 10% of whatever you find in your wallet and award it to yourself for winning the bet. Congrats!

          Removing the blurry effects on any version of windows (under accessibility settings) make any version of windows feel more snappy and responsive. This just comes default in 2000.

          Maybe you need to get your eyes checked. Unless you're conflating ClearType and AA with the GUI as a whole. I always find it fascinating. In the gaming world, people want MORE antialiasing. You can basically never have enough, and if people see a single jagged edge anywhere, they piss and moan about it endlessly. But then you take the exact same thing and apply it to productivity software, and suddenly you're not a real man unless you can see each individual pixel on a font. I know people are complex beings capable of holding multiple, sometimes contradictory, views on a subject, but this isn't a particularly complex subject. It's not like, say immigration, where there are good and bad aspects to it depending on what you're looking at. It's whether fonts look smooth vs jagged. There's not a lot of complexity in there.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            "The office 2007 ribbon was a broken concept "

            A good UI is, as far as possible, unobtrusive. That's not the ribbon.

            1. BrownishMonstr

              In all honesty, the Ribbon exposed features to users, which were previously hidden behind menus.

              "Wait, you can superscript a font? I was creating textboxes and placing them where I needed them" --- A teaching assistant 18yrs ago

              On the ribbon, it was on the home tab with the rest of the "text/font" group.

              That said, I did not like it on Autodesk. I think whether we like it or not depends on when we started to use it. For me, I was about 15/16 when the Ribbon came out, so it was something I got used to pretty quickly. But if I had to relearn it now in my 30's, I can see the learning curve be more difficult to climb.

              1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

                Re: previously hidden behind menus

                The reason why WordPerfect was so successful, sorry, one of the reasons WordPerfect was so successful, was that it introduced the user to a new feature when that user was ready to use that feature. If a letter needed to be written that didn't need fancy features, why bombard the user and confuse them?

                1. aerogems Silver badge
                  Holmes

                  Re: previously hidden behind menus

                  WordPerfect literally had keyboard overlays to help people remember all the different commands. Trying to claim that it was somehow the simpler word processor is quite the hot take.

                  https://www.4keyboard.com/12777/wordperfect-office-keyboard-sticker.jpg

            2. Fred Daggy Silver badge
              Facepalm

              Could almost stand it if …

              Could we please get the ribbon to dock on the right or left side of the screen/window? I have unused real estate there to house a minor war. But no … only to the top of the window. So I can read two paragraphs before needing to scroll.

            3. aerogems Silver badge

              Actually, that absolutely IS the ribbon. Assuming you're capable of taking a dispassionate view of it. It's far less obtrusive than the old menubar system which would cover up parts of the screen... usually the part you actually needed to see in a Murphy-esque sort of way. The ribbon has a dedicated space for those functions nor do they ever obscure the view of the rest of the app. Not only that, they're both easier for the developer who is freed from having to design a dialog box for those functions, and more customizable for the user should they choose to avail themselves of it.

              All I'm seeing are a bunch of emotional responses that are like a toddler screaming, "I don't wanna," when their parents tell them its time for bed or they need to take a bath. I'm not seeing a single factual reason offered up by you or anyone else. Which leads me to believe that you really are virtue signaling so that you'll be accepted by a specific social group, rather than expressing your actual beliefs.

          2. karlkarl Silver badge

            > Aside from sounding like it's ridiculously and needlessly complicated

            Running a VM is really not complicated. Especially one running an older OS with no DRM present.

            > I always find it fascinating. In the gaming world, people want MORE antialiasing

            The gaming world is really quite irrelevant. For people who work with computers, check out a project such as Spleen:

            https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

            Which is the default terminal font in OpenBSD (and now, FreeBSD). You will see that a lot of effort is put into raster fonts which look good without anti-aliasing. If everyone wanted blurry fonts, this project wouldn't be quite so popular would it? It is one of those things you have to try for yourself to realize that it is calmer on the eyes and clearer to provide a slight boost to efficiency. Does it look "good"? Who gives a crap?

            > Unless you're conflating ClearType and AA with the GUI as a whole

            The font rendering is pretty terrible for the eyes since Window XP but really I was referring to the naff effects enabled by the compositor. When a window closes, I want it to be gone. I don't want some childish fade or transparency effect wasting my time. Again, does a window suddenly disappearing look good? Again, who gives a crap?

            But ultimately this is all personal preference. It is a known fact that not everyone likes the nonsense that Microsoft forces on their consumers. I just happened to have jumped off that treadmill at ~2000. Some guys do it earlier, some guys do it at Windows 7.

            1. Richard 12 Silver badge

              Believe it or not, it is genuinely useful to have animations that briefly display the difference between "minimise" and "close" et al.

              It really helps an inexperienced user get a mental model of what's happened.

              Without that "swoop" or "poof", many people will never understand what actually happened.

              1. karlkarl Silver badge

                Windows as early as 95 actually had this as an accessibility option. It used an XOR buffer to allow pixels to quickly be updated rather than needing a full fat compositor.

                Weirdly, many user studies, including the classic one carried out by Sun Microsystems on beginner users, actually suggested the opposite, "moving things" on the screen overwhelms the user and distract from the actual process. Operations being done atomically ended up with less cognitive load.

                My personal hunch is it depends on the specific user. The only thing I know is that users tend to be experienced for a much longer duration than they are inexperienced.

            2. deep_enigma
              Devil

              check out a project such as Spleen

              Oh dear.

              Everyone[*] knows the One True Console Font is fixedsys.

              (Yes, I do actually prefer it. I also go out of my way to disable most of the modern antialiasing and subpixel rendering on both Linux and Windows [on the increasingly rare occasions I use it], because after about the late Windows XP era, every possible variation of settings for either looked blurry, colour-separated, or both, on every display I tried. Well-shaped jaggies are infinitely preferable to the eyestrain of blurry fonts with funny red and/or blue shadows.)

              [*] for suitably stretchy values of "everyone"

        2. werdsmith Silver badge

          I do all of my office work on an offline Windows 2000 VM (and RDP).

          I'm sure that's right, but please elaborate how you RDP to or from an offline VM?

          1. karlkarl Silver badge

            RDP can work offline, in the same way that X11, Wayland, NFS can.

            A local-only UNIX domain socket forwarded through the VM boundary offers best performance. If the OS / VM doesn't support that, then just a simple local-only network interface.

            1. werdsmith Silver badge

              OK, thanks for the information.

        3. Smartypantz

          So much this

          I still have Windows server 2003 instances (I know, not pure win2000, but still) running on kvm. It's insane how fast that s*** is on modern hardware!! With just 1 GB of RAM. UI is "instant-anything!!"

      3. JoeCool Silver badge

        target rich

        Why would you want that?

        What's Running in production stays running in production, and I get to use my time constructively

        Windows 2000 doesn't understand the difference between multi-core and multi-CPU setups, just as one major technical deficiency. It's a subtle, but very important, distinction on the performance front.

        Let's see what the VM options are for that ...

        The driver model on 2000 was also about as secure as a leaky sieve, which is why MS has worked on hardening with every release starting with Vista.

        Stable builds stick with known good drivers. Although I certainly wouldn't run an access node on it

        It still had a shitty 2D software rendered GUI instead of a 3D hardware accelerated one like every version of Windows since Vista.

        So not good for gaming, but capable of running the desktop ? Function for the win.

        It had a lot of issues dealing with apps that weren't written for a multi-user environment.

        Is Windows multi-user ? Not named Administrator ?? I hadn't noticed

        I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income that if you loaded Win2K into a VM, you'd find it's rather clunky and not at all like you remember it. It's like how people romanticize the 1950s, but you had diseases like Polio running rampant, racism was socially acceptable, sexism was socially acceptable, people didn't know the dangers of smoking, cars didn't necessarily have seatbelts, and if you lived to be 70 it was like the equivalent of living to 100 today. The past is never as good as you remember it.

        I'm willing to bet that the particular combination of hardware, driver and app that I am running are not supported on any later version. Just like the one WinXp machine I still have up 24/7. Plus the level of support from MS is basically the same across all versions of Windows. At least I don't have to correlate a problem + fix to the build number.

      4. chivo243 Silver badge
        Windows

        So funny you mention W2000 and vm, I installed a couple of years back it in a VM in my Free Esxi lab. It was a nice, 5 minutes in total. It installed in about 40 seconds, was at the desktop at about a minute in, and poked around a bit. I seem to remember networking was wonky, 10/100 and no driver handy at the time?

        1. karlkarl Silver badge

          The trick is to use an open-source VM. Not specifically for "freedom" and all that, but mostly because there is very little money in maintaining support for older systems, so commercial offerings tend to ignore the use-case.

          Open-source projects do a better here, partly due to the guys contributing to it typically have a passion for vintage stuff but also because they don't need to offer a "guarantee" it works, so don't try to remove it as soon as possible.

      5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        1. My last W2K lives on as a VM for the rare occasions when I need something from it. In fact I had it briefly running this morning looking for an old file. It looks a lot better than any of its successors.

        2. I remember the 1950s. I was there. It would take a long time to do a detailed comparison so I won't. It was a time of hopes and promises to a large extent unfulfilled despite a lot of unexpected goodies that emerged later.

        3. I've not only lived to reach 70, I'll soon be leaving my 70s behind. I don't fell anything like 100.

        3. If, like me, you became a jazz fan you PDQ acquired a lot of black* musical heroes

        4. There's one -ism that seems to be not only acceptable but almost compulsory today and that's ageism.

        * Apologies to any professional offence-takers out there. I can't be arsed to keep up with you and I doubt any of you ever listen to Louis, the Duke, the Count, Ella, Sassy or the rest. On second thoughts, no apologies.

      6. Dimmer Silver badge

        “I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income that if you loaded Win2K into a VM, you'd find it's rather clunky and not at all like you remember it“

        I have been running it on esxi, and even the latest version for years. Runs fast and no issues.

        I would take you up on the 10% but I don’t think it would pay the postage to send it.

        1. Dave 126 Silver badge

          I remember NT 4 fondly, I found it very snappy and stable. But then I wasn't using it to connect to the internet, play games or use USB hardware. I wasn't using it for much more than Photoshop and a student edition of I-Deas, but it did these things very well. Perhaps some of this feeling is rose tinted spectacles, perhaps it is because RAM limitations nudged me to just use one application at a time. Perhaps it was the focus that not having a browser window open engendered. Perhaps my brain was sharper back then.

          I would like an OS with the feel of NT 4 today, but I won't claim to know enough about how to achieve it technically.

          Oh, I've just realised that I did have one game, John Romero's Daiktana, because it ran under OpenGL and thus NT 4... thankfully it wasn't a great distraction!

          1. cat_mara

            I would like an OS with the feel of NT 4 today, but I won't claim to know enough about how to achieve it technically.

            There is a project called SerenityOS https://serenityos.org/ that's trying to do something like what you describe: a Unix-like workstation OS with a 90s-era GUI.

            1. Mage Silver badge
              Linux

              Feel of NT 4 to 5

              Or run Linux Mint, Mate desktop and suitable themes.

            2. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
              Thumb Up

              Haiku OS is another option: https://www.haiku-os.org/

          2. Robert 22

            I remember that it didn't enable DMA by default for the optical writer. In that state, even a good computer would choke on playing a DVD. And it treated AGP video cards as PCI devices.

            I suspect a lot of the snappy response had to do with using much lower resolution video than is now the norm. Also, I'm sure the overheads for security related functionality was a lot lower.

      7. ChrisC Silver badge

        "I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income..."

        I wouldn't take you up on that bet, because it really wouldn't be fair to take your money without even giving you a chance to win the bet.

        I actually DO have a few VMs set up for running older versions of Windows all the way back to 3.1 (because, why not), one of which is a 2K setup. And given my comments elsewhere on what I consider to be good and bad in UIs, it should come as no surprise to you to learn that despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Google et al to beat some sense into me re just how utterly awesome modern UI design is, I STILL think the classic 95/2K look and feel is pretty much the pinnacle of Windows UI design, and it's been going steadily downhill ever since - although at least MS were good enough to still provide a native implementation of the classic theme in XP and 7, before they completely abandoned any concept of keeping their existing users happy in favour of simply ploughing ahead with THEIR vision of what Windows ought to look like, whether WE liked it or not.

        I also have various retro system emulators which see regular use, so in addition to those older versions of Windows I also get to regularly remind myself what using different versions of the Amiga and Archimedes OS's is like. And guess what, once again I also find myself thinking "yup, this all still, even now 30+ years later, feels pretty damned good to me".

        Yes, I'm well aware there are issues with these older OSs in terms of security, stability etc, but those are all reasons for ensuring continual development takes place on the underlying kernel etc. It absolutely is NOT justification for making fundamental changes to how the UI looks or feels, and this is the key point here - when people like me talk about things being better in the old days, by and large we're talking about the UI behaviour, not so much the rest of the OS, because it's the UI which we're constantly interacting with when we use that OS. Give me Windows 11 with a natively implemented classic theme (just like the XP/7 days) and I'll be happy. I don't need the whole PC to revert to behaving the way it would if I could persuade 2K to run directly on the hardware rather than within a VM, I just want it to look and feel *at the UI level* like it's running 2K, because that's the sort of UI I genuinely do prefer. I absolutely do want the security/stability/performance improvements that come with 11, I just don't want the godawful excuse for a UI that comes with all that good stuff, but which I'm no longer given the option to natively switch away from.

        1. Dimmer Silver badge

          Re: ChrisC

          Second that and add with we don’t need all that telemetry either.

          1. aerogems Silver badge

            Do you have any evidence that Microsoft is collecting any additional telemetry data beyond what they clearly say they're collecting? Serious question. If you have anything, I would be genuinely interested in seeing it, but so far every time I put this question to people all I get are crickets chirping.

            Also, have you ever seen the average bug report or helpdesk ticket submitted by a user? They're almost universally garbage. Even seasoned developers can forget to include certain details when they submit a bug report. Telemetry takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. It can also be used to find bugs even before they're reported or give insights into how people use the app to help drive future development efforts.

            So, again, do you have any evidence at all that Microsoft is collecting more data beyond what they say they are, and/or that they are abusing the data they collect? Anything at all. I also hope you don't have a cell phone or credit card, where your every move/purchase is being tracked. El Reg's parent company could be tracking your activities on their set of sites and selling that info, but you willingly signed up for an account and use it. You are being watched by probably hundreds of security cameras every day. What exactly is it about what Microsoft is doing that is so extraordinarily onerous compared to all these other situations that you willingly tolerate or even actively participate in? Another serious question, not intended as a gotcha.

        2. DoctorNine

          Well said. Sooner or later the eye tires of baroque affectation and yearns for simplicity. Not only is it simply more productive to have less steps, all the flash and poof in the evolved Windows UI distracts the user from the actual thing itself which is being done. It's almost as if we are being forced to play PONG through an infinite regression monitor. As every new UI fad is thrust upon us, lamented, and then dies back a bit, only to be replaced with a new subset of changes derived from the initial fad. Enough already. Give me basic 'KISS' design principles, and I will be satisfied.

        3. aerogems Silver badge
          Facepalm

          I wouldn't take you up on that bet, because it really wouldn't be fair to take your money without even giving you a chance to win the bet.

          I said your income.

          I actually DO have a few VMs set up for running older versions of Windows all the way back to 3.1 (because, why not), one of which is a 2K setup. And given my comments elsewhere on what I consider to be good and bad in UIs, it should come as no surprise to you to learn that despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Google et al to beat some sense into me re just how utterly awesome modern UI design is, I STILL think the classic 95/2K look and feel is pretty much the pinnacle of Windows UI design, and it's been going steadily downhill ever since - although at least MS were good enough to still provide a native implementation of the classic theme in XP and 7, before they completely abandoned any concept of keeping their existing users happy in favour of simply ploughing ahead with THEIR vision of what Windows ought to look like, whether WE liked it or not.

          Granted art is subjective, but I was making a point that the only thing that's really changed with GUIs over the last couple decades is the superficial appearance. Does the close button look like a red button with an X on it, or does it look like a flat X? It still performs the exact same function if you click on it, so you've rather helped demonstrate my point.

          I also have various retro system emulators which see regular use, so in addition to those older versions of Windows I also get to regularly remind myself what using different versions of the Amiga and Archimedes OS's is like. And guess what, once again I also find myself thinking "yup, this all still, even now 30+ years later, feels pretty damned good to me".

          Again, you seem to have wildly misinterpreted my comment in your rush to disagree because I wasn't virtue signaling the right set of beliefs. You are again helping demonstrate my point. Namely that the differences between virtually any given version of Windows are superficial and it boils down to a subjective measure of whether you find it aesthetically pleasing.

          Yes, I'm well aware there are issues with these older OSs in terms of security, stability etc, but those are all reasons for ensuring continual development takes place on the underlying kernel etc. It absolutely is NOT justification for making fundamental changes to how the UI looks or feels, and this is the key point here - when people like me talk about things being better in the old days, by and large we're talking about the UI behaviour, not so much the rest of the OS, because it's the UI which we're constantly interacting with when we use that OS. Give me Windows 11 with a natively implemented classic theme (just like the XP/7 days) and I'll be happy. I don't need the whole PC to revert to behaving the way it would if I could persuade 2K to run directly on the hardware rather than within a VM, I just want it to look and feel *at the UI level* like it's running 2K, because that's the sort of UI I genuinely do prefer. I absolutely do want the security/stability/performance improvements that come with 11, I just don't want the godawful excuse for a UI that comes with all that good stuff, but which I'm no longer given the option to natively switch away from.

          And again, your complaint is that you find it visually displeasing, there's absolutely nothing in there about the actual behavior. Maybe because, as you said above, it hasn't really changed in decades.

          You, and plenty of others, seem to be in such a hurry to disagree with me because I don't say the right things, you don't even realize it when you agree with me. I'm talking about how things operate, you're talking about how things look. IMO, Vista was the peak for aesthetics, but functionally it was almost completely unchanged since Win95. Which is maybe why I didn't have any particular issues with Vista. I wouldn't call it the GOAT of OS releases, but it was perfectly serviceable, and the more I learned about the under the hood improvements, the more I came to appreciate it.

      8. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I'd be willing to bet 10% of your income

        My income? Not got any of your own?

      9. David Lawton

        I still regularly use my Windows 2000 dual processor PC from 24 years ago as my retro box. It is actually a pleasure to use. If modern Windows was like Windows 2000 I might be tempted to use it again as my client OS. It is clean, uncluttered, fast and pleasing on the eye. Modern versions of Windows are absolute garbage, loads of wasted white space, oversized text and graphics, don't even get me started on 'Settings', Control Panel is superior in ever way, Windows 8 made me get my first ever Mac because it was so bad (something I thought I would never do), and every time I am exposed to Windows 8, 8.1, 10 or 11 I hate it, and I grew up loving Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT4, 2000, XP.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          I did eventually warm a bit to 10, I far preferred 7 though.

          I'm sorry, but Linux Mint and the Chromebook are my go-to's at home at the moment. Limited in some ways but does everything I need.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Win2k was peak windows

      I did like Win2k.

      It did what it was effin told for the most part and nothing else.

      I like the idea of Linux because it will also generally do what it is effin told but I just don't have the time to invest in making it do what I need/want it to do.

      Although being forced to dump a perfectly functional and fast Ryzen 7 system because MS doesn't appreciate my lack of the right TPM chippery might nudge me to do so.

      I think the idea of things that we buy doing what they are effin told is an underrated quality. I really don't care if MS or Meta or Alphabet think they know best, I want my kit to do what I effin tell it to, not them.

      1. Proton_badger

        Re: Win2k was peak windows

        > Although being forced to dump a perfectly functional and fast Ryzen 7 system because MS doesn't appreciate my lack of the right TPM chippery might nudge me to do so.

        Ryzen 7 should be ok. My kid has a homebuilt Ryzen 5 3600 (without discrete TPM) with Win 11 and all I had to do was go into BIOS and Enable "AMD CPU fTPM". The best TPM is the CPU one anyway as it can't be "intercepted" on a defect motherboard like a recent exploit showed. You might want to make sure you're running latest BIOS update and AMD chipset drivers as there was a bug a year ago causing stutters with fTPM on and that's been fixed since.

        Anyway as for myself I'm just a free Tumbleweed, playing BG3 with with Steam Flatpak. Because of Proton I haven't booted Windows for a year on my own PC (and at this point I'm afraid to).

        1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

          Re: Win2k was peak windows

          Or use Rufus or Ventoy to install. It will disable the stupid hardware check, and allow a W11 install on anything. I made it work perfectly sensibly on a ThinkPad X230. That's a 10 (?) year old Core i5 system.

      2. Smartypantz

        Re: Win2k was peak windows

        "I just don't have the time to invest in making it do what I need/want it to do."

        Expressing yourself in a precise manner, in any language, takes effort!

        The Linux and UNIX OS's are very powerful, they are user-friendly. They might not be beginner-friendly, there's a difference. Often overlooked

  3. bronskimac

    LOL! StartAllBack saved my sanity.

    1. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      This looks great, thanks for that!

      With one issue: As emperor Augustus already exclaimed: Quintillius Varus, give me back my Quicklaunch!

      1. vistisen

        No problem

        Once you have selected your preferences in the program Right click on the Taskbar and select New Toolbar and in the box that comes up enter %UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch and Taa-Daaaa, Quck Launch is back

        1. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
          Pint

          Uhm, even in Win11? I had been using that trick for years, going back to Win7. But in 11.... it's gone! :'(

          Are you saying this bring *everything* back? I think I'm going to cry happy tears! Going to try this today and if it works, I WILL find you and ply you with ->

  4. David 132 Silver badge
    Happy

    “A Game Changer”

    If I wrote a powershell script that traversed your drives and deleted every instance of callofduty.exe, fortnite.exe and cyberpunk2077.exe, replacing them with the Freecell executable, would Microsoft make similarly gushing praise of it in a video?

  5. aerogems Silver badge

    It is easy

    Windows 11 is really only superficially different from 10, or just about any other version since Windows 95. Honestly, if you could magically transport through time someone from 1996, who used Windows 95, to today, and plop them down in front of Windows 11, they'd have little difficulty making the transition. A lot of the people complaining about Windows 11 are just repeating the exact same things other people say, so it's easy to see it's more about trying to signal their alignment with a certain social group than legitimate concerns.

    There was a talk show I listened to once upon a time, and one of the hosts had been married several times. Some guy calls up asking the hosts to help settle an argument between him and his wife. The host who had been married several times says something to the effect of, "If there's one thing I've learned from being married multiple times, it's that you can either choose to be right, or you can choose to be happy." Put into context of Windows 11, it's rather simple. You have X amount of time and energy. You can choose to spend that time and energy in one of two ways. Either 1) bitching and moaning about everything, or 2) learning new habits that fit with Windows 11. So, I can only conclude that El Reg is read by a lot of people who are only happy when they're miserable and will go out of their way to find something to get all bent out of shape about.

    1. AlanSh

      Re: It is easy

      The third option is to install Open Shell and Explorer Patcher and turn it back to something that is simple and easy to use.

    2. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: It is easy

      It's not hard to use. It's a pile of irritating gratuitous non-compatible changes that make life more difficult using it, for no reason.

      Why should I learn new habits? I don't want to move to Windows 11. I'm happy with Windows 10. Windows 11 does not do anything better, it does things worse.

      Edit: and actually I don't use Windows 10 or 11. I moved to Linux and Windows 7 was the last Microsoft OS I used extensively. I know how to use the 3 programs I use on Windows at work, and I use Cygwin for everything else.

      1. aerogems Silver badge

        Re: It is easy

        What exactly is "non-compatible"? Be specific.

        Why should you learn new habits? 1) Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age, 2) Windows 10 will be going EOL soon, so the alternative is running an OS that is an increasing security hazard, 3) because you're not that precious and/or important. And based on the fact that you claim you don't even use Windows 11, why should anyone give 11 shits about your opinion on it?

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: It is easy

          Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age and is vastly better and more interesting than wasting time having to re-learn old things because some misanthropic martetroids decide that everything has to be changed in their new version because otherwise they wouldn't have a new version to sell.

          1. aerogems Silver badge

            Re: It is easy

            Can't help but notice you have zero specifics on what things are non-compatible, just more toddler tantrum level logic of "I don't wanna!"

        2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age

          I've spent my entire life learning new things. Many of the achievements in my work career have been involved with development of new things.

          Unfortunately technology is at the point where the "learning" process makes me wonder whether I am suffering from dementia because the "improvements" generally put forward as milestones to mark progress look like retrogressions to my mind. In my view technology should be used to push down solid foundations from which industry, commerce, education can progress. Windows role should be such a foundation, it is not, it is trying to be something which it is not, and if history is a guide, never will be.

          As I approach my 70's I feel it far better for me to exercise my brain learning to play the piano... however badly that may be to my neighbours.

          1. DoctorNine

            Re: Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age

            Regarding the effectiveness of various things in delaying dementia, learning to play an instrument, or learning a new language, both are superior to relearning a previously mastered skill with a bit or bob changed here and there. There are actually studies on tis sort of thing, for those inclined. I'll keep up by reading foreign language papers, and playing my guitar. Yes, I said papers. They still print them.

          2. aerogems Silver badge

            Re: Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age

            Can't help but notice you have zero specifics on what things are non-compatible, just more toddler tantrum level logic of "I don't wanna!"

            1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

              Re: toddler tantrum v Feeding the Troll

              With 158 comments on here at time of writing, there would appear to be some dispute as to whether Windows 11 is fullfilling its role as a grown-up Operating System.

              This article gives some insight as to the role of an Operating System:-

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

              PS I'm not a downvoter of any of your comments.

              1. werdsmith Silver badge

                Re: toddler tantrum v Feeding the Troll

                Life long learning is mostly good.

                Or in my case a debilitating addiction due to being time-poor and having a tendency to procrastinate.

                Musical instruments, languages, martial arts, Verilog. Fill yer boots.

        3. tiggity Silver badge

          Re: It is easy

          Learning new things is great - I have a whole list of hobby related things I want to improve my knowledge of & gradually do so, its enjoyable to me.

          Being forced to learn a whole lot of even worse UI is, however, not great - it impairs my productivity in certain situations (Windows is for work use only) until I either lose the old muscle memory and acquire it for changed procedures needed or (the better option) find some registry hacks to regain as much old behaviour as possible so I can get back to normal productivity levels faster.

    3. cornetman Silver badge

      Re: It is easy

      > Windows 11 is really only superficially different from 10, or just about any other version since Windows 95.

      Well if that's true, why the unreasonable hardware requirements, and them going back on their previous commitment to a rolling Windows 10 evolution from then on?

      1. aerogems Silver badge

        Re: It is easy

        What previous commitment? For all the tired jokes people make, there's no official commitment from MS that Windows 10 would be the "last" version ever. Show me a press release, sent out by the company's official channels, that makes this claim. Is there any official statement on the MS website that claims Windows 10 would be the final version ever? They claimed that they wanted to move Windows to more of a SaaS model instead of the waterfall methodology of major and minor releases every so many years, which they've done. I don't know why people get all bent out of shape about a stupid number.

        Plus, this is taken directly from the command prompt on Windows 11 (emphasis added).

        Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.3155]

        (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

        It still is Windows 10. The 11 designation is just a marketing name. They slapped the unfinished (why?) 10X UI made for mobile (again, why?) onto Windows 10 and called it Windows 11. Call it Windows 21H2.5 if it makes you feel better. You want to make comments about the inexplicable decision to take an unfinished mobile UI and then slap it onto a new release, I'm right there with you. That is a valid technical complaint about the OS. Not only because it is like 80% finished, at most, but the fact that so soon after Windows 8 tried shoehorning a mobile oriented UI onto the desktop version they're repeating the same mistake. Complaining about a marketing name for a product, however, is just stupid.

        1. cornetman Silver badge

          Re: It is easy

          > What previous commitment?

          https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows

          "Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10." That was the message from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist speaking at the company's Ignite conference this week.

          You're welcome. A quick Google was all that was required. The fact that this was officially supposed to be the "last version of Windows" was *everywhere* at the time. Please stop gaslighting.

          > Complaining about a marketing name for a product, however, is just stupid.

          Don't really care about the name or the marketing. If Windows 11 is just an incremental evolution of Windows 10, then there seems to be no real justification for the onerous hardware requirements, especially considering that with some simple tricks, it will run perfectly fine on hardware without those requirements. I get it: *really* old hardware can't be supported for ever, but a lot of the hardware that doesn't cut it is pretty decent, recent kit.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: It is easy

            "That was the message from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon"

            And not, as far as I can see, contradicted or withdrawn until marketing needed to increment the number.

          2. aerogems Silver badge

            Re: It is easy

            I asked for an official statement from Microsoft, as in something put out by their PR department. The only gaslighting going on is you trying to misrepresent my request as part of a straw man argument.

            Don't really care about the name or the marketing. If Windows 11 is just an incremental evolution of Windows 10, then there seems to be no real justification for the onerous hardware requirements, especially considering that with some simple tricks, it will run perfectly fine on hardware without those requirements. I get it: *really* old hardware can't be supported for ever, but a lot of the hardware that doesn't cut it is pretty decent, recent kit.

            Those are legitimate complaints, but pretty much no one ever brings them up unless pressed and they have to stop and think about it for a minute. It's always a bunch of virtue signaling to others with emotional arguments that basically boil down to either the equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum, screaming, "I don't wanna," when told they need to eat their vegetables, or someone complaining about not liking the aesthetics. Not a single person has been able to provide a single example of something that they cannot do in Windows 11 that they could do in previous versions, or how Microsoft made some fundamental change to the way the UI works that it was completely different from everything before it. It's just "It's ugly" or "I'm a crotchety old coot who's stuck in my ways!" Still, it seems kind of stupid. It's sort of like refusing to ride in a car because it's colored blue. Does it still get you from point A to B? Does it have four wheels and go vroom, vroom?* You want to claim it looks ugly in your opinion, fine; you want to claim that it's somehow fundamentally different from the exact same car only painted red, just STFU and GTFO.

            As I said, you want to complain about the really poor, basically non-existent, explanation from MS on why they chose the hardware list they did, I'm right there with you. It is a strange one, and I'm guessing if they had just explained that they selected hardware based on Criteria X, Y, and Z, people would be much more understanding. Instead we're just left with this list that almost seems like someone just threw darts at a list of hardware and that's what was supported. I'm sure there's some kind of logic behind it, though I'm at as much of a loss as to what that logic is as anyone else here. Of course that's still not really a technical deficiency with the OS, it's more of a failure of the MS marketing department. Part of their job is to educate users/customers on these things. They could have done the same thing with the branding of Windows 11. They could say they chose to do it because they wanted to start dropping support for older hardware and this made for a very clear river rubicon. Maybe it was some other reason. I'm sure pressure from Dell, HP, and others played a role, but I doubt it was a driving factor. Before you get to tinfoil hat land claiming it's some kind of evil conspiracy, you first have to show that it's not any of the more reasonable explanations. As Carl Sagan put it: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

            * EV's excepted

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: It is easy

          "Show me a press release, sent out by the company's official channels, that makes this claim. Is there any official statement on the MS website that claims Windows 10 would be the final version ever?"

          Where are the press releases or official statements contradicting the statement that one of their employees.made. Perhaps he was being over-enthusiastic. Maybe he hadn't got the message that marketing might find that concept embarrassing. Maybe it there was an intent to make it a subscription service but he hadn't been told not to blab about it. Whatever, MS seem to have beenhappy to let it stand uncontradicted when it was widely reported.

          "It still is Windows 10. The 11 designation is just a marketing name."

          And thus utterly cynical, especially the inflated H/W requirement.

        3. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: It is easy

          Windows 11 doesn't support the i7-7700K.

          A CPU that was still sold by major system builders - including Dell - when Windows 11 was launched.

          A CPU that even has a TPM 2.0 module.

          There's been no explanation as to why Microsoft obsoleted it. Even in Windows Update it just says "not supported", with no indication as to what might be missing.

          1. aerogems Silver badge

            Re: It is easy

            A perfectly legitimate complaint, but not one that is the fault of the OS, but rather the marketing department at Microsoft. I wish they'd publish something that explains their rationale for picking the hardware they did, but again, it has nothing at all to do with the OS.

            In the past, major updates for Windows have often pushed the envelope on the hardware front. Everyone hated XP for about the first two years because IGPs of the day weren't up to the task of dealing with the Luna skin. Around the time SP2 came out, and the hardware was finally starting to catch up, the complaints about XP suddenly stopped. Same thing with Vista. The new Direct3D GUI required functions that a lot of IGPs didn't support, meaning they had to be done in software, which is slow and made performance suck. People who had actual discrete video cards were just fine. Again, a year or two after the OS was released and the low end spectrum of hardware had largely caught up, complaints about the OS started dropping off a cliff. It's possible that Windows 11 was intended to be more or less the same thing. After all, requirements for Windows have been largely static since Vista. If you're thinking about what kind of hardware you want to be supporting 10+ years from now, obsoleting the 7th gen core chips might make sense. No idea if this has anything to do with the decision, it's pure speculation on my part, but it's one of those possibilities that you have to disprove before you can claim it was some kind of evil cabal within Microsoft that was plotting to create e-waste or force people to buy new computers to drive sales for OEMs.

            Edit: Woohoo! I seem to have attracted a downvoting stalker. Someone who just comes along and downvotes every single one of my posts. I love people who do that. Every time I start thinking my life has gone to shit, I can say to myself, "At least I'm not reduced to downvoting people on random web forums to validate my self-worth!" I still have depths to which I could sink, so things can't be that bad.

            1. nobody who matters Silver badge

              Re: It is easy

              You are surprised that you are attracting downvotes ??

              1. aerogems Silver badge
                FAIL

                Re: It is easy

                Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane? No, it's Superman the point flying over your head!

        4. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: For all the tired jokes people make

          It amuses me immensely that Micosoft have versions of its operating system that have a suffix of POS.

          Ironically some of those products are actually quite good compared to those currently being produced.

          1. aerogems Silver badge

            Re: For all the tired jokes people make

            I once dated a girl who had spent most of her professional career in the banking sector. At some point I used the acronym "BSA" to mean Business Software Alliance, but to her "BSA" meant something completely different, the Bank Secrecy Act. When you only have 26 letters in the alphabet, it's not going to be long before you reuse the same combination of 3-4 letters to start each word in a name or phrase. The ancient greek alphabet only had 13 letters, so if we were still using that, it'd be happening even more often. I'm sure there's more than one sorority or fraternity on different college campuses that use the same three greek letters in their name even though they have no affiliation with one another.

            1. nobody who matters Silver badge

              Re: For all the tired jokes people make

              Are you a North American? You seem to have missed the point of the previous post viz: irony.

              1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

                Re: For all the tired jokes people make

                Whenever anyone mentions BSA to me, the "B" has wings on it.

                The aural trademark was just as distinctive though.

    4. chivo243 Silver badge
      Childcatcher

      Re: It is easy - easy marks

      telemetry, say with me children, telemetry... I know we're smart enough to block it, etc. But granny isn't, nor is mom (she's smart enough, just can't be bothered) Isn't that who we should be worried about?

      1. aerogems Silver badge

        Re: It is easy - easy marks

        I'll ask you, like I've asked everyone else who makes this comment: Do you have any evidence that Microsoft is either A) collecting more data than they state they are, and/or B) that they are using it in any way other than what they state in their privacy policy? Serious question. If you've got any evidence that such data is being abused, I would genuinely be interested in seeing it. Every time I've asked this question in the past, however, all I get is deafening silence.

        Telemetry, like that used by ad slingers, to track your behavior online is a very different beast from telemetry collected to help fix bugs and/or get data that tells developers what parts of what apps people use most, so they have objective evidence telling them where to focus limited resources. If you've ever seen the quality of the average bug report from a user, you know they're basically garbage. You're lucky if they even point you in the right general direction. However, if you have telemetry data, it can actually help the developer figure out what is wrong and fix it. Even seasoned developers will frequently forget to include some detail or other when they submit bug reports.

        So, once again, and this isn't a gotcha question: Do you have any evidence to suggest that Microsoft is in any way abusing the telemetry gathering in Windows? If yes, please share. If not... why are you spreading FUD? Bonus question: How is what Microsoft is doing fundamentally worse than cellular carriers, credit card companies, or any of the other instances where your every action is being logged?

        1. chivo243 Silver badge
          WTF?

          Re: It is easy - easy marks

          Just looking at as a vector... and how much traffic it creates. I know to turn off the crap at install, and block what I can at the perimeter. I don't think granny's metrics are really all that helpful, I don't see the 90+ demographic getting a whole lot of attention from M$. How much of power on, facebook, gmail, power off is helpful to M$? Other people sniffing that unneeded traffic might...

          1. aerogems Silver badge
            Facepalm

            Re: It is easy - easy marks

            And how much traffic does it create? A few MB over the course of a week?

            You've created a no-win scenario for Microsoft. For years people have been screaming that Microsoft should be more data driven, but then when they go to collect that data, it's like the greatest possible sin anyone could have committed. So, what is MS supposed to do, just make up data to base decisions on?

            I'd be willing to bet 95% (at least) of the people who bring up the telemetry argument haven't even read any of the documentation about what is collected and what it's used for. Not only that, I'd bet all but a handful of those people walk around with a cell phone everywhere they go. A device that is constantly pinging any nearby towers, which means anyone with access to the logs could trace their movements to within a few hundred yards/meters. Of the people who have cell phones, probably >50% have Android phones, which send truly massive amounts of telemetry back to Google. Even Apple has mandatory telemetry gathering on iOS, it's just far less than Google, or they do a better job of compressing it before sending. Of those people complaining, I'll bet pretty much every single one has a credit card, where every single transaction is logged, mined, and monitored. FFS, even Firefox has telemetry gathering. There are plenty of other examples where people don't just accept it, they actively participate, and do so gladly, but it's Microsoft we need to be worried about.

            So, if anyone has any evidence that MS is misusing that data, I'd be interested in hearing about it, but so far no one has ever been able to come up with so much as a credible rumor. However, somehow everyone's running around acting as if Microsoft collecting telemetry data is a sign of the end of days or something.

    5. BenMyers

      Re: It is easy

      "only superficially different"? True. THAT is the point of Windows 11. To be superficially different. The major Windows underpinnings and bloated obtuse registry remain the same. But superficial is a big deal. It is what you see every day, rather than spending 8 hours admiring registry entries.

    6. LybsterRoy Silver badge

      Re: It is easy

      Let's assume that we are talking simple end users, and for the sake of the discussion let's say all they use is Word. You know the sort of person when asked what version of Windows they're on they'll reply "I use Word"

      Right - turn on machine, click the Word icon on the desktop and all's well and good.

      Unless they're your W95 user who isn't used to the ribbon - I had to help a couple of secretaries at a large consultancy firm who's IT department didn't seem to understand that moving from the old menu structure where the secretaries had set up lots of shortcuts for themselves to the ribbon wasn't a seamless experience.

      A W95 user would (probably) be used to point and click so as far as that goes "they'd have little difficulty making the transition", however, doing something productive might take a bit longer.

    7. 43300 Silver badge

      Re: It is easy

      "Windows 11 is really only superficially different from 10, or just about any other version since Windows 95. Honestly, if you could magically transport through time someone from 1996, who used Windows 95, to today, and plop them down in front of Windows 11, they'd have little difficulty making the transition. A lot of the people complaining about Windows 11 are just repeating the exact same things other people say, so it's easy to see it's more about trying to signal their alignment with a certain social group than legitimate concerns."

      Yep. The thing which gets noticed most is the central alignment of the taskbar. So when I began rolling it as an upgrade on the newer machines, I also deployed a script to left-align the taskbar. Some of the users didn't even realise they were now on W11.

      I'm not a great fan of the W11 start menu (did actually prefer the W10 one), but it's no big deal and they bugger around with the start menu in pretty much every version so it wasn't unexpected. Pissing around witn the right-click menus is marginally more annoying, but again not a major problem. I don't think W11 is any better than W10, but equally it's not a disaster like W8 was.

      It's the hardware requirements which are the big annoyance, and probably a significant contributor to the low take-up.

      1. Evil Scot Bronze badge
        Pint

        Re: It is easy

        The ability to pin documents to application icons in the start menu is a time saver.

        Right click on Excel

        open timesheet

        update project commitments.

        Save.

        Run out the door.

        Get one of these =>

        Priorities Right.

      2. lglethal Silver badge
        Mushroom

        Re: It is easy

        I'm still using Win 10. I wont be moving to Win 11 any time soon. Simple reason - my hardware says it wont run Win 11, even though it's still better than the recommended Specs on EVERY program/game /software I use or plan to use in the medium to near future.

        When I built my machine 8 years ago, i bought a relatively top of the line, motherboard and chip, precisely so it would live a very long time. The memory has been upgraded, the hard drives changed to SSD's, new graphics card as well. But I bloody well wont be changing the motherboard and chip JUST to go to Win 11. When that Motherboard/chip combo starts proving problematic with the programs I use daily, then and maybe then I'll consider upgrading, but I dont see that happening for another 2-5 years. So probably I'll be using an unsupported version of Win 10, so be it... Maybe by then Win 12 will be out, and it will have ditched the hardware requirements. Or I'll finally jump to Linux.

        But Microsoft can jump in the lake if they really expect me to buy new hardware for a new OS which does NOTHING more than the old one does...

      3. aerogems Silver badge

        Re: It is easy

        Honestly, the start menu just needs to die in a fire already. It was a horrible concept when it was introduced in Windows95, and it hasn't gotten any better in the almost 30 years since. In that regard I applaud the Windows 8 effort of trying something different. It was a dumpster fire on wheels, as it was horribly disruptive to the UX, but at least they tried something. I'll admit that I don't really have any grand ideas for a replacement, but surely someone out there has got a better idea. The old Windows 3.x Program Manager was a lot better than the start menu, since you could have a series of frequently used program groups open and then pick the rest from an icon at the bottom of the screen compared to trying to navigate a menu, so maybe that would be a good starting point for future versions. Maybe just removing the horizontal menu from the Windows 10 start menu would work, only having the live tiles, or you could pin program groups to the taskbar. Just spitballing a little. And of course keep the emphasis on searching instead of sorting.

    8. BrownishMonstr

      Re: It is easy

      Mate, you're telling this to old folks who don't like learning new things and stuck in their ways.

      1. 43300 Silver badge

        Re: It is easy

        They are likely to notice barely any difference, especially if the tasbar is turned to left-aligned.

        The main reason for the low take-up is the hardware requirements. If the computer offers it (and eventually almost-insists on installing it), most home users will just accept it. What they won't do is buy a new computer when the current one works, just to get a new version of Windows which doesn't do anything which the current one doesn't.

        Microsoft is going to have a difficult situation if it gets well into next year and the stats still show widespread W10 usage - as is likely to be the case.

        1. BrownishMonstr

          Re: It is easy

          This Ars article goes into it a bit more, but it seems to be more for security:

          https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/why-windows-11-has-such-strict-hardware-requirements-according-to-microsoft/?comments=1&comments-page=1

          1. 43300 Silver badge

            Re: It is easy

            They could have written it so that the additional security features would auto-enable if the hardware supports it, and if not use the existing systems. What they have done (assuming there is no re-think) is going to reduce security levels overall as there will be large numbers of unpatched W10 machines still in use after the end of support.

            I also note that they have stated that they won't be enforcing similar hardware requirements on the upcoming Server 2025 - presumably because it's clear that many of the customers in this market simply will not accept it.

      2. aerogems Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: It is easy

        I know, but winding up geriatric toddlers is an amusing passtime. I don't claim it makes me a good person, only that I find it an amusing diversion from time to time. For all the bluster about how Windows 11 is horribly broken, can't do all the things Windows 10 does, etc, not a single person can come up with so much as one example. Just a bunch of arguments that are no different from a toddler throwing a tantrum when told they need to clean their room.

    9. Chronos

      Re: It is easy

      I had this discussion with a colleague while standing outside in "meeting room 5" a few weeks ago. We were discussing the more general issue of Operating System Evangelism as a curse, nay a pox, upon humanity as a whole. The general consensus following the application of copious amounts of mild stimulant via both respiratory and digestive tracts was that an operating system's job is to abstract hardware and then stay out of the way. If you're spending more time tinkering with the OS than doing Useful Stuff™, the OS is doing it wrong. The corollary to that is if the OS is shiny and full o' features enough to make you excited about it, it's too bloated in the first place, especially if it needs a GPU with the power of an early 2000's supercomputer and more memory bandwidth than most of us had for VRAM just a few years ago just to render the window decorations.

      In a perfect world, you'd get perhaps hardware abstraction, a window manager of suitable flexibility so you could make it look comfortably nice and personalised and a package installer and set of A[B|P]Is with which to interact with all the boring under-the-hood bits to attract devs, who would then make the other bits you would like. It'll never happen, of course, because people are used to being "force fed" instant gratification and will not, under any circumstances, consider what they actually *need* from a general purpose computing platform, workstation or desktop.

      What really irks me about the commercial side of the deal is how tightly integrated MS's operating system progression is with hardware vendors' need to perpetuate sales, even when the current crop of hardware is more than adequate for most people's usage patterns - and then we get blasted by various ecomentalists for being "consumers" and "feeding landfill" because we have bugger all choice but to upgrade. To be frank, I don't really care whose UI I'm using, I just want to get my day's work done without open wallet surgery or intrusive ads, irrelevant mithering from the underlying bad decisions made by committee or pointless features that I don't - and probably never will - need. It's not just MS, of course. All the phobile moan people do the same thing and even the flossie crowd keep finding new ways to use up all that Moore's law gain with pointless and irrelevant - but very shiny - fluff.

      Look at the security implications, too: If your desktop is yours, that one annoying chap in every office will probably take one look at it on the one occasion you forget to lock it and decide to either change someone else's screensaver to print a very rude word 500 times or just swap your mouse dongle with someone else using a Logitech Ubiquitous Wireless Mouse Type M175. Again.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who was complaining that it's hard to use? It's irritating to use, not hard.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Irritation isn't a desirable quality of something that's supposed to help you do your work.

      1. Smartypantz

        It's supposed to increase the lock-in to the MS Eco-system. Any user concerns was lost in enshittification decades ago. Windows is the prototype for this process

  7. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

    10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

    In Microsoft Entra (no idea why it’s called that made up name) you can check the version of windows on every device you manage. Any W10 device shows a version of 10.0.1xxxx. Any Windows 11 device shows a version of 10.0.2xxxx. I would not be surprised in the slightest if Win12 turns out to be 10.0.3xxxx. Under the rules of Semantic Versioning, by only incrementing the patch level, Win 11 should not involve any functionality that breaks compatibility, yet it requires new hardware.

    There’s clearly some infighting between engineers and marketing going on at Microsoft!

    1. aerogems Silver badge

      Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

      Or... you know, Windows 11 is just a brand name. It's like the difference between a regular Snickers candy bar and a promotional Valentine's Day one they put out that has heart shapes etched into the chocolate coating and has special promotional packaging. They're both still Snickers candy bars, and getting so upset that you spend years complaining about the fact that you bought one that had heart shaped in the chocolate coating is something a batshit crazy person would do. Same as complaining about a version number on software.

      For reasons none of us were privy to, Microsoft decided that they wanted to make a clean break because it would be less confusing for consumers. Maybe it was because Intel was launching their 12th gen chips with their P and E cores, and this required a pretty substantial overhaul of the process scheduler. Maybe it was because they wanted to start using functions like those in SSE 4.2 (just to use a couple recent examples) or like when Linux dropped support for the 386. Maybe it was both of those reasons, maybe it was another reason, or reasons, or maybe it was some combination of the above. Saying "Windows 11" is a lot easier than "Windows 10 24H2 or later" don't you think? It's just like a branch name on a github repo. Why people insist on getting their panties all in a wad over it just baffles me. There are plenty of legitimate technical issues to complain about with Windows 11, but everyone just focuses on the version number.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

        No, they're not focusing on the version number. They're focusing on the forced upgrade which requires new hardware to be purchased for no good reason, being forced to use more irritating GUI, and more telemetry.

        It's not like Linux dropping support for 386 over 20 years later, it's like Linux forcing support now for TPM 2.0 and SSE 4.2 and making you change hardware if you don't have them.

        There's no need to force an upgrade for SSE 4.2, it's not as if in 2023 that compiling the same OS or serving the same app in two architectures is a mystery. Nobody needs to say "Windows 10 24H2 or later".

        1. aerogems Silver badge

          Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

          No, they're not focusing on the version number. They're focusing on the forced upgrade which requires new hardware to be purchased for no good reason, being forced to use more irritating GUI, and more telemetry.

          And 5G causes autism and Bill Gates is secretly plotting to implant tracking chips in everyone. Do you even listen to yourself?

          It's not like Linux dropping support for 386 over 20 years later, it's like Linux forcing support now for TPM 2.0 and SSE 4.2 and making you change hardware if you don't have them.

          It absolutely is like that. The name "Windows 11" is just a marketing creation. It means nothing, except for in the paranoid fantasies you seem to indulge in a little too often. There are a lot of good technical reasons why you might want to start requiring TPM 2.0 support. I know RMS and ESR were all preaching about how it's because Microsoft is plotting to prevent people from being able to install Linux on their machines, but all these years later, Linux is still very much alive and well.

          There's no need to force an upgrade for SSE 4.2, it's not as if in 2023 that compiling the same OS or serving the same app in two architectures is a mystery. Nobody needs to say "Windows 10 24H2 or later".

          First up: What part of "this is an example" seemed to be lost on you?

          Second: There's plenty of reason to start using SSE 4.2. For starters, there's the instruction in this particular article which could be used to speed up the software BitLocker encryption. That's just one example. Adobe, a few years ago, decided that they were going to start requiring SSE2 support in all their apps. Makes a lot of sense when you look at what SSE2 is and does. It's more surprising they didn't do it sooner honestly.

          At the end of the day... if you don't like the direction Microsoft is taking Windows... you're free to leave any time. You can still install Linux on a PC, Apple would be happy to sell you one of their computers, or you could just migrate to an all mobile existence. A place where people don't seem to bat an eye when you have to upgrade your device every 2-3 years, but Microsoft making changes once a decade or so that requires a new PC is the end of the fucking world.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

            Do you even listen to yourself?

            Not sure why you say it's a conspiracy theory unless you have no real answer.

            Second: There's plenty of reason to start using SSE 4.2.

            Do you know what serving two different architectures means? They could serve a non-SSE 4.2 version and an SSE 4.2 version of the OS and apps without forcing anyone to buy new hardware. Which is what I said in my previous post but you ignored.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Snickers

        On this side of the pond, "Snickers" bars were once called "Marathon". A fine upstanding name redolent of vigorous exercise and Greek battles. Then the marketroids decided it should be renamed "Snickers", which means either stupid giggling, or an abbreviation of "it's knickers".

        I suspect these people now work for Microsoft.

        1. werdsmith Silver badge

          Re: Snickers

          Still Marathon to me. And Opal Fruits.

          But at least we won the Twix vs Raider battle.

        2. aerogems Silver badge

          Re: Snickers

          And? Doesn't make it any less insane for you to spend literally years bitching about it at every opportunity.

      3. ChrisElvidge Silver badge

        Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

        Bring back Marathon.

    2. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

      Quote

      "There’s clearly some infighting between engineers and marketing going on at Microsoft!"

      I just wish the engineers were winning...........

    3. 43300 Silver badge

      Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

      WIndows 7 had 6.1 build numbers as it was basically tweaked Vista. Same applies to 11, which is a tweaked version of 10.

      Whether they do the same with 'Windows 12' if and when it arrives is likely to depend on whether there are any significant changes or it's just another minor tweak.

      1. aerogems Silver badge

        Re: 10 + 0.1 = 11, according to Microsoft

        They've been doing it for years. Windows 95 was a major release, Windows 98 was a minor release. Windows Me was another minor release, Windows XP was a major release.* Then Vista was another major release, Windows 7 was a minor release, Windows 8 was a major release, Windows 10 was a minor release (initially). Then you had a succession of things that might vary between minor and Win95B or Win98SE tiny releases when MS flipped to the SaaS model for Windows. The major feature releases were more or less akin to what were previously minor releases like Windows 98 or 7, and the minor feature releases were more like Win95B and C or Win98SE.

        Windows 10 went through a decade or so of rolling updates, Windows 11 is in the process of doing the same. Windows 12, or whatever comes next, will do the same thing most likely.

        * No consideration to the NT line pre-XP is given

  8. captain veg Silver badge

    damned with faint (or feint) praise

    "actually moving was super easy."

    Perhaps so. Not moving is easier still.

    "This new Start Menu is a game changer."

    No it isn't. It's an app launcher. That's what operating systems do.

    -A.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: damned with faint (or feint) praise

      If Microsoft want to learn how to make a good start menu they should look at KDE. The menu choices can be ordered by the user into whatever sub-menus make best sense to them and their use case and there are three options for how to present them. Nobody needs to be unhappy.

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: damned with faint (or feint) praise

        Really don't want to faff with fiddling with menus. Just launch my apps and get on with the work.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: damned with faint (or feint) praise

      When you've finished playing one game and want to play another, you need a game changer. The start menu is one option.

  9. mattaw2001

    If the start menu search searches my PC first I'm in!

    ... but of course it doesn't. FFS MICROSOFT IF I WANTED TO SEARCH THE INTERNET I WOULD BE USING A BROWSER

    1. Rob F

      I'm no fan of some of MS's previous decisions

      But the search on the W11 Enterprise (and Pro) edition is excellent. It's fast, clean and doesn't bring in internet search, but that might be the good work of our IT team removing the crap defaults.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: I'm no fan of some of MS's previous decisions

        Home users don't have the help of your IT department.

  10. Antony Shepherd

    I was writing a paper, on the PC

    Ermagawd! I watched that ad and I was irresistibly reminded of this classic AMV reversioning.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdqOIju4lL4

  11. Omnipresent Silver badge

    cool beans!

    Just one question?

    Why does it take ten minutes to start up a windows 11 machine with a core i9,16 gig, and a 4060 gpu?

    1. Someone Else Silver badge

      Re: cool beans!

      Answer: Because we're Micros~1, and we can!

      Next question?

    2. captain veg Silver badge

      Re: cool beans!

      This is a serious question.

      Why do Windows installations slow to a crawl over time?

      I've got a few running in virtual machines, and they seems to be roughly as performant as when set up. Relatives and acquaintances who bought machines pre-installed with the cancer reliably report slowdown to unusability.

      How does that happen?

      -A.

      1. Marty McFly Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: cool beans!

        Planned obsolescence. Isn't it obvious?

        Someday, in the far distant future, when Windows is a curious museum piece, the source code will be examined by computing archeologists. My money says they find evidence of intentional slow down as the OS and the install ages. Look me up on that day, and I will pay up with a malty beverage.

      2. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: cool beans!

        So much stuff that is installed wants to have its own service and sit and occupy its own bit of RAM even when it's not running. And it's own piece of crap that looks out for updates and stuff.

        Like a printer driver I saw recently, added three services. The people who make this stuff never consider the need for considerate cohabitation with other stuff.

        And all the other stuff people see and like and install and never consider the capacity. The things start using virtual RAM and they become dog slow.

        Uninstall all the cruft, disable all the unnecessary services and the things perk back up again.

        1. captain veg Silver badge

          Re: cool beans!

          > Uninstall all the cruft, disable all the unnecessary services and the things perk back up again.

          Not my experience at all, I'm afraid. Once the bitrot has set in, no amount of uninstalling and tweaking seems to help short of bare-metal reinstallation. I've seen instances where Task Manager shows low CPU usage and plenty of free memory, but still it runs like an arthritic dog in a tar pit.

          Really weirdly, one such afflicted laptop was going spare in the office and (for reasons too arcane to relate here) I needed something to install a Windows VM on. This lappy was unusably slow, which is why it was going spare. It had XP on it. I installed a virtual machine manager -- probably VirtualBox, but possibly some free variant of VMWare -- and created a VM and installed the same edition of XP inside. It ran absolutely fine! The host system was just as bad as ever, but once the VM was spun up the guest operating system was right as rain.

          -A.

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            Re: cool beans!

            An old computer with XP on it?

            A defrag (remember that?) might have helped.

      3. aerogems Silver badge

        Re: cool beans!

        They don't. It's an illusion created by your mind. After you spend all that time waiting for the OS to install, which seems like it crawls along, once you can actually start using the computer everything feels much faster by comparison. Eventually your expectations adjust and things feel like they're getting slower. However, a 2GHz CPU is a 2GHz CPU, it doesn't magically turn into a 1GHz CPU if you don't reinstall the OS every so often.

        There's also plenty of other contributing factors. I have a friend who literally has hundreds of browser tabs open, plenty of them things like youtube videos, and then have plenty of other things open as well all on a system with only 6GB of RAM. If all you do is close the browser, the performance of the system picks up considerably. People have a tendency to live beyond their means. If you only have 6-8GB of RAM, you have to understand that you can't have 100+ browser tabs open, every Office suite app open "because [you] might need it," along with plenty of other things, and then expect the latest AAA game to run well. This will apply equally to Linux as it does Windows or macOS. If I have 8GB of RAM, and I have open a workload better suited to 16GB, it's not the fault of the OS that things are slow.

        1. Yankee Doodle Doofus Bronze badge

          Re: cool beans!

          CPUs don't slow down, but fragmented Win XP boot disks do...

    3. AlanSh

      Re: cool beans!

      Mine doesn't. About 1 minute - and half of that is waiting for the Bios to do whatever it does. AMD 9 processor, 64Gb memory and a 4070 graphics card.

      1. Spazturtle Silver badge

        Re: cool beans!

        "half of that is waiting for the Bios to do whatever it does" "64Gb memory"

        The more memory you have the longer it takes to initialise all of it.

    4. aerogems Silver badge

      Re: cool beans!

      Because you have something very wrong with your computer. Mine goes from powered off to Windows login screen in roughly 1 minute. I've never actually timed it, so it could be a little more or less, but that's probably a pretty good estimate. The part of the whole reboot process that takes the longest is waiting for the computer to establish a wifi connection and then my VPN client to connect. Still, I'm generally up and back to work in under 5 minutes. Again, never timed it, but if I had to guess, I'd say 2-3 minutes on average. If I had a spinning rust drive instead of NVMe SSD, maybe 5 minutes would be more the average.

      Maybe you have your BIOS set to do a full memory test every boot? If you've enabled BitLocker, Windows defaults to software encryption because a surprising number of mobos don't have things like AES-NI enabled, so that can slow things down too.

      1. Khaptain Silver badge
        Alert

        Re: cool beans!

        The 1st question should be , Why are you booting your PC so often.

        Mines gets booted only if an update gives me no other choice, otherwise it stays on. I just switch the screens on and it's instantly ready. Work PC is exactly the same , although I need to keep it on for other reasons.

        1. LybsterRoy Silver badge

          Re: cool beans!

          Ignoring the fact that you're wasting electricity (woooo climate change) you're leaving whatever mess the OS and programs have decided to bung into memory. Power off does a nice clean up. Mind you with the frequency with which an update requires a reboot you're probably OK.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: cool beans!

            Then there's Mark Pesc's story in his column yesterday about a friend whose Dunning-Krugerrands got raided overnight, apparently because the PC was left running.

          2. AJ MacLeod

            Re: cool beans!

            Power off _used_ to do a nice clean up, unfortunately MS have managed to screw up even since Win 8! (You'd have to disable fast boot/startup to get proper shutdown and not glorified hibernation.)

        2. aerogems Silver badge

          Re: cool beans!

          I'm usually not. I just know I can tell my computer to reboot to install some new update, walk about 50ft to the bathroom, use the facilities, and come back 1-2 minutes later and it's at the welcome screen. I don't exactly time how long it takes me to void my bladder, but 1-2 minutes seems like a pretty reasonable guesstimate. If your computer is taking 10+ minutes to boot, there's something very wrong with your computer. My first guess would be a failing HDD, but it could be a lot of other things too, maybe even a combination of different elements.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: cool beans!

        "Because you have something very wrong with your computer. Mine goes from powered off to Windows login screen in roughly 1 minute."

        I just switched mine off and restarted. 26 seconds to login screen. A few seconds extra to KeePass prompting for its password with the full desktop displayed a second or so later, WiFi being established in the background. Admittedly no VPN to start. A minute would be about the time from switch-on to getting KeePass and email logged in.

        8 × Intel® Core™ i5-1035G1 CPU @ 1.00GHz, 16Gb

      3. David Hicklin Silver badge

        Re: cool beans!

        > Mine goes from powered off to Windows login screen in roughly 1 minute

        Thats because windows 10 + by default don't shutdown when you ask them, they go into hibernation. That 1 minute is the time it takes windows to reload itself from where it left off when you did "shutdown"

        At work they have disabled that so that the laptops etc really DO shutdown

        If you want to find out how long it really takes do a restart

        1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

          Re: cool beans!

          Yes, upvoted. It's called Fast Startup, who wouldn't want that? Well, if you dual-boot _AND_ you plan to modify your NTFS files from the other OS, Fast Startup should be disabled. Maybe there are other scenarios where it should be disabled, I dunno.

          1. Yankee Doodle Doofus Bronze badge

            Re: cool beans!

            It should be disabled in more cases than not, if you ask me. At the very least, it should be made extremely clear to users whether they are doing a full shutdown or some form of hibernation. I have to deal with way too many users who believe that they are booting their machine fresh every workday, when a quick look at the task manager shows that they haven't rebooted in weeks. "I just close the lid on the laptop. Doesn't that shut it down?"

  12. Jason Hindle Silver badge

    Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

    It's decoration. Power users search for what they want. Civilians either have desktop icons or pin what matters to the taskbar.

    1. aerogems Silver badge

      Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

      Very true. I can, to an extent, forgive people who may have tried using Windows search in the 9x-7 days when it sucked donkey balls. But starting with Windows 8, it actually became pretty useful, and it's generally only gotten better with each subsequent release. With Windows 11 (and probably 10, though I can't remember for sure) you can even search for specific things like control panel settings. If you use the PowerToys search it includes other functionality like being able to do basic mathematical calculations.

      Most of the apps I use on a regular basis I have pinned to the taskbar, and the rest I just search for. Only when I can't remember even a few letters of the name do I resort to using the old folder hierarchy method. If Google ever got one thing right, it's "search, not sort" is the superior way of doing things.

      1. ChrisC Silver badge

        Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

        Searching only works well IF you already have at least some idea what it is you're searching for and what to start entering as your search term to find it - if you don't already know the thing you're looking for exists on that system, and you then get back an empty result, how do you differentiate between the system not actually having what you're looking for in the first place, vs simply not having yet stumbled on the correct search keywords to elicit a more useful response?

        Having the system present you with all the options arranged in some sort of fashion - alphasorted, heirarchical tree etc - at least gives you the chance to figure it out for yourself that the option does or doesn't exist, and where to find it if it does.

        So why not simply provide both and let the user choose which one to use based on which is more appropriate at the time? Given how powerful even the most basic of entry level PCs is these days in comparison to what would have been considered a high-end setup not all that long ago, it simply beggars belief at how much LESS choice we're now given by Windows - surely the explosion in processing power, memory capacity etc. ought to facilitate a myriad of UI options allowing each user to tailor THEIR system to THEIR personal preferences, yet here we are being slowly corraled down a path where Windows Knows Best and we're given increasingly limited ability to make our systems our own.

        1. aerogems Silver badge

          Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

          Searching only works well IF you already have at least some idea what it is you're searching for and what to start entering as your search term to find it

          Which represents probably 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of scenarios. To search for something implies that you know it exists. Otherwise it's more akin to a discovery.

          Having the system present you with all the options arranged in some sort of fashion - alphasorted, heirarchical tree etc - at least gives you the chance to figure it out for yourself that the option does or doesn't exist, and where to find it if it does.

          A lot of words to say "I've never used Windows search."

          So why not simply provide both and let the user choose which one to use based on which is more appropriate at the time?

          Uhhhhh.... they do. What rock have you been living under?

        2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

          Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

          But the stupid internet-first search means that you then have to manually search the results to find if the search term has actually found a program on your pc.

      2. Richard 12 Silver badge
        Mushroom

        Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

        Search only works as a concept if you know the name and there's only version installed and your IT dept have disabled Bing.

        Many line-of-business applications have weird names that bear little resemblance to what they're called in documentation and by their users. IBM and SAP are good examples.

        Many line-of-business applications have multiple versions and the user needs to pick the right one. When it just lists four identical links, how do I let the right one in?

        By default, it also searches the Internet with Bing. So several results don't even exist.

    2. LybsterRoy Silver badge

      Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

      For the programs I use all the time they're on the taskbar, reasonably frequent stuff on the desktop. Some stuff (like Notepad - Alt-Q) is on AutoHotkey. Why would I want to waste time searching?

    3. Kubla Cant

      Re: Windows 11 Start Menu Changes Nothing

      Power users search for what they want. Civilians either have desktop icons or pin what matters to the taskbar.

      Thought I was a power user, but I pin things to the taskbar, so I guess not. Do I have to use the start menu to prove my virility?

  13. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "You just need to buy a PC that supports it!"

    As we used to say, ROM - Requires Only Money.

  14. AbominableCodeman

    Thank The Good Lord Gaben

    Luckily due to the sterling efforts of Valve, it's getting increasingly difficult to find software that won't run on Linux, even really esoteric, expensive software (and at least Linux still works with weird old serial devices). My windows 10 Box has been relegated to a headless install that only ever is accessed via Steam link when I want a VR fix (the one last windows hold-out). Come 2025 it will get some nice firewall rules, and I'll be done with M$ bovine excretions.

    Other than that I went fully Linux 4 years ago and have never looked back, and that's after a fair few decades as a Windows fanboy, but M$ have worked so diligently at alienating their user-base with needless UI change for change's sake, slurp and adware. And to think "retraining users to a new OS" used to be the C-suite excuse not to move to Linux, now Mint is more windows than Windows is.

    1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

      Re: Thank The Good Lord Gaben

      Unfortunately Fusion 360 won't play under Proton.

  15. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Mushroom

    "Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!"

    Or not. To both.

  16. billdehaan
    Devil

    Moving the Linux is easier

    It actually is. I have four machines, with one (32 bit) laptop running Linux, and the other three running Windows 10.

    At least I did, until one of them could no longer download Windows 10 updates because the 32GB boot drive couldn't handle a 105GB "patch" that was almost four times the size of the OS plus applications.

    I read the Windows support voodoo, which recommended all sorts of nonsense that pushed OS management onto the end user (clear this cache, delete this subdirectory, change the ownership of this file, then edit this registry entry, then reboot to the USB disk and copy this file to this directory, they reboot again, blah blah blah), and even spent a couple of days batting around with it, without too much success.

    Then, I downloaded a few Linux ISOs, booted off them, installed Mint on the machine, set up a Win10 VM on the other disk in case I needed to actually run any Windows app on it (I haven't in the four months since I switched), and left it that way.

    The second machine I switched to Mint, and likewise haven't touched.

    My primary machine is still Win10, but I'm slowly migrating things off, and will easily be finished before October 2025.

    Not one of my PCs would run Windows 11, according to Microsoft. All four of them run some variant of Linux. And since I can run Windows 10 in a Linux VM, all I have to do is disable networking for the VM and there's no worry about security, either.

    Why should I throw away perfectly good working computers simply because Microsoft stops security updates for them?

    Linux didn't pull me in; Windows pushed me out.

    1. 43300 Silver badge

      Re: Moving the Linux is easier

      " Moving the Linux is easier

      It actually is. "

      For the sort of people who read this, site - maybe it is.

      But for the type of user which that ad is aimed at, it really isn't. The idea of booting off a USB and installing an OS would be completely alien to them.

      1. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: Moving the Linux is easier

        > But for the type of user which that ad is aimed at, it really isn't. The idea of booting off a USB and installing an OS would be completely alien to them.

        We're talking about the ad for Chrome OS, right? Isn't that exactly what would be required?

        -A.

        1. 43300 Silver badge

          Re: Moving the Linux is easier

          Which is why this attempt to entice users across will fail!

    2. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Moving the Linux is easier

      Whilst I am also migrating away from Windows (to FreeBSD in my case), it's not 'easy' if Windows is still your primary machine.

      Turn off your Windows system, leave it off for a few months, and handle everything you need to run on Linux, without a VM running Windows

      If you can do that, then you've migrated to Linux and it's easy. If you can't, you're still tied to Windows.

  17. BenMyers

    Propaganda of the finest kind

    I sure don't think Windows 11 offers me a fresh start. Without registry mods, I have to click more buttons to do the same routine tasks that I did under Windows 10. A Mac-style centered taskbar is a fresh start? What if I like the Windows 10 desktop better? Well, I'm stuck with what Microsoft gave me with Windows 11. Like many other people. The slow migration to Windows 11 is caused in part by the expense of new hardware, and also because people just do not like it as much as Windows 10. Nadella, take note!

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Brand new PC with W11 Pro

    Easy peasy.

    Sorry.

  19. SoulFireMage

    Work PC fine. Home PC? Waste my hardware!

    Why should I waste really good hardware that was top the line in 2019,for a purely arbitrary decision on their part? My home PC kit still runs the latest games, at 4k, at near the top of the graphical tree acceptably. Cpu and mono wise, the advancements, whilst benchmark able of course, are absolutely not worth burning money on still.

    They're not getting a big surge because so many folks have good kid to high end hardware that is good for another five years and, like me, resent the idea that a purely arbitrary choice on their part means windows 11 refused to run on it. The start menu and task bar nonsense is icing on the cake.

    Who on earth remove flexibility and features, and dares to call it an improvement?

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Work PC fine. Home PC? Waste my hardware!

      It's not arbitrary at all. It's quite specifically intended that you should replace your hardware and hence buy a new Windows licence to provide themselves and their hardware buddies with revenue.

      1. Crazyman0665
        Facepalm

        Re: Work PC fine. Home PC? Waste my hardware!

        What? Your key is litterly tied to your account so what are you even talking about........ I paid $20 for the pro so if you can't afford that then I don't know what to tell you. I don't have a crazy job and I can afford a PC by just saving up.

    2. Shadowlight

      Re: Work PC fine. Home PC? Waste my hardware!

      Marketing.

  20. 3arn0wl

    Ecco-destruction

    Micro$oft ought to be fined to within an inch of its life for wantonly creating so much patently unnecessary e-waste.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Ecco-destruction

      Why stop at within?

  21. Joe W Silver badge

    Remeber "start me up"?

    Love the song in that context. Especially as it continues with "you make a grown man cry"...

  22. PM.

    Game changer..

    Our previous menu was like chess. Now its more like candy crush soda, a real game changer!

  23. This post has been deleted by its author

  24. Big_Boomer

    Ooooooohhhh SHINY-SHINY!!

    "Look we have new SHINY-SHINY that has built in AI and lots of other bullshittium and it'll make your schlong bigger and your breath fresher too." Is it really any better? No. Is it worth the expense. Not even slightly. Are they just releasing it to try to make even more money? Of course they are.

    When I bought my PC (early 2015) it came with Win8.1. I reformatted the disk and installed Win7 because Win8.x was shit!. A couple of years later I upgraded it to Win10 because it was free and I liked it, apart from the childish "Win 8" tiles menu which I still hate, so I run OpenShell.

    Now they expect me to buy a new PC just so I can run their latest SHINY-SHINY? Feck-orf! If they'd made it compatible with my 8 year old CPU then I'd probably already be running it, but I'm not throwing away money just because they have a new SHINY-SHINY.

    I'll probably buy a new PC with Win11 (or whatever is current at the time) when they finally release GTA-6 for PC. That is something I will want to play and the release of GTA 5 was what motivated my last PC purchase.

    1. Yankee Doodle Doofus Bronze badge

      Re: Ooooooohhhh SHINY-SHINY!!

      I'm not a big gamer, but I do have a few dozen games on Steam. One of my most recent additions is GTA 5, which I already owned on PS3, but barely ever played. To my delight, GTA 5 works acceptably on my NUC with an 11th gen i5 and intel's integrated graphics. This is on linux using proton, and I think I get about 40 to 45 frames per second at 1080p on the standard settings. There is a part of me that really wants to build a new PC with a mid-to-high-end graphics card just to experience a few new AAA games, but I just know I would spend around $2K on the PC, plus at least a few hundred on a high resolution, high refresh rate monitor just to try a few games and say "Yeah, this is pretty cool!" and then go back to playing Command & Conquer: Red Alert, lol. What I really need is for someone to commission me to build a gaming rig for them so I can get it out of my system without spending my own cash.

  25. Luiz Abdala
    Joke

    I upgraded to a...

    Ryzen 5800x on a vintage b550 motherboard. Relatively fresh CPU, just a couple years behind, way more than what I need actually. Decent rig.

    "You cannot upgrade to Win 11" - Fine then. Don't bother me again.

    YOU CANNOT UPGRADE TO WIN 11 - alright then don't, move on.

    I SAID YOU CANNOT UPGRADE TO WINDOWS EEEELLLEEEVEEENNN!!!ELEVENTYONE!!!! - Stop pushing for it then, geez.

    Every Microsoft patch tuesday the warning would get bigger and more obnoxious on the Win10 control panel.

  26. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    Still trying to move away from Windows, wonder if I'll make it by 2025 though..

    I'm still aiming to not move to Windows 11 at home (at work, already on 11. It mostly works but I'm getting very tired of the bug of taskbar icons going blank, and occasional multi desktop bugs).

    It's probably much easier if you're on Linux. On FreeBSD things are more tricky, particularly as I want to use WINE for games. Old games : largely fine. More modern ones, running into problems. Bhyve virtualisation is basically functional but needs work, especially for PCI passthrough. I'm not optimistic it will all be sorted in a year when Windows 10 support ends.

    I'm perfectly prepared to pay for up to three years of extended Windows 10 support, by that time hopefully WINE will be in better shape on FreeBSD. Expecting VR support is unlikely though!

    For everyday use FreeBSD works fine for browsing and basic productivity, but so long as I keep booting Windows for games or specific apps, I haven't migrated yet.

    That also, depressingly, means in the mid 90s when I was in Peak OS/2 Enthusiasm I hadn't managed to ditch Windows properly either. True I was only booting OS/2, but my dissertation was written in Ami Pro for Windows under WinOS/2, because all the OS/2 word processor options sucked. I had a licensed copy of Describe, but it wasn't pleasant to use for long documents and they never added a word counter despite many, many prompts. Ami Pro for OS/2 was horrendously buggy, Word Pro was OK but released after I needed a proper word processor, WordPerfect wasn't great either. I'm not sure Star Office was around, and things like Open/Libreoffice weren't even a speck on the horizon.

    1. captain veg Silver badge

      Re: Still trying to move away from Windows, wonder if I'll make it by 2025 though..

      > I'm still aiming to not move to Windows 11 at home (at work, already on 11. It mostly works but I'm getting very tired of the bug of taskbar icons going blank, and occasional multi desktop bugs).

      I've not tried 11, and hope never to have to. But really, what kind of system gets to major version 11 and still has basic display bugs?

      -A.

  27. Crazyman0665
    Facepalm

    Wow

    I will always be amazed at how much people will never stop complaining about windows. Y'all are stuck in the 90's and it really shows.

  28. Grumpy Rob

    Chronos is right..

    Short version - User Chronos said "..an operating system's job is to abstract hardware and then stay out of the way.." Absolutely right.

    Now the long version - My wife was using Windows7 at work, and insisted on using it on her PC at home too. She did (still does) *a lot* of Internet shopping, with consequent flood of "your package is.." emails. I gave her a lot of coaching, but the inevitable happened and she clicked on an email link and, BANG, she had the cryptovirus going wild on her PC. She lost a lot of stuff that *I* hadn't backed up - my fault naturally. That finally convinced her, so I wiped her PC and loaded it with Linux Mint, put icons on the desktop for Thunderbird and Firefox and she never noticed any difference. If I told her that a new version of Windows was a "game changer TM" she'd be mystified, and if I told her she needed to buy a new laptop to run it on she'd be outraged. Bonus - I set up a script that ran at login and rsync'd her email to a local SBC file server (that I had setup to allow me to remotely save my email on my work computer). Still, everything else was still my fault :(

    Meanwhile, I might be old but I'm still childish :) I run Linux mint and cinnamon, but for old time's sake I loaded the Motif window manager as well (Yes - I'm *that* old). If someone wants to use my PC I logout, change to Motif, and log back in. Voila - a completely blank black screen background, a mouse cursor, and NOTHING else. Now that's what I call a UI :)

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