Windows 11 thoughts

[idleprocess]

A client desktop can be tested quickly in hours or days, but a critical production server that can't be down may take much longer, should, really, because that's the thing that makes money. FWIW, IT never makes money, only loses money, but smart enterprise will make that losing investment or suffer the consequences.

A standalone lab environment - which isn't directly tied to that the enterprise's raison d'être making money - can be put through a series of tests in short order that will replicate everything the production environment sees over the course of months so as to vet out problems and ensure the upgrade window is acceptably short. Lab environments can - and have been - trashed in the course of such testing and that's just life.

Planning a major upgrade at work this year of such magnitude that it will involve rolling an entirely new lab environment.

 

[Stress_Test]

I might have to look at a new PC soon since I've got Windows 7 now and it looks like it's falling off the curve of being supported (Edge browser for example, saw the last release compatible with Win7 was in Jan)

I'm thinking I keep my tower PC as-is and just get a basic Windows 11 pc (maybe laptop) for Internet stuff and anything that requires the latest and greatest updates.

Only issue I have with 7 is that my old 32-bit software won't run on it, but my dad has a pretty new Win-11 laptop that runs all his old software no problem. I mean really old stuff...

 

[PhotonWrangler]

Speaking of really old programs, we had a program that ran on DOS. The newest machine tha could run it was XP. When that machine finally gave out, we had to scramble to find something else to get by untill we could import the program's data into something more modern. We wound up using FreeDOS for it. Works like a champ on Win 10.

 

[chillinn]

FreeDOS is pretty awesome in that it is still in active development.

Just saw this,
Has Windows Become Spyware? regarding Windows 11 telemetry compared to XP, and thought others would find interesting.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

Windows telemetry seems to get a little worse with each new version.

 

[Lights and Guns]

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

How about you?

I stayed using Win. 7 for as long as I could. Up until about 2 months ago and made the upgrade to win. 11

Skipped Win. 10 because I absolutely hated it.

I will say, Win. 11 is by far WAY better than Win 7 and am very happy with my choice to start using it.

Night and day difference

 

[bykfixer]

I have one laptop that uses 7. It's only been online twice. First time to install 7, next time to update it for a usb c cord to work. Moving tunes from a phone via mico usb was slow but until I updated, moving a small pdf file via usb c took like an hour. Seriously. It was bad. After the update it worked like it should from a usb c cord.

At one point the thing started running really slow and got hot. Thinking one of the songs I downloaded from my phone may have had a fatal virus I learned how to know what was running even though I didn't use it. Turned off all that crap and deleted software I don't use and she runs good again, albeit slow on occasion. Nice and cool nearly all the time too. It's almost always the media player that bogs down.

With Windows 11 it's like a nice change but even that shiney new media player bogs down sometimes. Yet overall I like it so far.

 

[Toulouse42]

I have to say that Microsoft programmers for many years have had the belief that they know better than me how to do what I want to do. We used MS Office 2000 for years and were happy with it (still not a patch on Wordperfect). When MS Office 2010 came out we had to use it because of a merger. Pretty, certainly but they basically moved all the menus around so that the knowledge gained over many years that enabled us all to work quickly and efficiently was suddenly worthless. This is what they do. Juggle stuff around so you think you have a brand new system. Someone earlier in this thread referred to layers of lipstick. A perfect description.

By the way, I use VLC Media Player and am happy with it.

 

[RCS1300]

Lipstick. Yes, two extra coats.

I went from win 98 to 7 Pro to 11 Pro. Only reason I migrated to 11 Pro is that Microsoft stopped supporting 7 Pro. I also had to purchase a new desktop computer to accommodate the software. All the new computer added was a newer video card. The new Office Software was disappointing for the price. So, overall not too thrilled.

 

[Stress_Test]

We've had Win-10 on our gov computers for a few years now. I haven't found it to be all that bad (we'd had Win-7).

Only 2 things I can't stand:

1: The search in 10 is just awful. Sits there and grinds forever and then usually doesn't pull up what I want, even when I've searched for the name of the actual file (and just can't remember where it is).

My home windows 7 (and older PCs too) are always fast to search, and the wildcard * works well. Since I put an SSD in my Win-7 machine at home, the search is blazing fast. Somehow it's been completely screwed up in Windows 10.

2: Win-10 has a weird bug, when you have a folder window open, it acts like you randomly hit the "home" key and it scrolls the top of the window. Super annoying when I'm browsing through a bunch of photos; I'll be scrolled down halfway in the window and it'll randomly reset back to the very top. I searched online and tried a few of the suggested fixes but it didn't help.

I REALLY hope Win-11 will be better in those two areas....

 

[idleprocess]

2: Win-10 has a weird bug, when you have a folder window open, it acts like you randomly hit the "home" key and it scrolls the top of the window. Super annoying when I'm browsing through a bunch of photos; I'll be scrolled down halfway in the window and it'll randomly reset back to the very top. I searched online and tried a few of the suggested fixes but it didn't help.

I experience something similar. Open a directory with a lot of files showing thumbnails and they will display in some initial default order (I've never bothered to figure out what this order is) while Explorer furiously builds an index of the preferred order. At some point this index finishes and it refreshes the directory display. I've found that beyond ~2000 files this effect becomes more pronounced and oftentimes it's far faster to force-restart the explorer.exe process.

 

[letschat7]

I'm getting an Windows 11 PC soon and I will be installing Linux on it. 10 and 11 aren't worth using and 7 hasn't been any good since the telemetry update.

 

[bykfixer]

I moved a bunch of iPhone pix to my 11 clad computer @Stress_Test that are in their "folders" from the phone itself. Not very many in each folder, a few hundred at most. Anyway, when scrolling down the thumbnails, the photo viewer does not suddenly launch back to the top like you say your 10 does.
I use a software called fastone for photo viewing and editing but before installing that I did try the 11 photo viewer some. It's pretty much like the 10 viewer, which I was glad to see works similar to Office photo viewer that Windows did away with. Not that it's all that and a bag of chips yet it at least lets you resize and other basic steps.

 

[bykfixer]

My company has a bunch of proprietary stuff designed to work on Windows 10. One tool I like is a photo to pdf maker that automatically sends the scan to your one drive. No more scan and email it, wait for the email then save as.

If history repeats Windows 45 will be out before we upgrade to 11 due to all of those proprietary tools.

 

[ampdude]

I would like to get it, but I don't really care, I'm fine with 10. I've seen 11 and not sure what the improvements are for me. I don't know why I'd be sold on it other than that I'd be forced into it. Remember when they said Windows 10 was going to be the last Windows? You'd have to be brain dead to buy that.

 

[ampdude]

My company has a bunch of proprietary stuff designed to work on Windows 10. One tool I like is a photo to pdf maker that automatically sends the scan to your one drive. No more scan and email it, wait for the email then save as.

If history repeats Windows 45 will be out before we upgrade to 11 due to all of those proprietary tools.

I don't know if this is still true, but I heard up until recently the U.S. Navy is still on Windows XP on most of their systems and pays Microsoft for updates. That makes sense from what I saw in my 6.5 years in the military doing commo stuff.. and a lot of other things.

 

[idleprocess]

I don't know if this is still true, but I heard up until recently the U.S. Navy is still on Windows XP on most of their systems and pays Microsoft for updates. That makes sense from what I saw in my 6.5 years in the military doing commo stuff.. and a lot of other things.

Every couple of years the internet loses its mind whenever they learn of some ATM that crashed to desktop and that it's running an ancient OS like Windows NT or something even more exciting like Novell Netware. Despite the great gnashing of teeth that results nothing comes of it. These OSs - while obviously quite old - are reasonably hardened against the threats they face from the user. The touchscreens, keypads, etc are limited both in terms of hardware and software to interacting with the ATM application. The hardware and software is reasonably hardened against local threats and generally designed to fail safe while reliably sounding an alarm via its uplink. The ATM networks themselves are thoroughly isolated from the larger internet making them unprofitable to attack. As such the approach chosen by enterprising criminals is to physically break into the things.

The proverbial Windows for Warships could be made adequately robust despite being based on XP. Proper isolation, a stripped-down hardened kernel, solid application cert enforcement, and physically hardened server-grade hardware could work quite well.

 

[ampdude]

I'm still about about Windows 2000, but that's just me. 7 and 10 are fine though. XP well.. it was usable, unlike you know.. Vista and 8

I've been battle hardened against MS O/S's to not do anything with the new one for a few years. I've brought machines out of the graveyard on 95B 95C and 98.. 98SE.. and even Windows Me.. that should be impressive to anyone.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

I'm still about about Windows 2000, but that's just me. 7 and 10 are fine though. XP well.. it was usable, unlike you know.. Vista and 8

I've been battle hardened against MS O/S's to not do anything with the new one for a few years. I've brought machines out of the graveyard on 95B 95C and 98.. 98SE.. and even Windows Me.. that should be impressive to anyone.

I'm with you. I won't jump on the next O/S just because it's shiny and new. Let them get the kinks out first and let the U/I settle down.

 

[kaichu dento]

Don't remember the last version that gave me trouble, though my past had it's share of them, but both 8 and 10 have worked well enough for me and I see no reason to change until I hear fanfare from actual users that it's actually worth making the leap.