Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks Windows 11 has a number of puzzling or annoying UI changes from Windows 10 that power users might wish to change. But you can't make these tweaks from the Settings menu or even the legacy Control Panel. To make these changes, you’ll need to edit the Registry. For those unfamiliar, the Windows Registry is a set of folders and …
... unless you are a poor sod like me and stuck with Windows on the work machine. Nothing us poor souls can do.
It is really effed up that one needs to jump these hoops just to make the system usable. Remind me again why people think Linux is difficult. Microsoft has no interest in user experience, no interest in maintaining a high software quality.
(and at home I have ditched windows long ago)
There are IT teams who still use those? Did they fix it or something?
For maximum user-torture combine roaming profiles with computers that are re-imaged automatically every night, so you can't even get around the "your profile is in use on another computer" error by using the same computer you used yesterday.
Entra + OneDrive is the WORKING version of roaming profiles. Unfortunately these are tied to a Microsoft subscription...
...which will save your company $5.3M/year.
And then the bigger picture.. Do those calculations for the number of Win11 licences currently in use globally (or just within the UK, EU) and realise just how much time & money Microsoft is wasting. And then my pet peeve.. Electricity. I decrufted my installs and shaved around 100-150W off the default energy consumption. And then there's the millions of PCs destined for landfill (or Linux) because MS can't make Win10 secure or reliable.. Or just won't.
Probaly, there is/are utility(es) that make it super easy to do this in one go (areotweaker come to mind). This article is just showing the manual/under-the-hood way to do it
Just like in linux there are utilities to do this from a nice GUI all under one roof, but, from time to time, you see articles on how to hunt down each individual ini file in the command line and editing it using 'vi'
And just like in macos there are utilities that allow you to change plists from a gui, but from tiem to time there are articles about how to do it from the CLI.
In defense of registry-like solutions. Everything is centralized in one place, so no hunting down individual ini files from place to place. You only need 4 primitives to handle entries (create, delete, inspect, change), so is completely programatically accesible and consistent.
Meanwhile, in linux land, you need a parser to access ini files, each program has its own semantic conventions (so each needs a different parser for automation), and they are scatered all around the FS.
If your machines are pets, either method has pros and cons (registry, everything is centralized but non human readable, ini, everythig is human readable, but one has to hunt for ini files all over the place).
But is your machines are cattle (clouds wit 100thhs to 1000ths of machines), a registry-lile approach is superior. That's why systemd is moving in that direction (programatic access of config and log info).
But is your machines are cattle (clouds wit 100thhs to 1000ths of machines), a registry-lile approach is superior. That's why systemd is moving in that direction (programatic access of config and log info).
I think there are strengths and weaknesses. So sure, having a centralised registry to control your machine could be convenient, but a lot of aspects are still broken. So picking on an example. Win11 has a taskbar. We're conditioned to left click to launch, right click to do <something>. So taskbar has a search box, but right clicking on it does.. Nothing. No option to launch settings and configure its behaviour so it only searches locally. Or if it can't find locally, prompts to ask if I want to use the search engine of my choice. Or another of my pet peeves. When I click on the 'X' to close an app, it actually closes it, and the app doesn't go into the background and leave a lot of dependencies loaded.. Especially when those are often dataloggers.
Whether systemd going in the same direction is a good or bad thing I guess remains to be seen. Sure, there might be access to configs & logs, or it may go the same way as Windows and we're forced to dive into systemd to make registry hacks. On the plus side, it might mean more people at the bar in the Scarey Devil Monastery. Turning Linux into Windows isn't neccessarily a step in the right direction, but then again, Microsoft forcing users into running carp like Copilot or Totalitarian Recall might encourage more users (especially businesses) to cut their ties with Redmond.
Over the decades I've used many different OSs and programming languages. May favourite languages remains APL even though I haven't used it for a looong time. My favourite OS remains PICK even though it wasn't built with nice pretty pictures and I thing Windoes could have learnt from its data dictionary structure
My favourite OS remains PICK even though it wasn't built with nice pretty pictures and I thing Windoes could have learnt from its data dictionary structure.
I don't think I've ever used that one, which is possibly as it should be. I shouldn't need to know about the OS, it should just work. So in the past, if I wanted pretty pictures on *nix, run X. But I kinda hate Windows because it's not an OS, it's a way to bundle nagware, spyware and a lot of apps that I might not want, and certainly might not want constantly running and hogging resources. So I look at what's running in Task Mangler and see cryptic and useless info like a group for 'Microsoft content' with no useful info in what's in that group, or why it's running.
Or other fun stuff. So it has Xbox. I don't have an Xbox, and given MS's love of spamming networks to discover things, connecting an Xbox to my network could then trigger a prompt to let the PC talk to it. But on nagware, I gave in and got an Xbox pass, which is kinda like Steam. Difference being if I want to play a Steam game, I fire up the Steam app. The Xbox garbage is running constantly. Or another favorite, playing kill the 'My Phone' game. It should be my choice whether to pair my phone to my PC, not Microsofts, especially when that pairing seems to need bluetooth running and I like battery life. But I guess this is why minimum system regs for Win11 is probably 32GB because MS can't (or won't) make an efficient OS.
And then with every new and unwanted 'feature', MS introduces a new range of bugs and security vulnerabilities that might help shut down airports, and regulators let MS keep doing this. Win10 is now 10yrs old, still has new vulnerabilities being discovered even though it should be mature and mostly trusted. If MS can't produce a secure & reliable OS after 10yrs, perhaps governments should stop buying and start fining MS for every new vulnerability that's discovered.
PICK... and APL.
I have not heard those names in a very long time.
You may be interested in J, definitely the closest spiritual successor to APL, although it's ascii based, so maybe that takes some of the charm away.
As for PICK... gosh. The last time I used that in anger was I think D3, in the 90s, on a Unix that some may have had the misfortune of hearing the name of before... SCO.
"Meanwhile, in linux land, you need a parser to access ini files"
They're not usually called ini but I guess if you view things through a Window that's how you'll think of them. The Unix approach is to make file plain text so the only parser you need is between your ears and, as you point out, a standard text editor is all you need to change them.
But pets? Try work horses. Carefully tended and fed because they do heavy lifting.
Equally if not more important, Unix configuration files almost all ignore lines lines starting with #. This means that they can (and usually do) contain abundant explanatory comments. The registry on the other hand was, when last I looked at it in 2003 or so, a humongous undocumented data base. Any information as to what key did what and what values were expected had to be gleaned from the often cryptic or incomprehensible names and/or whatever information could be found on the Internet and/or trial and error. I assume that's still the case. I have trouble understanding why people continue to defend this rather bizarre approach to system control.
There may well be better ways to manage system configuration than .ini/.init/.cfg files. But I don't think the Windows registry is one of them.
log files are in /var/log and they can be parsed with normal tools. That's how it should be. And the "central configuration file" was something I absolutely hated with SuSE (version... 6.2, I think, might still have the CDs somewhere. So... nah. I sort of get why the cetral solution might be a good idea, but then the structure should be consistent and not the mess that it is under Windows. It is as bad as barfing config files "all over the file system" (instead of in /etc/$programname). The implementation is, let's say, subotimal, and moving the registry keys around from release to release and overwriting changes during updates is a big mess.
My main complaint was in the OP that all this just does not work if you are in a business context and you have to be contend with what is given to you. All the "oh, just use this program from github" or "just change this registry key" or "use this program to fix the start menue" are just... well... not helpful.
And don't get me started with systemd. I had so many problems with it f'ing up my systems (mostly networking) that I could not fix easily because settings did not do what they were documented to do (among other things), and log entries were a hot mess, I'll keep my hands off it. As an init system I totally like some things, but it forces itself into so many unrelated things and then deletes your home directory (didn't happen to me, I can do that all by myself, eh ;) ). Pulseaudio is similar. Might work nowadays, but software quality was pretty bad when some distros started pushing it. Alas, the ship has sailed, and I'll have to look at something else that just works. I really don't know how long Devuan, or Alpine, or... can keep up the task of disentangling systemd from the rest of the system.
> ...so no hunting down individual ini files...
Yes, creating {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} is far more intuitive than "cd $APPDIR;ls -l *.ini" (-‸ლ)
Thanks to @Avram Piltch for listing these tweaks; Not all of which I want/need, and PowerShell scriptlets to back up the Registry and automate the tweaks would be handy, but I'm not complaining, I wasn't even aware of the 400ms delay being artificial.
Edit: Yes, of course it should be /etc/$APP/*.ini, my bad for assuming app devs followed Unix/Linux conventions
>>> In defense of registry-like solutions. Everything is centralized in one place, so no hunting down individual ini files from place to place. You only need 4 primitives to handle entries (create, delete, inspect, change), so is completely programatically accesible and consistent.
And lots of old, now-irrelevant crud gets left there. Since it's all in one place you have no idea what it is associated with, and hence whether it is still relevant.
The task bar has 2 settings:
1. Hide labels, so you can fit more stuff on there before getting the ... treatment.
2. Do not combine windows, so I can quickly access the correct window when I have more than 1 window open from the same app (for example the current project, and the one I am referencing).
But it will not let me use those at the same time??? By far the most bloody annoying arbitrary restriction in 11!
I found a third party tool that fixes this, so you can have multiple windows shown in icon form. But after I installed it all kinds of random stuff started breaking in random applications, which started working again as soon as I disabled it.
Many options like these are available as Group Policies on non-Home versions of Windows.
So you can find and change them there.
If you need the Registry settings for Home or a just-click-this.reg:
Get Sysinternals ProcessMonitor from
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/
and watch Registry changes as you change GPs.
I just took those 11 registry settings, 30 minutes in ChatGPT and created a small batch script you can run a la ncurses in bash.
I would have created a powershell script, but CBA to check it was correct.
I might push it up to my github. Give recruiters something to get their teeth into.
"I would have created a powershell script, but CBA to check it was correct"
"Give recruiters something to get their teeth into"
You sound like quite the catch for a recruiter!
Also if that took you 30 minutes WITH ChatGPT then god knows how long it would have taken you manually to do some "REG ADD" entries.
Ouch
"I usually put those reg add commands in a .bat file so I can quickly duplicate my settings on a new machine or reset them after a Windows patch overwrites them".
I will have them added to my existing .bat file that gives me the classic Windows Boot Menu that runs on startup just in case of any unhelpful resetting of my preferences!
Just open `cmd.exe`, and write the following command:
>deltree /s C: [2]
Now restart your computer and all shall be well!
---
[1] Well, unless you work for an employer which insists on using Windows, but in that case you should quit your job and find less of a dogshit employer. But I guess doing the latter is the hard part...
[2] I haven't used Windows for eternities so the command-line guide may be somewhat out-of-date. Send me a PR if it is!
I'm responsible for platforming engineering and maintaining clouds of Linux machines. But of course, I still have to do it from a Windows 11 Enterprise laptop. Because enterprise, or something. To be fair, the Linux and open source world hasn't yet come up with a reliable or familiar way of centrally managing almost 100,000 machines in a vast global directory. Or has it? I once had a go at trying to do some user management / directory stuff with FreeIPA/389DS (in a much smaller company), but it was a hopeless cause and we got absolutely nowhere.
To be honest, Windows Enterprise is sane enough to use for work-related stuff, because at least you aren't forced to use an M$ account and you can turn off the shittiest settings with the Windows Registry.
For your use case, which is a rather unique one, I totally understand. But personally, I've found my solution to work better.
"To be fair, the Linux and open source world hasn't yet come up with a reliable or familiar way of centrally managing almost 100,000 machines in a vast global directory." It hasn't come up with anything like https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bug/
>” To be fair, the Linux and open source world hasn't yet come up with a reliable or familiar way of centrally managing almost 100,000 machines in a vast global directory.”
A good question is: why should it?
I suggest being able to manage 100,000 machines (not in a botnet), isn’t something a lone developer would encounter and so devote unpaid time to, only for a large business to make a one off donation and adopt it as their own and not feed updates back to the original developer/project.
However, it is something enterprises with this need could easily afford and by forming a consortium make it even more affordable, and commission a software development house to produce an Open Source package .
Fair enough, and you're right about the lone developer, but tell that to all the people that think we should be rolling Linux desktops across corporates all over the world because "M$ sucks".
Until there's a viable replacement for central user management, security and audit policies, certificates, OS and application deployment etc, no SME or corporate is moving anywhere.
Until Win 10, that was the way, now you need a 3rd party app to do it, like StartAllback (trialware, first 30 days free, then USD 4.99 if you like it)
Yes, then go growing peanuts because Linux doesn't run the applications you need... ffrankly all those Linuxtards having to comment on each article about Windows your way are really annoying.
But probably people like you do still envy Windows has a decent GUI and applications - despite Nadella working hard against that -, while Linux desktops still look designed and implemented by amateuers without a clue about good UIs, and have to sput out it on each occasion.
"But probably people like you do still envy Windows has a decent GUI and applications - despite Nadella working hard against that -, while Linux desktops still look designed and implemented by amateuers without a clue about good UIs, and have to sput out it on each occasion."
First of all, yes, Windows has decent GUI. But its applications? No way. Most of M$'s applications are a steaming pile of Electron crap, with tonnes of useless UI clutter and notifications about turning on "AI". GNU/Linux doesn't have that, or to be more accurate, most DEs do not. For instance, look at Cinnamon, Linux Mint's in house DE, it's having none of that worthless crap Windows - and by extension, Microsoft - keeps shoving down your throat, and it still, in my opinion, manages to look pretty much the same as Windows' UI. Which is what you want, isn't it?
I also disagree with your statement that "Linux desktops still look [like they're] designed and implemented by amateuers[sic]". Why? Because it doesn't apply to ALL DEs. If you meant just GNOME - the DE meant for iPads -, I get you, but if you're talking about Elementary's DE (Pantheon), for example, then I'd strongly disagree, because it looks like a modern macOS UI. But don't get me wrong, my point is not to state which DE is the best, though - that's everyone's own opinion. My point is that you can't just throw shit at all DEs and say they all look "amateur" just because you've used GNU/Linux once with some shitty DE nobody likes anyway - like GNOME.
Depends on the nature of the work I think.
I'm seeing more use of bespoke phone apps and some use of tablets with dedicated software in my world. It's all just front ends to some kind of database on a server somewhere but it is what a lot of people are using.
Sort of back where I started (dumb terminal and big machine in the basement) but with fewer cables.
Linux certainly does have some excellent GUIs to choose from. And KDE is configurable enough that it looks as nice as either the distro defaults or the user are willing to make it. Linux has had great driver support and is "ready" as an OS for most users by itself. But it is true that lack of many critical applications (running native, WINE doesn't cut it for a lot of things) really does hurt. It's why I can't adopt it as my primary OS. While I gladly ditched Windows over 20 years ago, the cost is being stuck with Apple. *Shrug*. At least it's more stable, less bloated, and is still UNIX so after installing a package manager, I can use most of the same stuff I use on Linux. But it is trading one set of overlords for another.
Windows HAD a decent GUI until W11 (and arguably when they started messing with things in W10 updates), From W98SE to W7 the Windows UX was pretty good. Things were where you expected to find them it was all fairly intuitive and followed convention. Arguably well ahead of MacOS which I've never really got to grips with.
W11 is some unfathomable backwards step. Every thing is moved and changed purely for the sake of change. Like a supermarkets switching aisles about to ensure you spend longer wandering around looking at everything and not just finding for the one thing you actually want.
The Linux desktops I've used are a step backwards towards established norms which is welcome. Not perfect but at least with Linux I can change it. I can make the toolbar left align if I want, the right click context isn't changed to suit the whims of some AI code glitch.
TBH, I think W11 was a move to try to look more like MacOS than anything else.
Just wish the MS bods would admit defeat and do things people ask for - I'm forced to use Windows for work and on my ultrawide monitor I just don't want the taskbar stretching across the bottom of the entire screen (StartAllBack enables me to have a smaller taskbar centred, but I'd like to have the taskbar on the left or right).
Quote
"But probably people like you do still envy Windows has a decent GUI and applications - despite Nadella working hard against that -, while Linux desktops still look designed and implemented by amateuers without a clue about good UIs, and have to sput out it on each occasion."
m$ HAD a decent GUI ... anyone remember winxp or win 7 ?
m$ also issued a document regarding good consistant GUI design to use when making windows applications.
The less said about win 8 the better... ok win 10 .. cringe... but win 11 with 6 tons of AI+ network stuff? do they even remember that some computers are'nt connected to a network for 'reasons'? and then when you DO want them on the network, they cannot see it even when you turn the wi-fi on and off... repeatedly... then swear.. loudly..... before the all encompassing rage takes you and you throw the laptop in the plating tank and find the win 10 one.
I swaer there is a department inside m$ whos job it is to slow down windows and make various components within windows fail at random times and for no reason
Gimme crummy linux anyday
Gimme Windows 2K desktop please. More clicky clicky is NOT an improvement.
Less colours and no themes? Light grey on a slightly different light grey with no borders and oodles of white space? NOT an improvement.
Control panel please. Settings app is NOT an improvement.
Store everything locally. I do use Onedrive, to share files. But it's not my daily driver. Onedrive by default is NOT an improvement.
No telemetry. My loss of privacy is NOT an improvement.
I like Edge, it lets me download FF very quickly. Much faster than Internet Explorer. Much offset by default grabbing and constant pleading to be used. But otherwise, Edge is NOT an improvement.
Copilot? See what I said about Edge. And then double it. Neither helpful, used, and NOT an improvement.
Might be bias here, but I am remembering the stuff that gets in my way. If there ARE improvements, they are so completely overwhelmed by the negatives, that I don't believe they exist.
That's 0/7. Please see me after class.
> ffrankly all those Linuxtards having to comment on each article about Windows your way are really annoying.
Look at you, a Windowtard, what a surprise, it is the same when you comment/troll on (a lot of) articles about Linux.
> But probably people like you do still envy Windows has a decent GUI and applications
Haha, just KDE alone is vast superior to Windows GUI. It seems that the awful GUI inconsistencies of Windows UI don't count for you: Settings vs Control Panel at the same time?, Control Panel/Disk Manager/Event Viewer/etc with different DPI, really? (ohh but zoomed-in just to be aligned with the rest of GUI), Ribbon Bar in File Explorer, OMG! File Explorer and its particular way to show the User's Home Folder, a mess. Constant change of the Start Menu, one worse than the other. Search in Start Menu that fallback to Edge with ads even if my default browser is other. Start Menu in Win11 in a movable middle point, WTF!?. How about the GUI differences between Win32/WFP/WinForms/UWP/etc?. And not to mention nasty things of the past like having to install all apps as Admin because the OS "GUI" didn't have a proper way to elevate permissions without resorting on the command line.
> while Linux desktops still look designed and implemented by amateuers without a clue about good UIs
Well, if "amateurs without a clue about good UIs" design way better interfaces that "professionals" at Microsoft, I will always stand with the "amateurs".
Here’s the problem with your argument. I actually know what I’m talking about.
But first a caveat. Choose and enjoy an OS that you like - it’s no skin off my nose. But I would advise you to try out and gain experience with multiple operating systems before pontificating about the benefits of the only OS that you have any practical experience of.
For my money, as a developer who has written commercial software for Windows, won an industry award for the software I’ve written for Linux, had best selling software on the Mac and iOS app stores (so quite a lot of experience then) and written software for Android (no superlatives there - just experience), I can say that I have quite a lot of familiarity with all of these OSs.
My beef with Windows (and if it works for you then great) is that the way settings and preferences are handled is a mess, DLLs still cause trouble* (more than twenty years after every other vendor sorted the problem out) and, worst of all, Visual Studio is more expensive and capable than nearly every other IDE out there. And the free tier is barely better than a text editor*. But that’s my actual experience. It might be that the things I dislike are part of the experience that you love. And you know what? That’s great. But it ain’t what I’m looking for in an OS.
* Yes. I know. There’s some hyperbole in my grumbles. Improvements have been made. It still ain’t great though.
*looks at Windows 10 with overlapping windows with no clear boundaries and dialog windows with buttons of uncertain dimension*
*looks at kmorwath*
*looks at windows 11 with even less distinction between any UI elements*
*looks back at kmorwath*
... Yeeaaahhhh, about that...
Unfortunately a lot of the Linux UI crowd seem to *also* think of this disaster as the pinnacle of UI design, but on the flipside, it's usually fairly trivial to locate a theme or setting to bring back clear distinctions between UI elements, and you can have your pick from looking like Windows 3.1 through Windows 7 as you please. Much *un*like recent Windows where theming and control over UI element colours has been axed away to nearly nothing without deeply invasive unsupported third party hackery.
i've got a sweepstake with myself on how long it will take someone really clever to hack the adverts & display something suitably p*rnographic or political.
Mix that in with the override on corporate machines & who knows.... hilarity ensues
and YES i am encouraging those with a sense of humour to hack those annoying adverts
Depends on if you want something to be done. Comparing the speed with which the US Senate moved with designating 11th September as “ Patriot Day” and recently designating October 14th as a Remembrance Day for a non-entity political activist; I suggest if you want action then the advert hack will need be along the lines of: the kid that shot CK was a fully paid up MAGA supporter… or one of the many interviews where Trump was complementary about Epstein and the under age girls he could supply….
So while I was doing this on my home VM I use to access work, it popped up a suggestion to play Crash Bandicoot. Sigh. Another thing to turn off.
Also, I'm surprised to see my actual work machine has several of these already applied.
And no jokes about The Register editors doing articles on registry editing?
This post has been deleted by its author
# Run in elevated PowerShell for HKLM changes.
function Ensure-Key($path) {
if (-not (Test-Path $path)) { New-Item -Path $path -Force | Out-Null }
}
function Set-String($path, $name, $value) {
Ensure-Key $path
New-ItemProperty -Path $path -Name $name -Value $value -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null
}
function Set-Dword($path, $name, [int]$value) {
Ensure-Key $path
New-ItemProperty -Path $path -Name $name -Value $value -PropertyType DWord -Force | Out-Null
}
# 1) Classic context menu
Ensure-Key 'HKCU:\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32'
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKCU:\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32' -Name '(default)' -Value '' -Type String
# 2) Faster shutdown
Set-String 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop' 'AutoEndTasks' '1'
Set-String 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop' 'WaitToKillAppTimeout' '2000'
Set-String 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop' 'HungAppTimeout' '2000'
Set-String 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control' 'WaitToKillServiceTimeout' '2000'
# 3) Hide web search
Set-Dword 'HKCU:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer' 'DisableSearchBoxSuggestions' 1
# 4) Disable lock screen
Set-Dword 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Personalization' 'NoLockScreen' 1
# 5) Skip Settings home
Set-String 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer' 'SettingsPageVisibility' 'hide:home'
# 6) Verbose status
Set-Dword 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System' 'verbosestatus' 1
# 7) Menu show delay = 0
Set-String 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop' 'MenuShowDelay' '0'
# 8) Show seconds in clock
Set-Dword 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced' 'ShowSecondsInSystemClock' 1
# 9) Add favorite app on desktop context menu (optional)
# $exe = 'C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe'; $name = 'Notepad++'
# $base = "HKCR:\Directory\Background\shell\$name"
# Ensure-Key $base; Set-String $base 'Icon' "`"$exe`""
# Ensure-Key "$base\Command"; Set-String "$base\Command" '(default)' "`"$exe`""
# Set-String $base 'Position' 'Top' # optional
# 10) LastActiveClick on taskbar
Set-Dword 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced' 'LastActiveClick' 1
# 11) Startup delay removal
Set-Dword 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Serialize' 'StartupDelayInMSec' 0
Set-Dword 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Serialize' 'WaitForIdleState' 0
# Restart Explorer to apply most UI tweaks immediately (safe)
Get-Process explorer -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Stop-Process -Force
Start-Process explorer.exe
Write-Host "Done. Some changes may require a reboot."
I think we all expected the data grab and to have Coprolite shoved down our gullets by MS through W11.
None of that is a surprise, or the adverts, or the insane reminder to install 365 on android when you plug in an iPhone, or the constan nags to get a 365 licence when you have a 365 licence.
But it just doesn't work. It's worse than W98 as basic things.
I couldn't get it to format a USB stick at one point. I can't find anything because MS think it's a good thing to change all the established norms from 30yr of computing. And that's without the deliberate obfuscation that they do as well.
It's just rubbish, a piss poor product.
So my desktop has gone to Mint. Not out of some ideological standpoint but to have something that works reliably.
I am forced to upvote you, because of your use of Coprolite. I've no idea if this is your original gag, but I've never seen it before, and it made me laugh. So congratulations.
Sadly El Reg, in their infinite wisdom, have failed to provide me with a smiling-poo-emoji icon...
Oh dear.
I think I'm going to have to stop calling things "StickyFurSuit", "ExcitingCucumber" etc.
I never have trouble turning the PC off though, if it gets bolshy I just pull the plug out. (It's a work one. We're supposed to be green and save the 'leccy these days.)
...because I will not install Win11 on my own machines (work laptop, unfortunately) -- I am more confident in that than ever.
The boost in confidence is due to finally attempting "the big switch": a toast ---> to the developers of Linux Mint (specifically LMDE) which breathed new life into two much older machines (details below), one which will probably never get used again but was a good candidate in case in blew up in my face, and the other for the kids to use, mostly to learn GIMP and Inkscape -- in its former state it couldn't handle latest versions of either.
Each install took hours, not days as feared -- more time spent updating post-install than the core installation. Just having the USB live version was nice to see how it handled. The Cinnamon OS is easy enough to navigate. The extra "Windows" keys on the keyboard map appropriately. There is a lot of hardware I didn't test -- might need to check drivers -- and much tweaking to do, but they are effectively running a *modern* OS -- and browser, and other software -- with firewalls enabled, and without the vulnerabilities of Windows versions long since expired.
Summary of the experience: Refreshing, better than expected, and way better than installing any version of Windows. These machines were otherwise rubbish and now live again. If you can't handle this much, give up your PC and stick to phone/tablet from now own.
Details:
Machine 1: HP laptop from my father-in-law, previously ran Windows Vista (?), 32-bit, < 500 GB HD, 2 GB RAM, lots and lots of ports and old enough for a DVD drive and PCMCIA slot. Battery still had a charge after sitting around for months/years, and it appeared to keep time! Battery took a charge, too, just really slow, which is good since we know failing batteries tend to "charge" quickly. But the Win install was an illegal pirate from someone shady (not my doing!) so it was borked already and no access to previous data -- I had no qualms nuking & paving it. Due to 32-bit, had to use LMDE instead of regular Mint, but that's fine.
Machine 2: Dell tower, Windows Vista, 64-bit, 500 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, no onboard WiFi. Was our family computer for years, mostly for photo storage/sorting and family finances, plus random online stuff. I had stripped all the useful data years ago when we moved houses and I got our Win10 Lenovo tower. I booted into Vista one more time (no Internet) just to see if it would and to double check its state. Even unplugged, still kept time (fast by a few hours) but ran fine. Then reboot to live USB, nuke & pave -- decided to also use LMDE (64 bit) because of age and I don't need many updates -- this will be for the kids now as told above.
There is a Win8 laptop in a corner, but I'm hoping to send that out for destruction/recycling. The battery is trash, one screen hinge buggered, et cetera.
Future: The mentioned Win10 Lenovo, eventually. I'll probably go for Mint 22 Zara (Ubuntu) or whatever it will be then, because it's always on and should have updates ASAP. No program I can't either find a Linux equivalent, run in WINE, or use open-source already. Most data on external drives -- just have to make sure the live USB will read them. I will not rush into this one, but eventually Windows will be gone from this house!
StartupDelayInMSec and WaitForIdleState sound incredibly useful, thank you!
I could have sworn I was just waiting around on my laptop being as slow as a bag of hammers. I've got to test this but it's nice to know I wasn't going entirely crazy.
Also just to chime in with the shared sentiment: To hell with Windows 11!
Out of frustration at the feature being available in my smartphone for years, I scripted a solution to check an API for sunrise/sunset in my region and enable dark mode at that time. Ridiculous that I've had to run that since Windows 11 arrived in 2021 and nothing native has been released even now.
Why aren't you in charge of Windows development?
The only complaint I have is that my work machine is stitched up tighter then a duck's arse, and that's the one that frustrates me most.
Thanks for all of that. It's surprising how normal it all feels, as though it should always be like this.
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