I bought a new (refurbished, to be accurate) laptop from Tier1 a while ago but so disliked Win11 that I've continued using the old Win10 machine. Is there a straightforward way to make Win11 more like Win10?
I'd like to make all windows like XP. The problems when you are blind is that you cannot just configure it as stuff like ribbon menus and strange convoluted ways to do what one set of hot keys used to do is very messy, though the sighted tell me its obvious on the screen. Another moan is about the constant stopping you doing stuff without ok or setting up administrator settings is completely pointless. I managed to make windows 7 more like XP quite easily with some software, but 10 and 11 are another thing entirely, since they made it a kind of dumped down version of windows. Brian
All I've done is move the start menu from centre to bottom/left corner and increase the number of pinned apps in the start menu, turn on jump lists, turn on specific folder shortcuts
you can make the file explorer context menu jump straight to the "more options" version instead of the simplified one you get by default
You could install one of the "Start replacement" menus, but then you make your system different from most, so it hampers you helping others, or others helping you, because your system isn't "normal" ...
Explorer Patcher will bring back the old Explorer context menu.
win11_classic_context_menu_hack will allow you to put the Taskbar top, left, right or bottom.
I have decided I will stick with Win10, the changes to Win 11 seem to make it more like a tablet and my PC is a serious machine used for real work not a toy.
Of course there is. It's called "dual boot". It allows you to add another OS to the machine.
Part of the fun, is resizing the partitions before you begin.
# As administrator
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu True # Looks like the black-colored WinXP menu # You can do this, after the install
It's not that I want a steam-punk look to my screen. When I make a boot choice there, the boot time for the two OSes is the same, and there is no aberrant behavior at boot. That's why I do them that way.
This is my disk layout.
[Picture]Summary: Dual booting is an option, but it is an "earn while you learn" hobby. There can be mistakes along the way. Having a working backup scheme is a common requirement for the work. I've lost two disks of "stuff", doing this work, and learning from mistakes :-)
Paul
I'd not worry about the latter as in the main if it looked and felt legacy, then unless they are children, they mostly warm to it, At least that has been my Experience of Windows 7 with the ribbon remover and some other tweaks. As I say, I'd like folders in 10 and 11 to open in their own window, and to be selectable by enter on the subfolder in that folder and not have this really annoying sprawling tree hanging off of a menu. For goodness sake it says in the folder what its ancestors are and you can alt tab much faster than you can push a mouse around, so I'm told, but obviously I don't use mice since I cannot see the mouse pointer. Brian
Well I called Win 10 looking like it was maybe Tonka Toy and turned off the touch screen. Trouble is win10 is out of life in 2025. I will obviously need to find some tools to make the 10 and latter 11 experience more like Win 7 with ribbon remover, provided of course they actually present the correct codes to screenreaders. Brian
That does not solve the underlying problem though. You just end up with two machines you cannot use at the same time in a box. Brian
I've found that there are several configuration changes that I needed to make so that Win 8, 8.1 and 10 are usable. "Usable" as in "behaves in the same way that Windows 95 to Windows 7 did" so I don't have to learn a new user interface".
- install ClassicShell (or other similar software) to give a proper Start Menu with links to Control Panel, Settings (for Windows 8 onwards), all the entries for installed software etc (so as to get rid of the Win 8 "mess of tiles" shortcuts to apps, where those shortcuts move around as they feel like it, and whose shortcuts are monochrome white-on-a-colour)
- restore the Quick Launch bar between the Start button and the icons that represent running apps
- turn OFF the setting which merges multiple instances of the same running app into a single icon on the task bar: I want separate icons for instance
- delete from the taskbar all permanent icons: Win 8 onwards has this stupid idea that the taskbar should combine shortcuts to apps that are *capable* or being run, with instances of those apps which are actually running - I want the former as the Quick Launch and the latter on the taskbar, in *separate* locations
- make Cortana invisible or at least minimised to a small icon, to the right of the Start button (as an aside, which moron called it Cortana with an a, when the name Cortina with an i is so well known as a former UK car?)
- install Windows Live Mail or else Thunderbird as the mail/news client; the Windows "Mail" app is a worthless toy program that lacks so many features
With those changes, my Win 10 laptop is sufficiently similar to my Win 7 desktop that I can switch between them without having to stop and think all the time. It's equivalent of putting the steering wheel, indicator/lights and wipers stalks, gear lever etc in the same places on all cars, even if there may be subtle changes between one car and another. The aim of a user-interface should be that once you have learned it, you can do things subconsciously by muscle-memory, without having to stop and think, and to look.
And the "look" aspect is even more important for someone with no sight like you, Brian.
I've not used Win 11 enough to work out *all* its differences, and how you configure it to "look and feel" like Win 7.
When I say "Win 7" I also include all versions of Windows before 7, because although there were evolutionary differences, none of them were utterly revolutionary like Win 8 onwards.
I miss the file-search capabilities of XP. I don't trust the equivalent of Win 7 onwards because a) there are too many false-positive matches, b) it misses filenames that I *know* it should match, c) it is painfully slow.
If I am searching for a file of known name (full or partial match) in an unknown folder in the tree structure, I go back to first principles:
- open a command prompt
- dir /b /s > \tmp\dir.txt
- use a text editor to view \tmp\dir.txt and to search for the file
It will give me all the matches, and even more important, it will tell me which folder each of them is in.
You can pull content from the 11 to the 10 if you want. It allows you to do a transition in stages.
I don't think you can install 10 over-top of 11, as the migration logic will likely check the version before it starts.
Clean installing 10 by itself, means your materials have to be stored somewhere, to migrate onto it once the install is done. It's just a little easier if it is dual boot, as your stuff is sitting on the other partition, waiting for you to move it. It's a mental model users will understand. If I do one of my weird setups, peoples eyes just glaze over (you could do a Macrium backup of the existing profile, and mount it as K: later and access it, to copy your files over).
As for running two OSes at the same time, you can easily do that with virtual machines. But any time I talk about that, I don't exactly get a lot of "converts". I don't put tools I rely on, in virtual machines, because the risks are higher than on a regular physical machine install.
I don't have any easy solutions for "dissatisfied customers". When all is said and done, you'll still be dissatisfied. And Linux is just "more of the same". You would be dissatisfied with Ubuntu, and I'd tell you to install Linux Mint.
Paul
Agree with the painfully slow. In fact, what it is, is the response speed is "variable", like badly designed elevator service. It can give an almost-bearable result sometime, but it can't do it twice in a row. (And that is my testing, with a properly prepared index and a lot of care.)
My suspicion for a long time, is the developer of Federated Search left Microsoft. And there's no one to take its place.
The considered opinion in some W10 and W11 groups, is you should use third-party search software
Agent Ransack (brute-force search, content&filenames, no index, Free)
Everything.exe (Voidtools) (filenames, indexed search which is USN-journal-hooked, Free)
Those will give a more predictable result.
I just started testing it here (the Microsoft search), on patched-up W11, and it wasn't doing a very good job, so I stopped testing and gave up.
When you properly program the Indexer, it works "better", in the sense of "you've been colouring within the lines". But, is this a thing you could give to a friend. The answer to that is "Nope!". It's not magical. It's not even usable when productivity matters.
So the third-party tools, as of this instant, are getting an even stronger vote.
*******For the Microsoft search ("Federated Search"), instead of typing this
notepad
you can use the search language, which is colon-separated. The operator "AND" would be implicit if you entered all this crap in one search.
filename:notepad ext:EXE content:"surprise!" size:gigantic
and by using the right kind of search language, you can avoid getting totally random looking stuff. By default, it is doing a content search. But these are not equivalent
surprise! <=== filenames or content will trigger content:"surprise!" <=== hopefully, only a file content contains this. You could try adding a filename:* to the end of it. Which might give yet another behavior...
For example, metadata in files can be searched. If I do this:
width>0 height>0
well, only image files, like GIF, JPG, BMP, TIF, have a width and a height metadata. If you mention width and height, text documents don't have metadata like that, so all the text documents are not considered. What should happen, is all the image files should be put into the search result. Even though you did not say (I have to explicitly add "OR" to this.)
ext:JPG OR ext:GIF OR ext:BMP
kind of thing. There can be crafty ways of getting a result from the Microsoft search. But it's really only a form of amusement, and not something you can rely on for any practical purpose.
So I tried width>0 height>0 and it didn't work. I tried
width:1095
and that did dig up the one image file which has that particular width. What I tried next, is this worked as I'd hoped.
width:>0
digs up my image files, the lot of them.
Another thing you can do, is there is a script, to run the Microsoft search engine from Powershell. The advantage of that method, is you don't have to wait for File Explorer to faff about preparing the list for output on the screen.
But as long as the behavior is variable and sketchy, who cares how sexy it is.
Paul
File Explorer is tabbed in Windows 11.
You can select a folder, and from the right-click context menu, "Open in New Tab".
But this is hardly a behavior that is going to be easy to navigate with a screen reader.
The other option is the right-click "Open in New Window", which is a more conventional approach. But then, how will you find the window it created ? The task bar has previews of windows, but that's the only organized thing in that case.
*******for a person on a screen reader, the "Mail.App" must be the most infuriating, as controls can be in the four corners, or in the center. And even as a sighted person, I can't remember where a particular function is hiding, because I cannot memorize "Mammoth Cave" in there. If nothing is organized, to the point I can see what each corner might be for, then I can't memorize it.
*******The two-level menu in Windows 11 File Explorer, can be unified into one menu. There is a hack for that.
Paul
Jam Software has some good free software, try Ultrasearch:
It is of course more complex for me as a blind person as cloning software won't speak and certainly the Linux route is less accessible. I just do feel that with all the resources Microsoft has, having skins to emulate previous windows would promote earlier adoption and folk could pick the interface they are comfortable with. Brian
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