We have three PCs that were all running Windows 10.
One of those is a content streamer to our TV with a DVD drive. I upgraded that to Windows 11 as there are no other installed programs other than VLC media player. I had to flash the BIOS to make it fully compliant with MSFT specs and it updated just fine and there were not issues.
The second PC was my wife’s workstation which was 13 years old with outdated hardware. I had a spare motherboard that is compliant with a good Pentium CPU which is fine as she only does Office and Internet work. For that one I did a fresh install and migrated her files over. We have a family pack of Office 365 so installation was just fine. I had to reinstall her printer which the HP app did flawlessly.
The final PC is my workstation that I use for financial analysis and photography. I decided to upgrade the system drive to a 1 TB Samsung Pro NVMe and then upgrade. The hardest part of this was the NVMe installation as I did it with the motherboard in the case (75 year old hands and eyesight make this a not recommended approach but it did get done). I updated the existing Windows 10 OS drive to Windows 11 (this was a necessity for me as I have a fair number of installed programs and did not want to go through a clean install and having to load and configure stuff) I used the free Samsung data migration utility to clone the OS to the NVMe drive. That entire process took just over an hour and Windows 11 loaded just fine. I then re-imaged the 500 GB SSD to my Windows 10 so that I can boot back to it if I ever need to.
I did lose the HP Deskjet printer when I moved up to Windows 11 and it was a bit of a pain to reinstall. The HP app did not work at all and I had to reload the driver manually but it prints just fine now. I have not yet printed any pictures on my Canon Pro 1000 so I can’t say for sure whether there is an issue or not. I’m going to do that later this week. I’ve not noticed any issues at all so far, other than adjusting to the centered tool bar.
