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I have a couple of older laptops that don’t meet the Windows 11 requirements. They are still decent though, being of the Dell Latitude series. My idea was to do a dual boot by installing Linux (Ubuntu) alongside Windows 10. I found that I can turn off internet access on the Windows side using network adapter settings, but have internet access turned on for the Linux side.

So, after Win 10 EOL, I can still use the internet via the Linux side, but the Windows programs that I’m used to will still be there on the ‘no internet’ side of things.

I haven’t seen that before and a reverse image search didn’t turn up any matches. I was wondering if that’s a hamburger menu at the top (the 3 horizontal lines), and if clicking that would give more info?

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kc27

I see it in my Edge, same version as everyone else in the thread so far, 117.0.2045.60, so I guess that does indicate A/B testing.  It was already turned off when I looked at it. (I rarely use Edge.)

I’d like to try this out as sort of a streamlined browser with few bookmarks, but I didn’t see how to use Chrome extensions. Do you know how to get those? I saw an article that said to install add-on ‘Chrome Store Foxified’, but that isn’t available in the add-ons page.

I had a similar problem recently. You may have already checked this, but make sure both computers are set to *private* network to allow them to see each other. I had one of my pcs set to public and the other couldn’t see it.

Among several other things, StartAllBack ($5) gives the ability to move the taskbar to top, bottom, left or right.

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windbg

I read that somewhere (after the install), and it seemed to make sense to me that if secure boot was on that it wouldn’t allow writing of executables from a USB stick. How would it know that the stick had been made with MCT and hence be safe? Is the BIOS capable of recognizing something in the files created by MCT that would allow them to pass?

Anyway, what’s your take on enabling secure boot now after the install?

Just wanted to note that installing Windows 10 will work. (at least it did for me).

I happened to win a new laptop (Microsoft Surface Go 2) last year that came with Windows 11, but it’s such a low-spec machine that I don’t have much use for it other than as a media player type of device. I’d gotten used to the Windows 10 folder design with folder previews, so I used the Windows 10 media creation tool to do a clean install of Windows 10 on it.

My higher-spec desktop PCs run Windows 11 with StartAllBack and they work fine.

Another option is a freeware program called ‘Folder Painter’. Its primary purpose is to allow you to choose from various colors for your folders, but it also has the effect of removing any previews from the folder cover(s).

It uses the folder icon design from Windows 10 and earlier where the folders are vertical rather than horizontal, so you’ll end  up with a combination of orientations unless you change all of the desktop folders.

I’d like to try a Mac Mini, but two things keep me from doing so: the inability to replace the SSD if it fails, and all the USB ports being on the back of the unit. I use multiple external drives for file backups, and I just don’t see that working very well with the USB ports being on the back. Yes, I could get a USB hub and that might work, but it also might be a cluttered, cumbersome affair.

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Will Fastie

I think it may be alternately phrased as ‘new Edge shortcuts on desktop’. It happened on my machines as well, in both Win 10 and 11. A few days ago, on booting up machines, there was a new shortcut to Edge on the desktop. I deleted the shortcuts and they haven’t reappeared (yet).

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Cybertooth

I read over at another tech site, ghacks.net, that ‘Microsoft 365 Basic replaces OneDrive Standalone 100 GB for no extra cost’.

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/01/12/microsoft-365-basic-here-is-what-we-know-about-the-new-plan/

 

My i5-8500 Windows 11 system was affected by this. I didn’t bother to do benchmarks, but certain tasks that used to take a bit longer than I thought they should are now much faster.

Unrelated, but I also found that Microsoft Edge had put itself into the startup menu with property ‘enabled’, so I disabled that. I’m sure it wasn’t always there and enabled.

Yeah, I tried copying the relevant Windows 10 dll file to Windows 11 to get some of the icons back, but it didn’t work. I prefer the yellow folder download icon as well, although I suppose I’m used to the vertical green arrow now. One thing that definitely was not working for me was the Win 11 folder shortcut arrow, in which the diagonal arrow is very narrow and hard to see (at least for me). I got around that with Winaero Tweaker to get an older curved arrow. I generally don’t use tweaker programs, but that narrow arrow was driving me nuts.

I wanted to thank you for posting this method. One of my computers has a Win 10 Home install, and for some reason the October update was repeatedly failing to install. I looked up error codes, ran checkdisk and SFC, tried manual install, etc. I didn’t really want to do a clean install as the current one isn’t that old. I refreshed the system with your method and everything looked good; up to date through October. At any rate, the November update just came through on that machine and it installed fine, so whatever the glitch was, it seems to be gone.

I don’t do anything to prevent updates besides usually deferring them for a couple of weeks, so this wasn’t a case of ‘user tweaks prevent system from updating correctly’.