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.

2021 09 17                                           Forte and Windows 11 

Windows 11 sort of sneaked up on me. My fault of course, not paying attention, but Microsoft says October 5, 2021, less than three weeks from today. We'll see. 

Microsoft did have an application called the "PC Health Check App," which could run on a destination computer and determine whether that computer met their Windows 11 requirements, but the scuttlebutt is that it was thoroughly flawed (with source code unavailable of course) and it has been withdrawn. As of today, September 17, the page for it still says "COMING SOON."  It's been coming soon for a while now.

However, there is a page on Microsoft.com which does purport to set forth the requirements for Windows 11.  Happily, there are others besides Microsoft who have read these requirements and put them in an application. In particular, there is a Windows application called WhyNotWin11.exe on GitHub: This app is open source and peer reviewed (unlike any Microsoft apps), written by by Robert Maehl, downloaded 869,000 times so far. Might be a good thing to support. 

WhyNotWin11.exe puts all of Microsoft's Windows 11 stated requirements into a nice display. You see two of those displays here. One is for a twelve-year-old HP Dv7t laptop, which has been updated from Windows Vista all the way to Windows 10. That one shows a lot of Windows 11 deficiencies. The other is for the Forte computer, built just this summer, showing no deficiencies. 

Bill of Materials

Of course even the old laptop might be upgraded to meet the Windows 11 requirements, and perhaps some of the requirements might not really be necessary to get Windows 11 running. For example, that ancient laptop has neither a discrete TPM nor a firmware TPM, but it has BitLocker encryption working just fine and quite securely on its (one and only) disk drive anyway. Experience will tell us what will actually work with Windows 11. 

Forte did initially have a deficiency, according to WhyNotWin11: The Vision Tech Radeon 5450 Graphics Card did not meet the Win 11 DirectX or WDDM requirements. Therefore that card has been replaced by the ASUS NVIDIA GT710 “4H SL 2GD5" Graphics Card, which I know will qualify and which is probably better anyway. See the revised Bill of Materials.

By the way, Forte is for sale. You can see what it cost, and I do expect to receive some benefit from my work in building it, so make me an offer. Note, however, that I will not ship it, and will only deliver it in the Twin Cities Minnesota metropolitan area. It can come with Windows 10 or Windows 11, your choice. Either way, it's a really hot computer!