SWMBO's 3 year old HP laptop failed as there was a problem with the touchpad which stopped the laptop fully booting properly. HP will not supply a spare part.
So I bought a new Asus laptop which came with Windows 11. The Windows Update on most of my PC hardware tells me that they won't run Windows 11 so I have remained ignorant of how it works.
Now I have W11 on her new laptop I have found that using Firefox, Pale Moon I can't access the cameras that I have. Eventually I did manage to access the cameras by selecting Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge.
This has left me somewhat unimpressed by Windows 11!
I managed to take SWMBO's apart and disconnect the touvch pad. I now starts properly and can be used with a USB mouse.
I've only used it incidentally while using someone else's PC to do a "real" task, as opposed to having chance to play with it and get to know its little quirks.
One potential problem with some installations of Win 11 is that they are in a locked-down mode (I forget the term that Microsoft use) which only allows it to run approved apps. It will not run third party apps like Firefox. There is a way to turn this lock off so Windows will run any apps, but it is a one-way process: having turned off the protection you can't turn it back on again.
I don't like the centralised taskbar of icons, and I *hate* the way that Windows (8 and onwards) defaults to a) one icon to denote all instances of the running app (eg if you open multiple spreadsheets in Excel), and b) the same icon to act both as a shortcut to start the app and also to denote the running instance(s) of the app. I turn this behaviour OFF and I enable the Quick Launch toolbar: this gives me one place for starting commonly-used apps, and another quite separate place to denote all the instances of all the running apps. Personal preference: you may like the default way that Microsoft does it.
I wonder if Classic Shell and other more recent equivalents work with Win
11, so you get a proper Windows XP or 7 start menu with a separate column for running Control Panel and Settings, instead of the Win 8/10 "mess of tiles" start menu where all the icons are monochrome (eg white on a single colour) and their position/order changes at random. Win 10 uses a mixture of Control Panel and Settings; it's possible that Win 11 moves even more of the config into Settings, so at least you don't have to look in two different places depending what you want to configure.
My Win 10 laptop has finally announced that I can download and install Win
No bloody chance! I'm staying on Win 10 for as long as possible. I'll only update it when I've had chance to play with Win 11 on a test PC to sort out all the workarounds and "FFS they've changed this as well" problems ;-)
I'm a self-confessed luddite. I am all in favour of upgrading the "engine" but I want the "pedals" and "switches" to remain as similar as possible (to use a car analogy). Having learned one way of using a PC, I don't want to have to get used to a new one every time Windows is updated (eg XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 to 11).
I don't like the Taskbar being stuck at the bottom, since it became movable I have always had it on the left of the screen to compensate for shorter screens and the stupid ribbon that MSFT has introduced.
Open-Shell does run on it and there is a third party app that enables you to move the Taskbar.
I run Office 97 on Win 10 occasionally and it absolutely flies compared to modern programs.
It's not locked down on my machine and I just downloaded and clean installed.
Right-click an empty section of the taskbar and you can work your way to Taskbar Behaviours and there is a setting to place it on the left.
, and I *hate* the way that
I have it set to only combine tasks when the taskbar is full and I'm happy enough with using it for both starting/switching to and seeing the running instances.
I have my start menu configured to show programs on the left and Control Panel/Settings/etc. on the right. I can't remember whether this is a standard, selectable option or whether its one I download a tool to set though.
Overall, I've found that just a handful of settings make Win 11 very similar to Win10. My machine is not even officially supported, but it runs well.
Vista was just too laggy (it was actually slower than 7, but more responsive to user input) and too naggy with security pop-ups. 8/8.1 were just horrible without ClassicShell, but very good with. 10 and 11 are fine.
It won't let me put the taskbar at the side of the window. I couldn't find any way to disable the shift-lock key (i.e., make it do nothing at all). I couldn't find a way to customise the time shown on the taskbar. I want the seconds to show, and flashing colons too. Also, if I highlight e.g. a row in an Excel spreadsheet, and then click in another window, then the highlighting of the row vanishes altogether (rather than just being muted). This may, however, just be a general Windows UI fail that has existed since forever, for all I know.
No opinion at all, It came on my HP laptop and was there for all of 20 seconds before I got in the bios to enable USB boot ,and put Linux on, and I haven't looked back.
I'm 99% certain that the Win 11 PC I saw was installed by a PC manufacturer, so it's probably a quirk of the OS build that they use. But it's an MS quirk rather than a vendor quirk.
Window 7 was the last "good" version of Windows that didn't need a lot of tweaking to make it useable by someone with 30 years of muscle-memory (ie instinct!) of using Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 10 (with some usage of Win 8 and 8.1).
Win 8.0 was very bad because the only Start menu that you could get (without
3rd party software such as ClassicShell) was the "mess of tiles". I'm used to icons on the Start menu being organised by folder (usually software vendor) with easily-recognisable full-colour icons within those folders. Any apps that I run frequently, I copy/past-shortcut to the desktop or to the quick-launch toolbar. Windows 8.0 gave a full-screen Start menu with icons arranged apparently at random, not even the same place from day to day, in monochrome (white on today's coloured background colour).
8.1 addressed some of those things and gave a Start menu that was a little more like the one used by every version from 95 to 7 (even if there were minor styling differences over the years). Win 10 is similar.
I've forgotten what native Win 10 looks like because as soon as I got my Win
10 laptop I gave it that standard tweaks:
- install and configure ClassicShell to look like WIn 7 Start menu
- turn off "tapping" on the mouse touchpad so a hard press on the touchpad (when repeatedly scrolling to get from one side of the screen to the other) doesn't get misinterpreted as a left-click. If I want a left click, I press the left button on the touch pad. However I normally use a mouse which I find easier.
- turn off combining of icons on the taskbar (I think I may even had turned it off when the taskbar is full, so application-running icons just get narrower)
- enable the Quicklaunch taskbar and copy/paste-shortcut icons there for the very frequently-used apps (email, browser, CMD prompt, PFE text editor, VLC media player, Show Desktop)
- disable Cortana
- configure which background-task icons are displayed - network, anti-virus, sound, Skype, Dropbox, VNC server
- turn off (if it has got turned on) the "auto-hide taskbar" option which causes the default state of the taskbar to be hidden unless you move the mouse to the bottom edge of the screen when it turns on for a few seconds. I like to be able to see the clock and the background and foreground application icons at all times.
Some of those are just personal preference. Some of them are "why isn't this the default" settings ;)
My wife hates using my laptop because she instinctively relies on mouse-tapping. Somehow she manages to whizz the mouse pointer from one side of the screen to the other without ever pressing her finger slightly too hard on the pad and registering a left-click (eg start the application whose icon is under the current position of the cursor).
Just to make life interesting, I've recently been getting familiar with Linux (eg Ubuntu, Cinammon Mint, MX Linux).
I normally find third party support for HP spares to be pretty good.
TBH, I have not had any camera problems with Win 11 that I have not also had with older versions. Worth checking you have up to date drives, and a recent release of firefox.
I just delete words to that effect from the top of the message before I read this far! :-)
With a bit of configuring and getting MS to wind their neck in, it is "ok" I suppose. I have not found any compelling reason to use it myself yet though.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.