W11 - First Thoughts

RBZ5416

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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.
 
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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.
For this reason alone I wish I’d never upgraded. There is no thumbnail preview on folders which significantly decreases usability for me.

In a similar vein for JPEG’s I just cannot open two in new windows concurrently. Regardless of what app I use they open in new tabs.

Disappointed.
 
I've only bothered upgrading one machine in the UK but I put together a new PC this week here in Spain and installed W10 and of course the upgrade option popped up so I upgraded. Apart from some visual changes I can see no benefit at the moment so I'll search to see what the real changes are. Machine boots up and I open a browser and thats about it as far as the OS goes. So long as my browsers run fast and my ham radio software runs I'm happy.
 
There is no thumbnail preview on folders which significantly decreases usability for me.
Not sure what preview you're referring to?
For this reason alone I wish I’d never upgraded.
You can always revert back:

1635804414579.png


I have to say that five days on, I really haven't yet found anything in 11 even vaguely interesting or useful. And I haven't yet figured out how the Taskbar overflow works. When the Taskbar is full, a line appears on it with the last opened app showing. But other apps seem to disappear. In the pic below I opened Photos, which took up the last place on the Taskbar. I then opened Calendar which replaced it & inserted that line. But I can't find any way to reaccess Photos other than Alt+Tab.

1635805322079.png
 
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Yes just rolled back and will be staying on 10 until 2025!
 
Yes, me too. But...

I decided to delete all the partitions on the disk and carried out a fresh, clean install of Windows 10.

I think its too early for Windows 11, like @mtenga I'll wait until 2025.
 

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