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I tried Windows 11 setting up a new Dell PC for someone this weekend because if it comes with it, why not at least take a look? I hoped it would be like it has been for me sometimes in the past. People complained so much about Vista and Windows 8.1, but after a bit of disorientation, I tweaked both to become really great. In fact, both were my favorite OSes, Vista because of its better taskbar and not much difference with 7 when tweaked and 8.1 for its maturity, cleanliness, speed, reliability and stability once properly supplemented with Classic Shell.

I don’t hate Windows 10 as much anymore, but I still hate that it changes so often and I don’t keep up with the changes as much as I would like. Gone are the days where you could invest hours in research to create a really great desktop you could then run just using your apps for years until the support ends. The good news is Windows 10 feature updates seem more boring and will be less frequent.

Unfortunately, I ran into deal breakers with Windows 11 for now. This system is too much of a step back in productivity. The real deal breakers for me are the inability to :

1. use the quicklaunch bar to better use muscle memory than the unproductive launch bar of Win 7 that moves your launch icons around and demands that you hover your mouse on an icon to see a subset of active windows instead of having everything already shown when you use multiple windows
2. ungroup Windows from the taskbar and display them with text instead of icons like previous editions so you can quickly see where to click to get back to a specific window
3. the disappearance of “open file location” from the right-click button. This one is a big deal. I always use Windows search and this feature to know where to find or put documents in my complex folder structure. This is much faster than going manually to a deeply nested folder. No, copying the path is not the same and much more cumbersome.

I can’t be productive with that kind of nonsense. I don’t know who tests those designs, but it is extremely irritating when you are used to do things fast and you get slowed down by mindless regressions. Probably they show it to average users who don’t even know a keyboard shortcut, but find the icons cute.

Now do we need to wait a year for at least some of this to get put back in? Here’s a tip for quality updates, Microsoft. You are allowed to change the features if it means bringing back the choice of using a feature that was previously used and liked by some people. You don’t even have to put it back as the default option, just give back the choice.

You can also ask yourself this question when adding a feature: is it something we add that people might not like? If so, put it in the next year feature update. If not, go ahead if you want and if it doesn’t risk introducing security, performance or stability issues. A button to turn off your mic from the taskbar when in a Teams meeting? Why not? That’s fine. Forcing an online Microsoft account? Are you out of your mind? Another hint: any privacy sensitive feature or automatically started new service/ app / *$”&$” widget might not be liked.

I initially found the new settings pane a step in the right direction for cleaning up the mess of having settings scattered around everywhere, but I found it annoying to have the impression I didn’t easily know what was on my computer when looking for installed programs and active services. I felt like things were getting even more muddy, but maybe it is just a lack of familiarity on my part. Accessing programs and features is getting more and more difficult. I saw Facebook and Instagram icons, ready to be clicked for an easy install, I suppose they were just placeholders, but they can also be easily removed with a click on the right. I understand some users might like that. I don’t but it is not a big deal and I understand why Microsoft would put them there. Easy remove, not too big of a deal.

When it comes to the new revamped Store for which I have absolutely no interest, I will just make an observation. It is funny to start the super new Store to find out that the suggested apps for popular services like Netflix and Prime have only a few reviews and the number of stars on them are pretty low. You can’t help but wonder how is this possible. Is there so few people giving stars and it looks pretty bad to show a Store with what appear to be lame apps according to users featured prominently as if it was the best the Store has to offer.

The new Start Menu is a useless piece of garbage but I don’t mind because I don’t use it. I use the windows key and start typing what I want. Of course, I know what I want. For someone who doesn’t or haven’t been with Windows forever, digging deep into the applications to find a Windows tools icon in which you will find other things is not that great. The screen that pops on the Start Menu with recommended things and randomly displayed apps that you can’t align to your liking is really bad design. But I can live with that. Remember to use WIN-X to reduce insanity.

The new forecasted requirement for an online account on Pro is really scary because even if you still can use an offline account, it will be too hard for many and a lot of people will end up with online accounts, which will make it more normal and acceptable to people. Funny that since Apple started asking users if they wanted to allow Facebook and others to track them as much, most of them said no, although they were living previously in a world where they were just thinking it was normal to be tracked and there was nothing to do about it. Fortunately, NetDef showed that the online account might be avoidable with a domain, so it means there will be many users running without an online account in businesses so any trick that will make it work at home will still be viable as Microsoft won’t be able to assume everyone uses an online account.

Overall, I felt like Windows 11 didn’t bring anything necessary for now. It moved a lot of stuff around without any perceived overall benefit and I really didn’t feel like learning again where things went. I have feature update fatigue already. I might love some of the security aspects down the road because I am one of those weird person who cares about that a bit more than normal. But for now, my 3 deal breakers higher are just too much. My productivity is more important than an increase in security if I don’t feel too threatened right now using Windows 10, knowing I am probably less inclined than others to be infected due to my use cases.

I also felt like Microsoft was asking a lot of times if I would allow them to give me a “better experience” or the equivalent marketing gimmick. Thanks to them for asking at least, but it still reminded me how hard they try at monetizing me and I don’t like that. I also didn’t like their patronizing demand that I try Edge when switching to Firefox, nor their idiotic process you now have to go through to change your default browser. I wonder if their is one person responsible for these “great” ideas and if it is the same person as the online account thing, but I wonder how it can continue like this. Please fire that person if you truly want to win back our love.

Finally, I felt Windows 11 sluggish at times. Sometimes, it was fast on this great machine I had, sometimes, there was delays for no apparent reason, although the Dell computer was pretty clean from the start. This is not a deal breaker as I could have removed McAfee that came with it and maybe Microsoft would polish it down the road for those problems if it is more on them.

What? You wanted to instill a sense of calm and serenity in me with Windows 11? Maybe turning off the computer will help with that because right now, I am just too irritated.

Things need to cleaned even more and by that I mean showing your options in an intelligible way so you can more easily grasp what is possible with your computer and make the choices you want, not removing useful things. Please stop dumbing down the OS to make it appear cleaner without leaving options for power user to put back what you removed without thinking twice.

Needless to say, I downloaded the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool and updated Windows 11 to a clean install Windows 10 that felt like a relief. I will be better to stay on Windows 10. Dell has made it quite easy to download any driver I needed that wasn’t already updated by Windows update. Thanks, Dell, for not making my life more difficult on this home computer.

P.S. I am not the only one horrified by the online account on Pro. This guy doesn’t usually say he will move the Linux as a primary desktop although he knows it very well:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/windows-moving-away.html

 

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SkipH, Fred

For an interesting take on Windows 11 adoption, business and Microsoft strategy:

https://4sysops.com/archives/result-of-the-windows-11-pollonly-very-few-admins-want-to-upgrade/

You should keep a minimal amount of pagefile to avoid issues. I had this discussion a while ago with ch100 here. I think 800MB was the value and that is what I would suggest as a minimum although I thought I used a lower value. Adding more RAM won’t change that. A fixed pagefile is best if it is enough to cover the needs when RAM is not enough. The issue is if you do run out of RAM, it will start swapping and then you will notice a huge slowdown on a mechanical hard disk, although I never seen how it impacts the performance when using a SSD, especially the fast NVMe kind. What can happen is if you do need more RAM and the pagefile is fixed and too small, you can run into issues and have the system break down on you.

The key here is not needing to use your full amount of RAM. I don’t think the pagefile is used that much because you make it bigger if not needed on Window. Unix is different and I am not sure about Linux today. If you use applications that need a lot of RAM and leave a ton of browser windows open for days, with memory leaks, you can end up using a lot of RAM. But 16GB seem plenty for normal usage browsing the web, no gaming and no heavy duty apps like video editing.

I monitor my RAM usage and never ran into issues, I restart my browser when it starts to eat up gigs after days being open on many tabs, but if you want to have peace of mind, you can let Windows manage your swap file. It will grow if needed. The fact you have a lot of RAM for your needs is probably the most important factor in all this. I’m not sure the rest makes much difference in your real life experience.

I’ve never heard of RAM wearing out due to use. It needs power to keep information, so I guess it always have power regardless of whether you write to it or not during use of your PC. I wouldn’t worry about this.

Just having 16GB and a SSD does the most for your performance.

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AWRon, OscarCP

It doesn’t seem to be abandoned. They keep improving it and the new version 3.7 is for Windows 11.

For at home reliable redundancy for data files on mirrored drives, I find it a very good solution. It doesn’t replace backups, but if you are a bit lazy with your backups, it provides an additional layer of security plus it protects you against bit rot (drives getting old and having a bit flipped in some of your files). I use it with people I help to give them a bit more safety for keeping their files in case of a hardware hard disk failure.

In theory, you can move the mirrored drives to a different computer. It doesn’t have the need for a computer with a similar RAID controller since it is software based.

For having mirrored drives, I previously used the Intel Raid controllers, but I had a bunch of computers that after a few years, they got something and the RAID got deleted, the user ending up with two drives with exactly the same content instead of just one logical drive. Annoying at best.

I didn’t experience any issue with ReFS, but the two issues that Microsoft let fall through the cracks over the years of Windows as a service are really bad. It is not normal to fear Microsoft will break all your data after a patch each time you install a patch. Good thing I delay patches a bit and I run the oldest supported Windows version.

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Microfix

Edge…

It’s Microsoft trying to copy Avast’s trick with their “Secure browser”. Open it automatically when Windows start and people won’t notice they are using your monetizing browser. Wow, would they aim low if that was true. The thing is… I am really not sure if this joke is more true or false, especially considering the last few years of similar “oops” moments.

What, clicking X on a Window doesn’t mean “go ahead, stop bugging me and install Windows 11? Oh, probably the new intern didn’t get the memo. Everybody else knows about it from Windows 10.”

Wow, maybe the ReFS bug is a small detail to many, but not for me. This is the second time Microsoft break ReFS with an update. This is beyond ridiculous. It is supposed to be a resilient file system but since they don’t seem to test it properly relying on Home version users to beta test their software which do not use it and since a few versions of Windows 10 don’t even have directly access to it when buying a new PC because they moved it to the weird Workstation version only, this is what is happening. Such a shame!

 

Thanks, so I wasn’t just thinking I am too lazy for not finding quickly something more clear about this.

This is ridiculous. You have a wormable vulnerability and you don’t even take the time to tell your customers in a very highly visible place if they should panic or not or if they have to mitigate by turning something off or adding a rule to a firewall. Imagine if it was a remote control vulnerability that would affect all desktop PCs.

In previous cases of a similar issue, it was more easy to figure out if you had issues or not, for example if SMBv1 was turned on or not. For this one, the few bits I read were not clear at what was the consequences of the vulnerability and what was it affecting indirectly in terms of Windows service or app.

I agree with you that if we are only talking about a denial of service, I prefer to wait. Please keep us informed if you find anything more clear about this.

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IT Manager Geek

Susan, anything about the wormable security issue?

Will, I don’t have much to say and it is not very original, but I think you are doing a great job.

Often, subjects will interest me and I am sometimes surprised at the depth some articles go to, even more than I am expecting. This is a goal your team is meeting brilliantly.

I am always curious and looking forward to read the newsletter, which I think is a good sign.

I often learn something even on subjects I am quite familiar with.

The community often brings interesting points to the subjects covered.

Keep up the good work and thanks to everyone involved.

 

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mledman, Wheel_D, Will Fastie

I did the same.

With pivot charts, vlookups, filters and a bit of Excel creativity, I have built a personal finance tool that is super powerful, free and won’t have to be changed constantly. It remains compatible with Excel after each version.

Since I control the tool and the transactions, it is very easy to create new categories or reassign some transactions to a different category. I have categories and super categories for reporting in a more aggregate form when needed.

I have one sheet that stores all formatted transactions with the following fields :

Month (like “2021-12”), Year, SuperCat, Acccount, Full Date, ForWho, Entity (who the money has been paid to), Category, Detailed Description, Amount and a few other fields to help split and keep together a transaction if it goes into multiple categories (in which case I create one line for each category).

I have another sheet that describes each category so I can easily see if a transaction goes into a category or another when in doubt, that assigns that category to a super category and that also tells if a category is a necessity or luxury.

I have one sheet where each unique transaction description goes from the transactions I accumulate from the bank files, along with the category and default detailed description it should use so next time a similar transaction is made it is automatically labelled entirely or not (with indications to manually validate if it can be ambiguous after suggesting the category). So my tool uses vlookups to do suggestions in imported transactions and once I verified them and validate them, I copy-paste them per value in the first sheet that is static. A version of the first sheet with formulas is used to create the suggestions.

The last sheet is another way to pre assign a category, detailed description and hints based on looser descriptions that are more generic and can be used by different type of transactions if there was no exact match in the other sheet.

Those last two sheets use a combination of who the money is paid to and the description of the transaction from the bank to suggest the appropriate category and detailed description.

I download my transactions once a month, then import them and my tool suggests categories based on specific or loose descriptions. It also traces who is spending and for who so I can see if I am too loose in my spending or if it is for someone else. Hint: always be nice if you use that feature.

You can also split expenses that way by automatically calculating who paid what for who and issue summaries of money owned at the end of the month if you are splitting expenses instead of putting everything together or if you use a hybrid method.

Once you have the raw data categorized and clean, with pivots tables and charts, you can easily see averages per year, month or other period.

I have all my transactions from the early 2000s in this file. I felt open-source software offered me things I didn’t need and wasn’t super comfortable using bank logins in those, so that is why I created my own tool. I have only a bit of old macro code for importing and pre-formatting the transaction files manually downloaded from the bank and that I drop in a folder, but this could be done manually without the macro that basically just saves me a bit of time. The rest is pure Excel.

My tool works well if you download your transactions once a month. If you have the time, you can do it more often, but the downside is it is a bit annoying to download manually your files from the bank vs an automatic download. I like to download once a month, because I take the whole monthly statement and next month I know to use the next monthly statement. I don’t need day to day or week to week tracking, although you can do it if you can select only the transactions you want per date.

I hope this helps someone wishing to do the same to see that it is possible to create a good tool yourself if you are into this and if your needs are mostly budgeting, not tracking investments or reminding you of what you have to pay like other software do.

Very interesting.

However, I wonder if those leaks are with default settings. Firefox doesn’t look too bad. You can disable telemetry. Of course, they at least should ask you when installing for the first time, as a privacy focused browser. Still, some things seem pretty minor if kept on the company’s server and not used for tracking, advertising or selling. Safari seem pretty good, too. This just reinforces my perception that Apple is more serious about privacy like it says it is and that Microsoft and Google are not software companies I want to encourage the practices.

I find it sad that Firefox is loosing ground so much, because it is still a great browser in many ways and they always tried to save privacy much more than the big competitors, which I respect, although they made a few mistakes here and there.

However, the arguments for Brave are compelling, the person at the head of it having a very good well-deserved reputation for his contribution to technologies that are better for the user. For now, I am sticking with Firefox but maybe if it falls, for sure Brave will top my list.

It would have been interesting to see where Vivaldi stands, too.

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Steve

Lots of interesting information in there.

For home users, maybe they could create two scripts:

create a .bat file called “start spooler.bat”, insert the line net start spooler in it and create another called “stop spooler.bat” with the line net stop spooler in it. Add the line “pause” to both file just so you can see the result in case you forget to use admin rights to run them. So it would look like:

net start spooler

pause

You need to run those as an admin, so right-click on them, run as an administrator.

So if you don’t print often at home, leave the spooler disabled and only start it when required, then disable it after. I am doing that now since I’m mostly paperless at home anyway. Print to pdf doesn’t work though when you disable the spooler, so that can be annoying if you do that a lot.

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doriel

Thanks, the command line instruction can be useful, but I am not sure it does what I want.

Resetting the group policies value to their default undefined state doesn’t undo what you did. For example, if the default setting for a functionality is disabled and the default group policy is undefined, but you change it to enabled, the functionality will now be enabled. When you reset the group policy to undefined, the setting doesn’t revert to its default Windows value of disabled because group policy simply stops forcing enabled.

As you say, I think the only way to start fresh with defaults is a clean reinstall, which is not very friendly.

Wow, that is not a minor thing, changing the file date when moving it. This is really bad. Thank you.

What I retain from all this is:

-Microsoft is able to make gorgeous looking design.

-Microsoft seem to forget more and more how it was good at designing functional UIs in the past. Windows was and might still offer the best UI there is, but from maybe Windows 2000 or XP, it went mostly downhill in many ways, even if they added a few nice things here and there.

-Microsoft seem to think they must emulate the inferior functional interface of their small market share competitors (vs the desktop and laptop PC market) just to look contemporary, to remain relevant. Why can’t they do the best of both worlds? It’s like Firefox copying Chrome thinking people will find them more interesting because they remove UI features their users loved and unfortunately betting that privacy will be enough of an incentive to keep or gain users.

-There is a difference between cluttering the UI with useless things and removing advanced features. I am for a clean UI, but it needs to offer an easy way for basic users to do what they want and a complete set of features for advanced users, with an ability to use shortcuts or customization options to add frequently used items somewhere else. Preventing power users from using a functional Start Menu or taskbar serves nobody. Lambda users don’t mess with that. Power users get angry.

-Settings need to be easily found in one giant place, with redundancy some other places acceptable, but no scattering of settings in different unusual places without a mirror in the normal settings spot. Windows 11 seem to improve on that. You need to be able to see all Windows settings and choose everything you want in a dedicated space, organized.

-Microsoft should abide by the click rule: is there a way to do the same features with the same number or less mouse clicks for a frequently used feature? If no, then it is not a great idea. If it is a feature frequently used by some users, maybe make it customizable so it can be added to a place where it is quicker to access.

-Microsoft pretend Windows 11 is designed to diffuse a sense of peace and whatever in a sea of crazy changes and distractions. The irony is Microsoft is responsible for those with their two times a year release schedule, which they reduced to one time a year with Windows 11, which is still too much for many. They also bloat the OS with mindless ads, sleazy marketing tactics to push bing or prevent you from easily choosing your default browser. Oh, the coherence!

-Windows was by far and is still the productivity desktop of choice. It is not great at security although they have very competent people on the security front. They seem to be going in that direction of being more secure, but it still has the legacy hindering those efforts. Windows should focus strategically on its core business, productivity and flexibility, while working on ease of deployment and security, then it would secure its position even more in the market as the no nonsense choice for serious work. They can switch the look to keep mass appeal, but not hinder productivity while doing so. The more Microsoft makes it annoying to deal with Windows, the more Apple and its new chips, less hassle experience for some and simple, beautiful interface can be attractive. I worked on the ugly classic look of Windows 7 for years because the classic theme was better for identifying the active window.

What Windows need is more customization and an easy way to save and copy settings from one computer to another. That way, advanced users could easily make a smarter set of settings targeted to their audience and simply dump them on others computers. I do that with registry scripts, but it is not user friendly. There are many things from the newer Windows versions I need to repair to get back to a productive state and I don’t think it is because I am a dinosaur. Group policy is incomplete. You need registry hacks to switch many settings quickly without going into the UI. You shouldn’t have to rely on images to deploy a fresh Windows and push sensible settings onto it, whether you are a home user that reinstalls or a SMB business user.

To give examples:

-I want to open an explorer Window on This PC so I can see drive instead of the stupid quick access when pressing WINDOWS+E because I only use this to reach drives, relying on search for finding documents and folder hierarchies otherwise or using one of the few shortcuts to my documents or pictures on the taskbar’s quicklaunch bar. Windows in its default state now needs more clicks to do all kind of things.

-The search tool since 10 is inferior to Windows 7’s one and it often needs more clicks to reach what you are looking for.

-The taskbar is awful after Vista, I need to tweak it to get back the view where I see what Windows are open and what is in it, to avoid clicking or hovering, wasting time to see what I am looking for. I need to re-enable the quicklaunch bar to have icons on the bar to quickly start apps (yes I could use keyboard shortcuts, but users click so that’s better for my users). It would be nice to be able to assign shortcut keys to quicklaunch icons with a vanilla Windows version. I like Windows showing in the taskbar, because they don’t move. You get used to have this third window you are working on there and you go there when you need it, you don’t alt-tab, look where your window is right now among the high number of open windows, just to find it.

Conclusion:

The only way we have a little chance of signaling Microsoft their approach to software development is insane is to not buy into it. I won’t run Windows 11 in production for a while, until it gets better than 10 in terms of quality/stability or until 10 runs out of support.

If enough people reject the OS, they will have to look into why and stop arrogantly or mindlessly prevent people from customizing their experience or change settings as much. Maybe they will look into adding more function into design, thinking in terms of productivity and not just look. They might have listened a bit with Windows 11, reducing the number of feature updates and cleaning the interface, they just didn’t do such a good job with the feedback and forgot to not create more hassle at the same time when people want another browser, for example. Let’s hope they won’t think Windows is dead because people don’t rush to upgrade but realize they just need to get better at releasing quality software from the start and focus on productivity.

 

 

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Cee Arr, Charlie, Cybertooth, Tom-R, NaNoNyMouse, abbodi86