Windows 11 has been announced

[andrewalston]

Is there a rationale for all this, or just bored programmers playing around?

It's almost always the Marketing Department.

They need to justify spending loads of cash on promoting the brand. If there aren't any new products, the "brand" is envisaged (mostly by the Marketing Department) as being "old-fashioned". So they demand that everything be "New!", "Improved!" and "Exciting!" even when it does exactly what the old version did. They have a Big Budget, so they get their way.

It's the same with laundry detergent. The first soapless detergents came as powders, and you could decide for yourself how much suited your wash. We have since seen fashions go through Liquids (with a measuring cup to make sure you didn't skimp), Tablets (which forced a certain dose on you) and currently Pods, which are such a bad idea that they need to be locked away from children). Through all this, thankfully, the powders have remained available, though with periodic "New!" "Improved!" on the carton.

The reasoning was invented in the USA around 1950 by their car makers. They started to change the design of a model in some obvious way every year rather than improving handling, safety, reliability or fuel economy, which they found difficult to promote.

[andrewalston]

Had a bit of a play with the Insider build - nothing heavy yet.

I notice that others have commented on the wide spacing of lines in File Explorer, but I had already adjusted that in a previous build. There's a proper setting under Options for it. MS assume that everyone is using touch devices and requires extra room for fat fingers.

If you pin applications to the Taskbar, they still get their recent documents shown on right-click. Those pinned to the Start Menu don't.

The size of the pinning area is fixed. Have more than 18 items, and a miniature scroll bar appears, in pale grey on white. The Suggested area also has a fixed size, being a list of recent filenames with relevant icons but without their folder names. Mine shows just the most recent 6 files used. There
is a "More" to show the same list as "Recent files" in File Explorer's Quick Access.

Clicking on the "All apps" button shows the stuff that used to be on the Win10 Start menu's left-hand column. Things on there get their Recent stuff.

There is a registry entry to get the Win10 Start menu back. Browse to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" and create a DWORD called "Start_ShowClassicMode", then set it to 1.

Signing out then back in then gets me my pre-update Start menu, with all the pinned items in the places they were last week, and their Recent stuff intact. With the Taskbar alignment set to Left (in its Settings), things line up again and start making sense.

I still don't know why one PC gets Win11 and the other doesn't. Neither support any UEFI features, and System Information shows hardly any differences between the configs.

[Michael J]

Hi Andrew,

Many thanks for the report on Win 11, it makes very interesting reading & has made me think again.

Although my 4yr old laptop keeps being moved to the release channel, apparently because its Intel Core i7-6500U isn't supported, reselecting the dev channel lets me download Windows 11 Insider Preview 10.0.22000.51 (co_release), but I'm unsure as to whether I should install it bearing in mind on consumer release I will have to revert to Win 10.

Michael.

[andrewalston]

I've only installed Insider stuff on things I could rebuild from scratch without worrying. I keep all the relevant drivers ready to use on my server, and I have a couple of spare drives I can slot in.

One of the  boxes has already gone through rebuild following a particularly bad Insider attempt (before the public release of Win10).

[Michael J]

I've only installed Insider stuff on things I could rebuild from scratch without worrying.

I agree, I used both of my desktops for this previously & am using one as my main computer, having upgraded it to Win 10 Pro, but as it has a 2nd generation core i7 it won't even look at Win 11.

[mike175]

As far as I can see, from various reviews on the web, all the 'improvements' appear to be cosmetic. I did try downloading the insider preview on an old PC, which aborted after a few minutes and reverted back to the installed Windows 10 build, telling me to reboot the system. It then immediately repeated the 'upgrade' process which aborted again     so I have abandoned the insider programme which I joined for the Windows 10 previews. I think I can wait a few years until I'm forced to upgrade, by which time I'll probably need a new PC anyway . . . if I'm still capable of using one by then 

[mumjo]

I wonder how many older computer users have been panicked into thinking that they need to buy a new computer. My mother in law on Windows 7 has just told me that she has to buy a new laptop as she couldn’t continue to use Windows 7.
Maybe she misunderstood what the information was saying, she is nearly 90.
Jo

[andrewalston]

There is a registry entry to get the Win10 Start menu back. Browse to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" and create a DWORD called "Start_ShowClassicMode", then set it to 1.

Signing out then back in then gets me my pre-update Start menu, with all the pinned items in the places they were last week, and their Recent stuff intact. With the Taskbar alignment set to Left (in its Settings), things line up again and start making sense.

Unfortunately, this week's update has removed this. We are stuck with the new design of start menu.

[Michael J]

Thank you Andrew for your latest report, in a way I'm glad all my hardware has processors that are too old to run Win 11.

I hope MS heed your feedback.

Michael.