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I updated both of my Windows 11 machines this week and both machines have the problem with the task manager not being useable to any extent.  I’ve attached a screen grab of it to share.  I assume it will be fixed some time down the road.  Meanwhile I have a number of utility programs that provide the same or better information that I’ll use.

 

 

Talk about a walk down memory lane. My 1st PC was back in 1983, an IBM with 2 5.25 floppy drives that I upgraded over time with Dell expansion for memory and various hard drives. When I put the 20mb drive in I had a friend chide me saying “What could you possibly need that big a drive for?” ROFL.. I’d forgotten all about the IRQ switches and memory settings needed. I’d gotten good with Config.sys and Autoexec.bat too. Anyhow I really enjoyed this article and it brought back many good (and bad 🙂 ) memories.

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oldfry, Travasaurus, Ben Myers

I have an iPhone and was using the feature to block calls from people not in my contacts list.  It works great, but with unintended consequences.  The result is I’ve decided to not use this feature.  If you are waiting for a call from someone you haven’t heard from before and have forgotten (like I have) that you have this feature enabled you won’t hear the phone call and will (maybe) discover a voice mail later.  Recently my son was in for surgery and they told me that I needed to wait and that they’d call me when I could come see him.  Well, you guessed it.. I never got the call sitting outside in my car.  It wasn’t until I picked up my phone that I saw the missed calls and by then they were already calling my home looking for me.  There were other calls I missed too but this was the most significant side effect that I’m sharing.  My fault for forgetting I had the feature turned on.  Yes but after a few weeks you do forget it is on.

Just wanted to thank you for this article.  I just installed Brave and I’m impressed by it.

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cesmart4122

rc primak wrote:

Did your system have Bitlocker enabled? Most Home Users of Windows 10 have that on, since it’s the OEM default.

Did you upgrade your system from Windows 10 Home OEM to Windows 10 Pro and then try to get it to upgrade to Windows 11 Pro? That is fairly standard among Power Users, and not too uncommon among business users. Home users will usually not upgrade to Pro, but more and more are doing so these days.

Was your computer a standard, off the shelf OEM laptop? That’s what most Home users have. And that’s what Fred tested.

My point is, Fred’s case demonstrated a recent, standard, NOT home-built laptop with an OEM installed version of Windows 10 Home, upgraded to Pro. That’s where most home users and a lot of business users will be starting out (maybe minus the Home to Pro upgrade).

I think your experience is a very narrow snapshot, and I congratulate you on your smooth and successful upgrade experience. But I think Fred’s experience is not unusual, and it does not bode well for the vast majority of home and small business users.  Many tech press articles back up Fred’s and my opinions about this.

So again, congratulations on a smooth and successful upgrade experience. Here’s hoping yours is not such an unusual experience. But I’m going to wait for the first Feature Release (Fall 2022) before even considering upgrading my Intel NUC Panther Canyon (Intel 11th Gen) kit PC to Windows 11. Even then I’ll be closely watching the third party tweaking tools for updates and new tools to fix whatever Microsoft decides to break next.

Hello,

No I don’t have Bitlocker enabled.  I haven’t reached that level of concern for data privacy yet.  But, my laptop is an OEM machine with no modifications that was shipped to me with Windows 10 home that I upgraded to Windows 10 Pro.

The rest of your response is like mine, pretty much opinion and we seem to be on opposite sides of this thought.  I believe that my experience is not unusual, and I feel that Fred’s experience might represent a less than majority of machine upgrades.

What has provoked me to write are the three headlines:

1.  Wait for Windows 11.1
2. Win11 Home never completely lets go
3. Windows 11: Not quite ready for prime time

All eye catchers to provoke one to read the article.   The third headline is what provoked me to write my opinion.  I’m concerned that people see that and without reading any of the articles be convinced that Windows 11 is evil and not to be considered.  Perhaps you fall into that group?

Regards and with all respect,

Bob

Hello Fred,
I’ve read your columns for a long time now and I have great respect for you and what you do for us readers. But this series on Windows 11 upgrades has me going “Huh?”. It seems from reading this that you had an upgrade that went fine on one of your machines, but not so well on another. And to make a point, you flogged that bad upgrade machine to death to get a smooth upgrade. I get it, curiosity being something that I’m given to too.

What concerns me is that this article seems to portray the upgrade process as being perilous to all systems out here. I have my desktop which is a home build with ASUS Motherboard, AMD CPU, older Nvidia graphics card, a Synology NAS connected, older NEC monitors etc and it upgraded so smoothly as to be a non-event. My Maingear Element laptop purchased in January 2020 had the same experience in its upgrade.

My concern over your article is does it portray the general experience when upgrading for the average user, or is it one that would be the exception for most users.
Bob

I recently upgraded my Macbook Pro to Big-Sur and experienced no problems with the upgrade.  But, let me qualify that upgrade.  I’m a 70+ year old former software developer who wants to keep his mind active.  I bought my machine, a Mid-2014 15″ i7 512gb ssd machine some years ago to learn Swift and to develop an iPad app I had in mind.  All my other systems are Windows 10 machines and I’m not an Apple aficionado by any means.  All my apps are Apple standard apps with the exception of Microsoft’s Office 365.  I mostly run XCode to practice my programming skills, such as they are.

So I think my experience represents the upgrade to a fairly clean machine which went without a hitch.  Your mileage may/will vary.

Hi… here’s my tale of the “swollen battery”.  And it has a happy ending for me.  Last December I started to notice that my Surface Book 1 was not charging consistently.  Losing charge even when powered down for just a short time.  Then in January I started to notice that it wasn’t closing completely.  Soon I noticed that when starting up the corners of the screen were off color like light was bleeding through.  Soon it was obvious that the screen was convex with the swollen battery.

Like everyone I went 1st to the internet to get the real expert opinions and found all of the posts about the woes of everyone with this problem.  Sigh… I bought mine in August 2016 so I was 4-6 months past the 3 year period where Microsoft would fix it.

I am fortunate to have the resources to replace the machine so I bought a new Maingear Element laptop which is an absolute screamer.  Still just for the principle of it I wanted to take it out to my local Microsoft store so I could at least say “I tried…”.  Then I ran a full reset on the Surface Book so I wouldn’t care about tossing it anyway.

This morning I went to my local MSFT store and to my surprise …….. they gave me a brand new out of the box Surface Book 1.  The store manager did explain to me what the 3 year policy was and then said that they would override the policy and give me the new machine.  Now I have a new Surface Book 1 and a replacement laptop.  Personally I prefer the new one so I’ll be looking to one of our children to see if they want the Surface Book.

 

Think just how boring life would be if there were only ONE way to do everything. For me I like convenience and as to risk… well there is risk with every security solution.  I’m comfortable with the one I’ve chosen.

 

Rarely will I get involved in a discussion over “preferences”.  In this case though I find myself puzzled and decided to contribute to this one.  I think that the original poster’s premise on passwords as a formula borders on naive and is in my opinion adolescent in it’s approach.  Something that a number of posters above have already articulated so I won’t belabor that.

I was a software developer over 40 years on everything from IBM System 3, System 38, AS/400, Microsoft DOS, Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX and Linux using languages from RPG, Cobol, C, Visual Basic and ultimately coding for Oracle DB and Web systems in Javascript, HTML and Java.  Why bore you with this?  So you can understand that I’m pretty agnostic when it comes to systems and software.  My preference is always to use what works best for me in any given situation.

In almost all the discussions that I read about password managment and password managers the one solution I rarely see mentioned is the one I enjoy the most.  It’s Dashlane. I suspect that is probably because the Dashlane Premium is very expensive.  I’m paying $60 a year for it now.  I’ve used this product for over 3 years now and my wife uses it too.  For that money we get so much more than a simple password manager.  1st it runs on every platform / OS that I use.  I have a Windows 10 laptop and desktop, but I’m also very invested in the Apple iOS ecosystem.  I have my iPhone and iPad as well as my Macbook Pro.  The Macbook being my retirement hobby to learn the Swift language.  Dashlane works extremely well across all of my devices.  And my data synchronizes across all of my Dashlane installations which are on every platform I own.

Everywhere I have Dashlane it applies passwords on almost every web page I go to (nothing is perfect). It even works on web pages in iOS on my iPhone and iPad. I have hundreds of passwords stored in Dashlane. I doubt that I know 90% of them. I almost exclusively let Dashlane’s password generator create a password for me and most times I never even see it. Dashlane is that reliable for me.

Beyond password management, Dashlane allows me to selectively share passwords with my wife, who also has Dashlane Premium. And she shares certain ones with me. Securely sharing passwords is a real convenience for us.

Also I have the ability to have my credit cards entered into Dashlane and it fills in my CC information for me when making purchases.  It will also do so for my name and address when making purchases online.

It has a secure note capability that allows me to put sensitive information in a location where I can access it from my phone and iPad when not at my laptop or desktop.  This has proven to be a real benefit time and time again.

And Dashlane Premium also provides me with a VPN on my iPhone and iPad when I’m forced to use public wifi locations.

Yes it is expensive, but I’m willing to pay for all of the convenience to me that it provides.  Its cross platform support makes it the most useful application.

Hi,

I realize you’ve already bitten the bullet and done the reinstall, but I thought I’d share with you my similar problem.  I have a Maingear Shift desktop that is loaded with power.  After my upgrade to 1809 I started having a similar problem on restarts.  If I am in Windows and I elect to “restart” the system, or post install of a new program it asks for a “restart” and I click yes, in every case my system comes up with the lock screen and no matter what I do, the keyboard is “DEAD”.  Like you described, the system seems to be running fine otherwise.  My only recourse when this happens is to hit the reset button on the front of the machine.  When I do this, the machine reboots and I can then use the keyboard and login.

I just love Windows….

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Travasaurus

Just an FYI… here are my available switches for selecting apps to turn off / on notifications in the general notifications area under settings:

Hello, and thank you for that suggestion.  I’ll have to read more about the focus setting.  That is one I’m not familiar with.  I don’t really want to eliminate all of my notifications though.  I have a couple of apps, like MS Outlook email, that I want to receive notifications on.  But Focus is something I would like to learn more about.  Thanks again.

Hello, and thank you for that thought.  I don’t run 3rd party AV software.  I rely on Windows Defender for my security support.  I am quite confident that this is generated by Microsoft.  Are you running 1903 on any machines you have access to?  I’d be curious to see if this is something unique to my installation as a result of some setup choices I’ve made.  If you can shut this off on a 1903 it would help me diagnose my own situation.

I found the Security and Maintenance Control Panel option and unchecked it.  I attached a screen clip that shows it unchecked.  Sigh… Microsoft doesn’t care.  I still receive the notification about Windows Firewall…