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FYI, while uninstalling the Windows web experience pack does remove the widget bar, it also removes some other things that Microsoft delivers through the Store rather than through Windows Update; I don’t know of any that are particularly useful (it’s things like a link to your MSA in the Settings app), but in the future that might block you from using something else in Windows 11 that you do want. Using GPEdit or the registry key targets just the Widget bar.

alas, ExplorerPatcher still doesn’t work with Windows on Arm – maybe one day!

in normal times, I might do it five times in a day because I work in multiple new locations; in the office I do it every time the Wi-Fi craps out which is far more times than I want to have to have an extra click for. The cognitive load of finding the right place in the interface is actually worse than the number of clicks – and like the rest of this very active discussion, suggests that the underlying issue is how many users want a lot more control over the Windows interface than Microsoft is prepared to allow.

In Windows 10, you have single-use controls for network and volume: a single click on the taskbar gives you the specific controls for what you want to do. In Windows 11, these are combined into a mini control panel with multiple options, so whichever icon you click in the notification area, you get the whole mini control panel that you have to navigate – and if you want the list of networks that used to appear when you clicked on the taskbar, that’s buried another level deep inside the mini control panel. Microsoft’s suggestion is to just use the buttons on your keyboard, forgetting that some of us use those buttons as function keys – and some of us just prefer single-use controls to a jam-packed control panel.

Indeed; I’ve been warning users not to make changes to the registry unless they’re sure what they are doing since the 1990s and I am deeply sad that Microsoft is so wedded to news headlines everywhere they can be crammed in that there isn’t a better option I can recommend for removing the wretched things than a registry edit!

Arm processors are the more battery friendly CPUs found in phones and tablets; now that they have enough processing power, they also drive lightweight Windows devices (mostly tablets and small laptops). Windows itself has been recompiled to run on ARM CPUs but while some applications have been recompiled, many run in emulation and tweaking utilities often take dependencies on things in the OS that are not exactly the same across architectures. Frequently Windows on Arm is “just Windows” – but not always.

 

BTW: Arm is the company; ARM is the architecture. The capitalisation has changed over time (it used to stand for Acorn Research Machines).

The News app that you can uninstall does show the same kind of stories as the News widget, but uninstalling it doesn’t remove the News widget: Microsoft has confirmed on multiple occasions that there is no way to remove the News widget without turning off the whole Widget bar. You might think this is a peculiar oversight or you might think that there is ad money in news headlines…

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Patricia Grace

it’s great that they update the utility faster than we can publish articles! 👍

‘block stories’ and ‘manage interests’ don’t remove the news widget and as many other users have found, they don’t do very much to actually change what stories you see in it; there’s a lot of feedback from users on how little effect this has – and I don’t want to devote hundreds of clicks to training the ML algorithm for something I have zero interest in seeing at all!

 

 

me too: I have a machine with Windows 11 on for testing that sits on the shelf for months at a time because I find I’m so unproductive with this UI, and I was dragged kicking AND screaming to Windows 11 on Arm when I bought a lovely little Lenovo device and realised I couldn’t downgrade it to Windows 10 without losing 64-bit emulation. On all my other devices I can continue to avoid Windows 11 until 2025 or Microsoft makes it less annoying (I’m not sure which will come first), but for Arm devices where Microsoft has made Windows 11 the default, there’s no real choice.

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oldfry

sorry I didn’t see this before. Can you actually open the OneNote 2010 data that you already have on your Win 7 laptop? If so, make sure that you are signed in with the Microsoft account you want to use and then use the Share command to move that notebook into OneDrive.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-to-move-my-local-notebooks-to-onedrive-or-sharepoint-7343c424-cdee-4bbf-9245-312549e81fc0?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

OneNote 2016 can also convert a OneNote 2010 notebook (and if you look through my various OneNote articles here, there is a link to the conversion tool on the OneNote for web service)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/convert-a-notebook-to-a-different-format-52e2f763-e138-4f6b-8de2-48362b6fe76a

If you run into problems converting the notebook you can make a new notebook (creating it in OneDrive), which will automatically have the most recent format, and move the pages into it (assuming you were able to open it locally).

The OneNote notebook from iOS is already on OneDrive so you can just open it in OneNote on your Windows 11 system and then move the pages into the other notebook (or the new notebook you just made).

You can change your user profile name in Windows in the user accounts control panel, to make the file links work (or you could use the OneTastic addon to do search and replace on the links to update the user profile name).

you can’t change the autoexpanding final column – it will always expand to the width of the current page window: if you make the window smaller when you create or paste into the table, it might keep it the size you want. or you could put in a sacrificial blank column as the final column?

OneNote saves automatically every time you type something: into the local cache every few milliseconds and then synced into the main notebook file and up to OneDrive. Ctrl-S doesn’t do anything in OneNote except make you feel better (and maybe exercise your fingers a bit!)

yes, the OneNote team has told me multiple times that they will continue to support local notebooks for users who pay for OneNote (whether it’s the perpetual licence or subscription licence and the consumer or the business licence – though it may not be a specific, separate OneNote purchase but an Office licence): you might not get all the features that syncing through OneDrive enables, but they know how valuable local notebooks are for businesses and plan to keep supporting them.

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oldfry, Chris-t

that suggests Vivaldi isn’t handling a protocol correctly somewhere along the line: mention it in your support case. I don’t generally recommend the Answers site because, as I say, vanilla ‘try these basic troubleshooting tips’ responses, but I also know that the OneNote team specifically do look at and give support for problems there. If you prefer, Help > Feedback inside OneNote but then you lose the chance someone else has had your problem and can help or that like the forums here, your very specific problem being solved is helpful to someone else!

BTW, my next OneNote piece will specifically cover getting information into OneNote, so you may find that helpful as you do your imports.

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Chris-t