Friday, 2021 Oct 8                    Windows 11 Review (Preliminary)

The computer (named Stirling) is new, home built, first booted in February, 2021. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Processor, ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Motherboard, Corsair Force MP600 500GB M.2, plus 7 rotating disks for a total of 24TB. It ran Windows 10 Professional, fully updated, now Windows 11 Professional. It met every requirement for the "upgrade" to Windows 11 and then some.

The Good News:

After backing up Windows 10, the Win 11 installation was done "in place" on Stirling using the Windows 11 Installation Assistant. It booted up just once, and was ready to go with Windows 11. Impressive:

• Even the placement of the icons on my double-monitor desktop is unchanged.  
• Every application (e.g. .exe) still works, including some that are 20 years old. 
• I have written thousands of lines of code in command-line script, and all of that still works. 
• Even the Windows 10 bugs are still there. If you use command-line script, you know what I mean. 
• So the good news is that Microsoft didn't break the really important stuff.

The Bad News:

• Toolbars can no longer be attached to the taskbar. This is huge, more about it below. 
• Some Windows utilities, such as the Task Manager, are no longer accessible through the taskbar. 
• Sound is changed - the maximum volume is much lower on my two HDMI monitors, too soft to hear. I'll work on that.
• Certain screens are flaky, e.g. right-click menus may disappear for no reason, and you have to right-click again.
• Menus are different, for no obvious reason. Not better, just different, especially the right-click menus. 
• Things that were accessible with one click now often require two or more clicks. Windows is harder to use.

So What?:

Except for the loss of toolbars, all of those "bad news" items are minor problems. There is a workaround for each of them, though I certainly made very good use of toolbars on the taskbar and will search high and low for the best functional equivalent. I WANT MY TOOLBARS! They saved a lot of mouse clicks and provided a kind of personal environment. Taking them away was a huge mistake. I hope there's a registry patch, or a simple executable that will do what the taskbar did in Win 10.

Bottom line: In my opinion Windows 11 is not at all better, just different, and not in a good way. There is probably a marketing reason why Microsoft created Windows 11. Perhaps it will help sell Windows and Windows-based computers to new buyers. It does help to enforce some security enhancements, so that's a good thing. Otherwise, for long-time loyal users like me, it's just a pain in the you know what.

My advice: 

Don't upgrade yet. I wish I hadn't. Maybe I'll roll it back.