Windows 11

You’ve lost any credibility :wink:

Same here. Not being able to ungroup the icons and not being able to drag a file to a taskbar icon* got to be very annoying very quickly.

*for example, you want to upload a picture to gmail or reddit or whatever, you’d minimize your browser, grab the file, drag it to the browser’s taskbar icon, the browser will maximize and you can drop it where you want it. Can’t do that anymore. Now, the only way I’ve been able to find is to minimize everything except the browser, then “un maximize” the browser window and move/resize it so you can see the file you want on your desktop, then you can drag the file to the browser.
I can’t understand why they’d drop such a useful feature.

Reviving this thread to ask if there are any new reasons, not mentioned above, to upgrade (or not) from Win 10 to Win 11 on my two Dell XPS laptops.

Both are working just fine with W10, and I might be willing to take a day or two to upgrade them (and do all the subsequent tweaks) if there’s some significant advantage. But from what I see here, the changes seem mostly cosmetic.

Are there any truly useful or essential functional or security reasons to move up to 11?

There are many unpatched Windows 10 vulnerabilities that should make you want to upgrade to 11 and keep it up-to-date.

Uh… citation?

Windows 10 is supported until next October, so if you believe Microsoft is in fact not supporting Windows 10 I would expect you to provide actual evidence of that assertion.

Maybe you’re thinking about Windows 7?

Thanks. I assumed that patches would still be coming for a while. Speaking of which…

By which you mean October 2025, according to your link.

Yes. Next October, as in October of next year.

9 months from now is this October.

Or did you already forget that this is 2024?

My machine refused to upgrade from 10, it failed every time even though I met all of the requirements. I had to clean install and restore my files and apps from a backup which was kind of a PITA but it worked.

We’ve had whole threads about this, but the way ISTM is that October is far enough off that “next October” means the next one that will happen, i. e., October 2024. Of course, “this October” also means October 2024, so logically one might say that “next October” must mean 2025, but language and people are not always logical. IOW, there’s some ambiguity in all these expressions.

When we talk about days of the week, the whole “this” vs. “next” thing is clearer, and if you had said “next February” I probably would have assumed February 2025. So somewhere between one month away and nine months away, the this/next distinction becomes fuzzy.

Some weird numbers:

You would expect Windows 11 numbers to always keep increasing [users buy new computers with Windows 11 on it while disposing on older computers with Windows 7, 8, 10–and relatively few users change operating systems from what is originally installed except increasing the Windows edition]

A statistical fluke?

Possibly not. My wife and I very recently replaced both of our computers with new Win 11 machines. A failing Win 10 computer and a perfectly fine Win 7 box.
Win 11 is different, not surprising, but doesn’t seem to do anything better, and has some annoying features.
So far we’ve discovered at least one program, PrintMaster Pro, which we have used extensively for many years, that Win 11 refuses to even install.
I suspect there will be others.
Also microsquash very much wants to push everybody onto MS 365 and OneDrive.

I have invested 30+ years of my life into Windows, because my emplotyers required it, but I’m once again considering learning Linux. Or, +gasp+ switching to a Mac.

I suspect I’m not the only one.

My issue is that Win11 puts programs on that are near impossible to get rid of. OneDrive, Teams, etc. Most you can figure how to erase or work around but I still have issues because MicroSoft insists I should save everything in the Cloud.

I would not use any version of Windows, even Windows 10, without first running Tron to get rid of all that stuff.

Yeah, because Apple never forces you to do anything you don’t want to do. (My prejudices are showing, I know. I have resisted the siren lure of Apple for lo! these many years, except for an iPod that I didn’t buy myself, and iTunes because I didn’t know any other way at that time to rip CDs and put the music onto it.)

Anyway, I am glad there is another 18 months or so before Windows 10 loses support. I’m delaying the change as long as possible, just because these changes create a lot of unproductive work that i have to do to just be able to use my computer. Maybe by then I can skip 11 for the next version, so I only have to change once instead of twice.

I can’t imagine life without OneDrive. The horror!

YMMV of course, but that shit works and works well.

You would be wrong, at least if generic “you” means me. I have Windows XP in a VM on my main computer and also as a boot option on another one, and there’s nothing weird about it at all, since XP was around for so long that knowing your way around XP became ingrained, much like riding a bicycle.

I found Windows 7 to be visually more elegant but with a few stupid quirks, like getting into situations where what the left pane of Windows Explorer displays doesn’t match what the right pane displays, causing me several times now to perma-delete an entire folder with hundreds of files when I meant to delete just one file. And a few other things.

And then Windows 10 got ugly again with the “flat” interface that eliminated Aero (which was almost completely useless but cute) and the God-awful stupid “tiles”.

Oh it does work. I just don’t trust it.
I want my data saved locally, where nobody else can get at it, and I don’t have to rely on access to the internet.

An odd data point: Win 10 apparently has some sort of connection to OneDrive, or somesuch. I used to use my wife’s Win 10 computer quite a lot because it was downstairs where the printer was and it saved me running up and down the stairs a lot.
Well, when I was setting up my new Win 11 computer it automatically connected me to OneDrive and I suddenly had access to most of my documents, pictures, and even some music that was on her Win 10 computer.
It saved me a lot of time loading stuff, but of course I then had copy everything onto my D: drive, and then disconnect from OneDrive and redirect where Win 11 wanted to send everything.
(I don’t remember where I found the instructions to do all that. You’ll have to search.)

At one point, Microsoft reduced the size of my personal OneDrive cloud, with very short notice to get stuff off of it before being summarily deleted. The technology works well enough, but they can’t be trusted to maintain it. I use it at work, since the company pays the big bucks for a very high level of service. But for personal use, it’s not reliable.

This has been my experience. They made us update our work laptops to Win11 a while back and it’s usable but has some annoying features. More to it, there’s never been a time on my home PC where I thought “Damn, I wish I was on Win11” but there’s been numerous times on my work laptop where I thought “Why did they change this from Win10?”

It does seem weird that the attrition rate would be high enough to push Win11 numbers downward, though. Even among more tech savvy friends, people who wound up with Win11 stayed with it despite its changes rather than installing Win10 instead.

I’ve got XP running on an old desktop (not connected to the Internet, of course), but I use that machine only for hosting my backup Quicken, printing checks, and occasionally printing a draft for proofreading. Weirdest thing about it is having an almost square monitor screen.

I do have one Win11 laptop, which I’m using primarily for document and email files backup, and to get used to when I finally have to migrate from my Win10 desktops and laptop in October 2025 – that’s when Microsoft will stop supporting Win10, damn their rotten souls.

Big question on migration will be whether my Win10 machines will have enough memory to upgrade to 11.