So. Back to the W8 to W11 transfer

[Tim Lamb]

With the tax return returned, the Internet connection restored, Wife's birthday celebrated, I am back to the job of upgrading my PC.

I found a local group who would do the job for £150 so those contributing can put a value on their advice:-) They would have both m/c.s plus the necessary passwords. The process seems to be to have both sets running W8, do the transfer and then re-upgrade the new box to W11. Alternatively if this is not practicable to simply copy files across.

Having already paid for a W11 m/c I am twitchy about any licensing issues.

TNP advocated retaining the old box. Apart from having to swap the display, I now have keyboards/mice/etc. so this could work. My data is backed up to a hard drive anyway.

Any thoughts in words I might understand?

Breaking news, Harpenden, 3 miles up the road, is to get 1000/Mbps under project Gigabit!

[Andy Burns]

Any machine which has an activated Win10/Win11 licence can always "retrieve" that same licence from microsoft servers even if it's completely wiped.

[Tim Streater]

Personally I wouldn't touch W11 with a bargepole. I get to use it once a week, and it's even worse than W10, which I didn't think was possible.

[Andy Burns]

Win10 only has 21 months left to run, personally once I've moved the start button back to the bottom/left corner, I don't find Win11 too bad to use ...

[Tim Streater]

I discovered accidentally that if you pin an app to the W11 taskbar thingy, and then happen to double-click it to start it (rather than single-click), then it starts two copies of your app. Rather a problem if your app wants to manage a particular set of files, and so needs sole access. I was able to fix that by adding the aquisition of a mutex to the app's startup sequence, but this is not an issue in W10, W7, macOS, or Linux.

Then I find that when right-clicking on a file do something such as Copy, Paste, etc, all the options I make most use of have been moved to "Show further options", and Duplicate appears to have gone altogether.

W11 appears to be like one of those websites where things pop up all the time, and there are lots of buttons helpfully labelled Download so you don't know which one downloads the file you are after - the others all open yet more popups.

All of this garbage slows down my workflow.

[Figaro]

See

how to get all the options back.

[Andy Burns]

There's definitely setting to get the whole of the old menu back, also I think individual options to bring back e.g. move

[Tim Lamb]

I see nobody wants to earn any virtual money:-)

For the simple minded, say I have a stack of photos saved in a file titled *pictures* under a further heading of *my documents* with access allowed to *new user*. Can I use the W11 box to search for that file in the back up hard drive and then save it?

[GB]

Why would you want it bottom left?

[Andy Burns]

Fitz's law. Having a button in the corner effectively makes it infinitely large as a mouse target.

[Andy Burns]

Sorry Fitts's, not Fitz's

[Tim Streater]

If they only way out is to screw with the registry, then I'll prolly leave it alone. The machine in question is not mine.

[Tim Streater]

Actually I found a one-liner that does the same thing, so I might try that.

Other W11 irritations: it keeps wanting to do clever things with windows. Today I found a couple of times that if I move a window near the screen edge it may suddenly vanish, with the only way to find it again being via the taskbar popup.

And, because I'm often working with two spreadsheets at the same time as well as referring to a web-based database, I make all three windows narrow enough to fit side by side on the one screen. I can then scroll any of them with the mouse wheel, without moving the focus. What I then need to do is to highlight a row in one spreadsheet (OK, so I do that), then switch to the website and locate something based on the highlit row. The problem comes because Excel, if you switch to another window, insists on removing the highlight from the now un-focussed window. So I lose the reference point back in the first window.

Oh and the taskbar. Can that be moved to the left edge of the screen?

[SteveW]

There is a setting (I can't remember whether it is a normal setting or a registry change), that prevents context menus moving items to the more option.

[Jeff Gaines]

That has been an issue with Windows for a while. We had a paradigm for things like newsreaders where the left column worked in conjunction with a top and bottom panel to the right. You'd select, say, a newsgroup on the left, a message at the top right panel and read it in the lower panel any by looking at the screen you could see the group and the message highlighted. One of the MSFT geniuses decide that wasn't necessary and as soon as focus is lost the highlight disappears. As a programmer I have to change a property called "Hide Selection" to leave a highlight but it is so feint it's hard to see.

You need Explorer Patcher for that.

[Jeff Layman]

Why is the taskbar at the bottom anyway?

When I started using Windows 30 years ago I often found I was using Word, Excel, Access, and one or two other programs and transferring things between them. I was always going down to the taskbar to click on a tab to change to another program, then going up to use the menu bar of that program to do something, then back down to the taskbar to click on the first program's tab, do something with that menu, then click on another program's tab to do something with that, etc. That involved going up and down the full height of the monitor screen all the time. After a while I simply changed to put the taskbar at the top, so there was minimal movement between the taskbar and menu bars of each program. I've done it the same way with every version of Windows - and now Linux Mint - since.

[Tim Streater]

I put the Dock on the left anyway, since I have much more width than height.

And at the top of the screen is always the menu bar, and that this is the correct place for it has again been highlighted by having to use Office under W11 once a week. Menubar at the top of the screen means it always has as much width as it needs. On my two narrow Excel windows under W11 (well, under any Windows, I suppose), there is no menu bar, just the ribbon, which is now also quite narrow and most of the content of which has fallen off. They do make some attempt to keep stuff available by shinking it as the window's width reduces, but as always it's better to avoid the problem in the first place.

[Andy Burns]

There are some machines where I do move the taskbar to the side, but it's no longer an option with Win11 (at least without installing one of the Shell replacements, which I don't want to do). I wouldn't be surprised if the "side" option comes back one day ...

[Jeff Gaines]

Look at Ubit Menu, free for home use:

Brings back the old menu.

[Paul]

The TaskBar has had some of its options removed, making it the VanillaBar. My Taskbar used to be set to "half-height", but they removed that feature too.

For Snap, you can find a Snap settings area in the W11 Settings wheel.

[Picture]

The picture also shows that an older menu is still available in "sysdm.cpl" which is a control panel program. The control panels are available as "control.exe" but for some of them, if you click a traditional control panel, the Settings wheel is triggered. If you instead execute "sysdm.cpl" directly, it avoids a stop-over in the Settings wheel.

I don't really know what all those settings do, but that will at least get you into an area needing work.

Paul