RBZ5416
Outstanding Member
So, much against my usual approach of "If it ain't broke...", I accepted the offer to upgrade my Lenovo S540 (Ryzen 5) laptop. These are just my initial thoughts that others will hopefully add to. Upgrade went without a hitch & so far, everything still works.
First thing that jumped out was a larger Taskbar with larger icons, that seemed to jump around a bit. I had mine set to small previously. Turns out MS have removed the options to resize the Taskbar. You can do it with a registry hack, but they've also included the date in the time window, & that doesn't resize. So is partially obscured. The jumping around is because by default, Taskbar icons are centred on the bar, so as you open software the icons reposition themselves. I found that quite distracting but fortunately you can disable it & tie the Taskbar to the left.
Reduced context menus are a little annoying. Right click gives you what MS want you to see with "More options" at the bottom. Again this is fixed unless you want to hack the registry to enable the full menu.
Start Menu now only shows pinned items with a search bar & an "All Apps" button to see the full program list.
Settings has a cleaner layout.
On first impressions, the GUI seems to have stepped back a few generations, with File Explorer folders looking somewhat 3.1-ish. But no issues otherwise & will get used to it soon enough I guess.
Windows Hello via the Lenovo's IR camera now finally works in low light. Used to fail miserably when working in the evening or even on dull days, but now much, much better.
No sign of the Android app support yet but that's supposedly being rolled out later. Bluestacks & Your Phone still seem to work fine for what I need for now though.
So in summary, word is that it was intended to more Mac-like. They've certainly achieved that to a degree by removing control of the Taskbar & context menus! But overall I'd say this was more Windows 10.1 than a whole new OS.
First thing that jumped out was a larger Taskbar with larger icons, that seemed to jump around a bit. I had mine set to small previously. Turns out MS have removed the options to resize the Taskbar. You can do it with a registry hack, but they've also included the date in the time window, & that doesn't resize. So is partially obscured. The jumping around is because by default, Taskbar icons are centred on the bar, so as you open software the icons reposition themselves. I found that quite distracting but fortunately you can disable it & tie the Taskbar to the left.
Reduced context menus are a little annoying. Right click gives you what MS want you to see with "More options" at the bottom. Again this is fixed unless you want to hack the registry to enable the full menu.
Start Menu now only shows pinned items with a search bar & an "All Apps" button to see the full program list.
Settings has a cleaner layout.
On first impressions, the GUI seems to have stepped back a few generations, with File Explorer folders looking somewhat 3.1-ish. But no issues otherwise & will get used to it soon enough I guess.
Windows Hello via the Lenovo's IR camera now finally works in low light. Used to fail miserably when working in the evening or even on dull days, but now much, much better.
No sign of the Android app support yet but that's supposedly being rolled out later. Bluestacks & Your Phone still seem to work fine for what I need for now though.
So in summary, word is that it was intended to more Mac-like. They've certainly achieved that to a degree by removing control of the Taskbar & context menus! But overall I'd say this was more Windows 10.1 than a whole new OS.
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