Windows 11 thoughts

[bykfixer]

So far I'm liking it WAY better than 10.

How about you?

 

[3_gun]

What isn't better than Win10?

I'd rather (&do) use XPsp3 & Win7. I have Win10 if I need it but I will in no way shape or form get/allow Win11 on my system(s). Happily I'm old enough that I'll never have to before I'm dead

 

[bykfixer]

Somebody told me there was a Windows 8 but I never actually saw that one in use. I had Vista on a Gateway for a moment and couldn't get rid of that one fast enough. For that computer I had a beta version of 7 installed with an expiration date of 12/31/2999. Don't know how the kid did it but it still works.

XP never seemed to play nice with my photo editor at the time but when 7 was installed my computer suddenly sprang to life. Nothing against XP as it was a good OS, but I just liked 7 better. XP was no doubt the favorite OS of many and still is today.

Windows 11 is new to me so I'm just learning the new setup. But the learning curve is like non existent. It's like Windows is now part computer, part smart phone. I don't want apps on my computer, I want software. So that'll take some getting used to. I uninstalled nearly all that came with my new computer. News, weather, amazon movies etc are gone. Short term like so far is being able to snooze pop up's from constantly reminding you you're not online and your virus protection hadn't been updated in 4 days... and like that there.

I suppose in time I'll find things about Windows 11 irk me, yet a few hours in there have not been any. With 10 I found that one annoying within the first 5 minutes and found myself wanting to toss the laptop like a frisbee in the first hour.

Some say Microsoft used ideas from apple and google to smooth out the edges in this new OS. Google's android left me years ago so I don't know about android touches. Apple's mac is way over priced for my wants so I do not know where Windows uses Mac ideas. If they did, good on them. All's the better, right. Afterall they all stole from IBM, so what's new? All I know is this new 11 and I play nice together much like 7 and I once did.

 

[Toulouse42]

Win 10 was a real PITA. I "upgraded" two computers when Win 10 came out and it broke both so that I needed to do a full reinstall (of Win7). Luckily neither was important. After that I pretty much gave up and stuck with Win7. Only last month I bought a new PC with Win11 and so far I'm pretty happy. I only did that because of the constant warning messages and the fact that a couple of programs I used finally stopped working. We replaced my wife's PC last year with one running Win11 and she has been fine with it. Mind you I have kept my old Win7 PC as my backup. It still does 90%+ of what I need.

 

[Toulouse42]

bykfixer I agree. Over the years I (mostly) avoided Win Vista, 8 and 10. Plus the one that came after Windows 98. I also use MS Office 2010 and refuse to upgrade despite the constant nagging. My wife uses the Adobe Photoshop group of programs and one day that just stopped working as "Win7 was no longer supported". That's what prompted her upgrade. Mind you both our PCs were 10 years old so we got good use out of them.

 

[bykfixer]

Windows had a "2000" and one called millenium. That may have been the same OS with different names? When I met my wife she was using it and that's what prompted me to buy the Gateway. It came with Vista. Anything had to be better than 2000..... or so I thought. I considered going backward to XP until a young lad in the family said "I can hook you up with 7". After reading how well 7 did for photo editing I chose that route. I was all in with photography at the time.

Speaking of photography, I went looking for a RAW thumbnail viewer since photoshop only let you view one RAW at a time and found one called Fastone that is not only a great thumbnail viewer it is actually a pretty good editor. It works for Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Pentax, and Sony RAW files. I downloaded it for 7 and 10. I haven't tried it for 11 yet. It's a nice, lightweight editor that does a lot. No white balance adjustment though.

I'm using whichever Office was available on my 07 Gateway and never even activated the starter on my 012 laptop or the one that uses 10. I may install Office on the Windows 11 computer but Mrs Fixer has Office 10 on her Vaio so I really don't need it. I get enough "office" at the office. 😉 It's a bit like that mechanic who drives a junky car because he gets tired of working on cars all day and just keeps driving the jalopy until the wheels fall off.

 

[chillinn]

This guy deletes the Program Files in Windows 11 to see what would happen. It really doesn't get interesting until about the 9:20 mark, which mostly confirms what I always expected about Windows "upgrades," which is that underneath everything, Windows is still NT with many layers and layers of lipstick. I would prefer to run NT, of which there were 64-bit versions, and if could be made to run on modern processors, would be blazing fast, stable, but likely not very secure, though reasonably secure through obscurity, because no attackers would be targeting NT anymore.

NT, of course, was developed by Dave Cutler at Digital, who when poached by Microsoft, took not only his team with him, he took DEC's intellectual property, namely, NT. But a lot like how Xerox PARC didn't mind sharing ideas about their pioneering GUI interfaces with Apple and Microsoft, who both then copied Xerox's novel ideas for great profits that Xerox never realized, Digital wasn't all that interested in NT, which is why Cutler left in the first place. But to be clear, even though he developed NT, he also stole the data and the storage it was kept on and gave it to Microsoft, which became the basis for 2000, XP, 2007, 2010, 2011, and all the Server versions of Windows, making a mind-boggling fortune for Microsoft. Digital, a monster of computing technology since shortly after 1957, ended up being acquired by Compaq in 1998.

 

[idleprocess]

Windows had a "2000" and one called millenium. That may have been the same OS with different names?

Windows ME (Millennium Edition) was essentially Windows 98 Third Edition while Windows 2000 was effectively Windows NT 5.0.

ME was a consumer OS through and through based on the old '9x cooperative multitasking kernel. It was generally good enough in this role in an era when a large slice of the market was still dialing in to the internet and multi-CPU desktop computers were rarities in the hands of dedicated hobbyists. It would also be the last iteration of '9x.

2000 was a more modern preemptive multitasking kernel with direct roots in the prior business-focused Windows NT 4. Windows 2000 is where all modern Windows OSs came from - XP, Vista, 8x, 10, 11 all draw relatively clean lines to Windows 2000 modernizing the NT interfaces and tools into something that could work in the consumer and business space with the capabilities to handle modern multicore hardware. I ran it for many years - only abandoning it once MSFT ended support for it - and miss the simplicity of the interface relative to what's come since.

 

[bykfixer]

^^ I liked this even about 40% went "phew" over my head.

 

[idleprocess]

^^ I liked this even about 40% went "phew" over my head.

One of the main takeaways is the difference between cooperative and preemptive multitasking. Cooperative multitasking gives the OS less control over the applications it's running, meaning a hung or crashing application may not relinquish resources (clock cycles, memory) and the OS can do little about it. Preemptive multitasking gives the OS far more control should an application hang, crash, or hog resources - the OS can usually correct the process's resource utilization or kill it if necessary. This difference is why modern NT-based Windows doesn't hang or BSOD as often as its 9x predacessor did.

 

[chillinn]

Also, Me is a direct descendant of 98, 95, 3.1, 2.0, & Windows 1.0, and like those was based on MS-DOS, originally a GUI running on top of DOS. NT and descendants 2000, XP, et al., is not based on MS-DOS, though it supports DOS. IOW, NT and decedents don't run on top of a lower layer OS. NT (plus the userland, APIs, drivers) is the OS. MS-DOS runs on top of NT.

This contrasts greatly with modern macOS, which runs on top of Darwin BSD, which is the underlying OS. macOS is xnu kernel, BSD userland, drivers, Cocoa, Carbon and now Swift APIs, and Quartz Compositor rendering the GUI.

Linux desktop distros are similar to macOS, but with linux kernel, GNU userland, various APIs and various window managers to run their many choices of GUI desktops.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

This guy deletes the Program Files in Windows 11 to see what would happen. It really doesn't get interesting until about the 9:20 mark, which mostly confirms what I always expected about Windows "upgrades," which is that underneath everything, Windows is still NT with many layers and layers of lipstick. I would prefer to run NT, of which there were 64-bit versions, and if could be made to run on modern processors, would be blazing fast, stable, but likely not very secure, though reasonably secure through obscurity, because no attackers would be targeting NT anymore.

NT, of course, was developed by Dave Cutler at Digital, who when poached by Microsoft, took not only his team with him, he took DEC's intellectual property, namely, NT. But a lot like how Xerox PARC didn't mind sharing ideas about their pioneering GUI interfaces with Apple and Microsoft, who both then copied Xerox's novel ideas for great profits that Xerox never realized, Digital wasn't all that interested in NT, which is why Cutler left in the first place. But to be clear, even though he developed NT, he also stole the data and the storage it was kept on and gave it to Microsoft, which became the basis for 2000, XP, 2007, 2010, 2011, and all the Server versions of Windows, making a mind-boggling fortune for Microsoft. Digital, a monster of computing technology since shortly after 1957, ended up being acquired by Compaq in 1998.

Chillinn, you know your NT history. This is how I remember the story also.

NT was honestly hard to crash. I could go for 6 months on my NT machine without a serious issue, where the Win95 machines would crash several times a day, taking all open files with it.

 

[chillinn]

I worked as a prepress operator at a commercial printer in the 1990's. The RIP (rasterizing image processor, everything going to the imagesetter ran through it) software ran on NT 4.0 on a 64-bit DEC Alpha. That machine ran 24/7 and never rebooted from the time it was installed in 1996 until I left in 1998.

 

[bykfixer]

Windows ME (Millennium Edition) was essentially Windows 98 Third Edition while Windows 2000 was effectively Windows NT 5.0.

ME was a consumer OS through and through based on the old '9x cooperative multitasking kernel. It was generally good enough in this role in an era when a large slice of the market was still dialing in to the internet and multi-CPU desktop computers were rarities in the hands of dedicated hobbyists. It would also be the last iteration of '9x.

2000 was a more modern preemptive multitasking kernel with direct roots in the prior business-focused Windows NT 4. Windows 2000 is where all modern Windows OSs came from - XP, Vista, 8x, 10, 11 all draw relatively clean lines to Windows 2000 modernizing the NT interfaces and tools into something that could work in the consumer and business space with the capabilities to handle modern multicore hardware. I ran it for many years - only abandoning it once MSFT ended support for it - and miss the simplicity of the interface relative to what's come since.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Do you still use XP since 2000 is no longer a viable option?

My first computer at work was a DOS number I really liked. Big ole green screen with whopping (iirc) 32mb hard drive. Word Perfect was the only software in the world that mattered in my view. I could mis-spell a word, erase it, correct it and nobody saw the error like with hand written documents. Sticky Bear typing was to me like Solitaire to some. Loved that game and got better at typing as a result. Life was good (and simple).

"The man" decided I needed Windows. Probably 3.0(?). Hated it. They needed somebody to take the junky old computer so they could have an NT version. One day my DOS machine was gone. In its place was the Windows computer. I did like the flying toasters screen saver.

So far using 11 is kinda like going back in time to what I recall about 95. Maybe it's from using an iPhone and Windows klepto'd much from apple, but I've found it more user friendly for turning stuff off. The idea being to keep it a non-internet, dial up speed era machine that can edit photos while listening to a media player playlist. I picked a gamer for the ability to multi-task without breaking a sweat.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

I worked as a prepress operator at a commercial printer in the 1990's. The RIP (rasterizing image processor, everything going to the imagesetter ran through it) software ran on NT 4.0 on a 64-bit DEC Alpha. That machine ran 24/7 and never rebooted from the time it was installed in 1996 until I left in 1998.

Impressive. That's totally believable based on my own experiences with NT 4.

 

[raggie33]

What freaks me out about Microsoft why is there Xbox os is way bigger then there windows 11 I mean windows does way more

 

[idleprocess]

Do you still use XP since 2000 is no longer a viable option?

No. My prior desktop (2009-2019) was almost certainly originally XP then migrated to '7 and then '10. The present 2019 workstation was installed with '10 from the start. The pre-2009 machine was '2000 with a reluctant migration to XP - back in the days of my desktops seeing 3-5 years of service.

 

[bykfixer]

At my work we use company issued laptops that originally had Windows 7, then one by one were upgraded to 10. It was pretty seamless actually considering a few thousand computers were switched in about a week. You'd have an appointment with a fellow who would do the migration (I guess it was called).

I was a fly in the ointment so to speak because in order for the guy to do the change he had to back up your laptop. Well being old school I kinda figured a 500gb hard drive means you store 500 gb worth of stuff on it. Mine had about 200gb in files, which totally freaked the guy out. "Why is your hard drive so full?"
I'm like "well because I keep my files local".
Him: "Yeah but we have the cloud now".
Me: "but I keep my files local because I don't always have internet access".
Him: "that's the craziest thing I've ever heard".
Me: "so can you do this or not?"
Him" well, it's going to take a while".

He ends up doing the switch and pushed a few buttons or something so that one drive could send all my old files next time I was online. It took about 2 weeks for all of the files to show up. I had the stuff I really needed right away on a flssh drive.

Thing is if he had just been cool about it, I would have handed him the 2TB portable hard drive in the laptop bag I used to back up the computer the night before.

He has a nice big long desk with electric raise and lower, a few nice chairs to pick from and a server in the next room. My desk is a steering wheel of a pickup truck and my server is stored in a laptop bag. My internet connection is a hot spot on a phone that at times causes me to long for dial up speeds. "Why is my hard drive so full? Shut the front door."

Anyway, Windows 10 (not sure which version) has been playing nice with that HP so far. I set it up to look like my old 7 and really can't tell a difference anymore.

I remember this one day I was at the actual office doing some printing when the lights dimmed briefly then came back on. Suddenly everybody in the place start talking to each other "your computer working?" "No". "Mine niether". Their boss says "you can all go home because the server is down for the day". Everybody files out except for one old dude who kept working. Like me, he keeps his work local and wasn't affected. I called the IT twirp on my cellular phone and asked "got internet there boss?" He says "no but we're working on it". I said "now you know why my laptop had 200gb worth of stuff on the hard drive". He hung up on me. 😉

 

[idleprocess]

Speaking of, my work laptop is sending ever more urgent messages regarding the Windows 11 update that my organization requires. Co-workers are reporting a ~45 minute affair along with all the usual UI 'enhancements' that do helpfully away with longstanding conventions such as pinned applications. I can hardly wait - and won't have to since the clock counts down to zero within a few hours.

 

[Toulouse42]

Incidentally, I had a HP printer a few years back that stopped working days out of warranty. It kept reporting "out of paper" even though there was plenty of paper in the tray. The problem was some plastic pinwheel that broke and was not replaceable or serviceable. I had to junk a perfectly good printer because of that. Needless to say I won't buy HP again.