Say hello to these new Windows 11 features

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WINDOWS 11 By Lance Whitney The next flavor of Windows kicks in several new features, some interesting and hopefully helpful, and others not so much.
[See the full post at: Say hello to these new Windows 11 features]

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lmacri, abbodi86

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Are there many basic Windows (10) users like me? I browse news sites all day (BBC, CBC mostly), receive and send the occasional email with a third party client (Pegasus) or on my email provider’s web site, do my online banking (now with an OTP acquired each time via an app on my wife’s smartphone), chat on Skype with a friend in the States and my son in Malaysia, and play Solitaire, which oddly on my PC doesn’t seem to have the advertising that’s on my two laptops.

And that’s about it. I marvel at the complicated problems and questions and answers on AskWoody and follow Forum discussions I find interesting or useful, but whether to manually download and install individual updates? Forget it! I religiously defer—Sorry, pause (“defer” seems to involve complicated registry stuff I have no interest in or any need to learn, so far at least)—updates for five weeks and resume them according to Susan’s go-ahead notices.

So Teams holds no attraction or interest beyond the vague worry that Skype will get scrapped, and Widgets? Heck, I managed somehow—but I’ve forgotten how so don’t ask me—to open Windows without signing in every time and directly to the desktop instead of the Start page, just like I have since Win 3.1 (forgive me if my memory is incorrect about its opening screen; it’s been a while . . .), so I simply don’t see the weather tile or any of the other possible live tiles anyway. Besides, the weather site provided rarely provides an accurate picture for my area, so I have a slew of weather links in a bookmark bar folder that are more reliable. The Windows key gets me to pinned tiles like Settings, Update & Security, and Calculator (mostly to compare Celsius and Fahrenheit) when I need them.

Basically I’ve been untroubled by any of the new versions of Windows since 3.1, including the so-called disasters like Vista and ME that didn’t affect my normal usage at all so I have no idea what the fuss was all about, and I don’t expect the eventual upgrade to 11 to make much difference to me. Will I feel more secure? If I can’t install Avira after decades of use, I’ll be annoyed but I suppose I’ll live with whatever MS Defender provides since AskWoody has repeatedly said it’s good enough.

Am I a lucky, ordinary, or minimal user? What kind of things do more advanced users do with their computers that upgrades appear to mess up?

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rc primak, doriel

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Am I a lucky, ordinary, or minimal user? What kind of things do more advanced users do with their computers that upgrades appear to mess up?

Oridinary user, mr. Wayne.

Some of the problems with updates appears when users try to customise Windows by:
++ “fiddlin” with registry
++ tweaking Windows performance by disabling certain services
++ moving system folders and files

Usually, such changes may not impact the system. But if, for example, someone runs PowerShell script, that he downloaded from somewhere in order to install custom theme to the system, it may cause problems. Sometimes update fails even with non-customised systems as well.. so have your fingers crossed and the best way to avoid failing updates is to do not hurry and do not patch ASAP.

I religiously defer—Sorry, pause (“defer” seems to involve complicated registry stuff I have no interest in or any need to learn, so far at least)—updates for five weeks and resume them according to Susan’s go-ahead notices.

Thats the correct ordinary user attitude.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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rc primak, Wayne

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And people mess up Windows and cause updates problems by over-cleaning the Windows Registry.

OEM drivers have also been a major cause of update failures and issues. Those are not the end-user’s fault.

-- rc primak

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Skype appears to be headed for “deprecation” — i.e., the scrap heap of Windows history.

Teams is the new Skype. But it is more significant than this.

Lance probably knows about the Your Phone experiment in Windows 10. Only select advanced (and pricey) Samsung smartphones can share apps with Windows 10 via Your Phone. The experiment has not caught on downstream with mid-priced Android smartphones, and never has had a working iPhone version capable of sharing Apple Store apps.

So the ability to natively run Android apps on the PC is going to allow Teams and Your Phone to be a more limited experiment, with a greater possibility of gaining downstream support for more mid-priced Android phones.

At least that’s what I’ve gleaned from people who are following the tech press buzz about these changes in Windows 11.

The other main selling point seems to be hardware and firmware security improvements. These include Intel’s fixes for Meltdown, Spectre and other attack scenarios. As well as some sorts of hardware-level virtualization, which is way over my head technically but promises to improve security and performance on capable hardware.

To implement these upgrades on any Intel 6th Gen Skylake chip or many 7th Gen chips would slow these systems by up to 30 percent. Hence the cutoff point announced by Microsoft. AMD chips have similar performance cutoffs, though not being an AMD person, I forget which chips are not eligible for the upgrade. TPM 2.0 is only a minor piece of the security and virtualization matrix.

I agree with Lance that Start 11 will be a good addition for Windows 11 users who want a useful Start Menu. Being also a Linux user, I see the Windows 11 default Start Menu as sort of a parallel with the GNOME Activities Menu, which I loathe and detest. It also reminds me of the Ubuntu Frequent Apps display, which I also loathe and detest.

As with Windows, Linux users have choices. Unlike Windows users, we get to make our choices without third-party software, though GNOME Shell Extensions are technically third-party software. So I see both worlds as running sort-of in parallel. Can’t Windows just develop a Launcher Panel on the left side of the desktop and be done with it? As in the Unity Desktop for Ubuntu? (There’s even a Linux fork called Ubuntu Unity, but I digress…)

We shall see how all of this plays out over the next couple of years, as Windows 11 is released, updated and gets its first Feature Update. Since I already had to replace my own PC recently, I am looking forward to the joys and challenges ahead, both for Windows and for Linux. And yes, I upgraded a bit ahead of the hardware curve, partly to insure Windows 11 compatibility.

-- rc primak

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I spent a week or two looking at Windows 11, testing faithful Windows 10 registry tweaks and sundry scripts I use to coerce Window into behaving how I want, checking for proliferation of services, scheduled tasks, etc.

In the end I decided ‘meh!’, wiped my test laptop and clean-installed Windows 10 back on it again. Personally I think Windows 11 is still a long way from prime time and the look’n’feel leaves me cold. That and the new hardware requirements means I’ll very probably be giving it a complete miss when finally the RTM version is rolled out.

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doriel, Charlie, Cybertooth

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Wheres the shut down button in the new start page?

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Charlie

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Maybe try –  Alt – File – Exit ?  That works with most Windows including 3.1 which is what this is looking like more and more.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Geo wrote:

Wheres the shut down button in the new start page?

Power button at bottom right:

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rc primak, Geo

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At least with barb wire on your bum fodder you know what’s going to happen.

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I presume this should have been a reply to the post below?

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b wrote:

Power button at bottom right:

Wow, that looks exactly like the Power Button on a Chromebook.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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It’s been an international standard icon for 48 years:

The IEC power symbol—or, more formally, IEC 60417-5009—was synthesized from the language of the earliest binary switches, which were marked with an I and an O to denote, respectively, a closed electrical circuit (device on) and an open circuit (device off). In 1973, these two symbols were combined into one now-familiar icon, the official definition of which was, initially, “standby setting,” although common connotation (and a 2002 Lawrence Berkeley National Labs report) now wins out when most of us call it the “power symbol.”

The IEC Power Symbol (IEC 60417-5009). 2002. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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rc primak

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Geo wrote:

Wheres the shut down button in the new start page?

b wrote:

Power button at bottom right:

In other words, our other left!  😊

-- rc primak

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Oh, you mean Microsoft’s latest marketing ploy?  No thank you.  I need Microsoft’s “features” like I need barbed wire on my toilet paper…

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Charlie

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