Just when you thought Windows 10 was the last version of Window ever...

[zappaDPJ]

...along came Windows 11

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/15/22535123/microsoft-windows-11-leak-screenshots-start-menu

[Simon]

Yeah, I've seen that mentioned a bit this week.   

[Clive]

I doubt if I will upgrade any of my machines.  Upgrading from Win 7 to 10 wrecked two of my laptops and I don't plan to risk another! 

[zappaDPJ]

I doubt if I will upgrade any of my machines.  Upgrading from Win 7 to 10 wrecked two of my laptops and I don't plan to risk another! 

The main issue you might have with that is Microsoft are planning to drop all support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025.

I must admit I don't like really Windows 10, it's caused me a lot of issues and a huge amount of wasted time. I also detest Corona... Cortina... Cortana, the notification center and every aspect of the search function.

[Clive]

As I understand it they are still rolling out occasional updates for Win 7 as so many businesses are still using it.  Their usual ploy is to extend their support a couple of times then just update for very serious problems afterwards.  Who knows, Win 10 might yet see me out.   

[Technical Ben]

The main issue you might have with that is Microsoft are planning to drop all support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025.

I must admit I don't like really Windows 10, it's caused me a lot of issues and a huge amount of wasted time. I also detest Corona... Cortina... Cortana, the notification center and every aspect of the search function.

Yeah, 10 is manageable when those things are disabled/fixed. A bit like Win 8.1. Fine under the hood, ruined by fiddling GUI worriers.
So guess what they are doing to 11? Yep, same mistake. Improve the Kernal, confuse the GUI. It kinda was the opposite for 3.1 to Windows 7. Improve but confuse the kernel, and improve the GUI massively.

[zappaDPJ]

We might be in luck! Windows 11 (which looks and feels more like Windows 10.1 to me) will only run on computers with the following specs: Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake or Zen 2 CPUs and up, TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) support, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.

As none of the five PCs in this household have TPM 2.0 or the socket required to add it to the motherboard we will be running Windows 10 until the hardware is no longer usable

[robinc]

As a full time long term linux user the good news is that the ex business machine market will be flooded with 7th gen machines with plenty of life left in 'em.

Yaay!

[nowster]

As a full time long term linux user the good news is that the ex business machine market will be flooded with 7th gen machines with plenty of life left in 'em.

Ditto. I wonder if VirtualBox can emulate a TPM device...

[robinc]

I see that Microsoft are replacing the Blue Screen of Death with......

the Black Screen of Death.......

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57695586

Hasn't anyone pointed out that a Blue SoD is one thing?............but!

Let's hope someone has a quite word in someone's ear real soon!

Idiots!

[zappaDPJ]

 

As a full time long term linux user the good news is that the ex business machine market will be flooded with 7th gen machines with plenty of life left in 'em.

Yaay!

Every cloud...

[Clive]

I see that Microsoft are replacing the Blue Screen of Death with......

the Black Screen of Death.......

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57695586

Hasn't anyone pointed out that a Blue SoD is one thing?............but!

Let's hope someone has a quite word in someone's ear real soon!

Idiots!

That would be very disconcerting because we wouldn't have a clue what was going on.  My heart is in my mouth every time a Windows update causes a black screen for seemingly an eternity before lighting back up again.   

[Postal]

Ditto. I wonder if VirtualBox can emulate a TPM device...

According to a thread on the ThinkBroadband Forum (https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/t/4687302-windows-11-or-what-ever-it-is-going-to-be-called.html) Windows 11 can be installed on VirtualBox.

[zappaDPJ]

So I solved my Windows 11 compatibility issues and bought an iMac It sits at the heart of my recording studio and I'm really happy with it but recently I decided I still need a PC which has, to use the modern vernacular, turned out to be quite a journey

My old PC was expensive and built to last, nearly 15 years and it still compares well to today's pre-built PCs. However it won't run Windows 11 and it struggles due to slow I/O when I encode over 150,000 files, something I need to do on a regular basis.

When I started to put together a list of components for a new PC is became apparent that things have changed during the last 15 years to such an extent I considered buying something built to order until I worked out I'd be looking at well over £5,000 to get something to last and cover all bases. £30,000 if you want cutting edge!

Back to the drawing board and I put together a list and posted it on OCUK forums. The first reply made me realise compatibility with modern components was going to be a nightmare. My suggested PSU was incompatible with top end GPUs, the motherboard probably wouldn't work without a BIOS flash and I worked out for myself that the CPU heatsink I wanted was physically incompatible with the layout of modern motherboards.

It took me over a week of reading to put together a new list during which time I concluded that top end SATA drives (at over £1,200 each) had been superseded by M.2 SATA storage which in turn had been replaced by PCI NVMe SSDs but there are currently no Intel motherboards that can take advantage of the Gen5 variant so you are stuck forever at Gen4. Are you with me so far? I lost the plot at this point.

To cut to the chase I ordered components I hoped would work and spent the next week ordering leads to make it work including new monitor cables because none of the large box of leads I had would fit the new GPU which has no VGA, DVI or HDMI sockets but 4* 'DisplayPort' sockets. All my previous PCs have had a full tower case including my current PC which is rammed full of components to such an extent I have had to resort to external storage. I ordered a mid tower for the new build and immediately regretted it when I saw the size but had to laugh once I'd put it all together. Around two thirds of the case is filled with fresh air and that's with 16 terabytes of storage.

Putting it all together really was a nightmare, at one point I considered taking it all down the road to a PC repair specialist. I should know what I'm doing, I used to build computers and monitors at circuit board level but the current pace of technology is causing so many compatibility issues. Anyway at 4.00am this morning I made an offering to the gods of technology with a rather large Islay malt, fed the infernal device some electricity and stone me, the damn thing actually POSTs

All I have to do now is install Windows 11 and copy and/or install 15 years worth of programs and data

[Simon]

Well done!  I haven't got to the time or inclination for self-builds these days, but the last one I did was well documented on here, and lasted about 15 years.  I'm well out of the loop now, so I wouldn't even know where to start.

[zappaDPJ]

Installing Windows 11 bloatware proved to be another challenge. It wouldn't install without logging into a Microsoft account but I couldn't do that without first installing a LAN driver. I eventually managed to circumvent that problem but I can't for the life of me remember how.

The amount of bloatware that comes preloaded with Windows is ridiculous and a lot of it you can't get rid of without resorting to registry hacks. The only app that did interested me, syncing a mobile, simple doesn't work. Anyway it's done, all that's left now is to copy everything across from my old PC. To pass the time while I do it I've been watching Glastonbury which was going really well until I saw Alison Goldfrapp miming

It's hard to believe that this PC has 16 terabytes of storage. I'm thinking of installing a hamster in the empty space

[Simon]

One of the things that put me off Windows 11 big time, having seen it on my cousin's new laptop, is the amount of adverts that keep popping up all over the place.  I think I would probably need to spend a week trying to get rid of them all and to prevent further incursions from appearing.

[Simon]

Oh, and I just watched Elton at Glastonbury, and thought he was pretty good!

[zappaDPJ]

Oh, and I just watched Elton at Glastonbury, and thought he was pretty good!

I thought so. I prefer his earlier music and I was quite surprised to hear him and his band really nail those songs. A quick google provided answers. It's was his original guitarist playing tonight, Davy Johnstone who played on all of Elton's early albums and contributed greatly imo to his distinctive sound. If that was his last performance it was a fitting end to an amazing career.

Back to Windows, I've yet to see an ad, I can only guess that your cousin is using Edge for browsing. I use Firefox/uBlock Origin which blocks everything you don't won't including ads on YouTube.

[Simon]

Yeah, I think it's default everything on my cousin's laptop.

Back to Elton, was that not his usual guitarist then?  I'm sure I've seen him play with Elton before. 

[zappaDPJ]

Back to Elton, was that not his usual guitarist then?  I'm sure I've seen him play with Elton before. 

That I don't know. I do know it was the same guitarist who played on all the early albums, everything up to Captain Fantastic. I lost interest and stopped buying after that so I don't know about the rest of his catalogue.

[zappaDPJ]

When I first installed Windows 11 I was using a really old, low res monitor and I didn't fully appreciate just how truly awful the interface is. The start menu alone is shocking, tiny pixelated icons floating in a huge sea of nothing. The icon for Edge looks like it was fashioned in Lego. I'll be upgrading my monitors to 4k units in the near future and I dread to think what it will look like on those.

Other than that I'd say Windows 11 is total garbage, I mean really, really bad. It's slow, anything of any use I can't get to work and visually it looks like something that was designed last century. All it lacks is a scrolling marque and some animated glitter text.

On the upside the speed increase from my new hardware is pretty impressive. Encoding jobs that used to take about 36 hours on my old PC now complete in under 50 minutes. I'll take a guess the biggest improvement comes from the PCI-e NVMe storage which has a read/write of around 7500 MB/s compared to my old system which trundled along at 150 Mb/s or thereabout.

I really don't understand why Microsoft is so behind the technology curve. Compared to an Apple iMac which just works, regardless of your level of expertise, Window 11 is stone age by comparison. I've started to think in terms of Linux

[Simon]

Thankfully, my main PC isn't compatible with Windows 11 so it will never try to upgrade, and I've managed to persuade my laptop to stop nagging me to upgrade with a registry tweak so I should be safe for the time being.

[Clive]

As we all know, good versions of Windows are always followed by bad ones.  I was stupid enough to use Windows Me and learnt my lesson.  Gosh, I suppose that was not much short of 25 years ago when I was paying £1,600 for a desktop from Time Computers.   

[zappaDPJ]

Thankfully, my main PC isn't compatible with Windows 11 so it will never try to upgrade, and I've managed to persuade my laptop to stop nagging me to upgrade with a registry tweak so I should be safe for the time being.

Judging from what I've seen so far I can imagine it would rinse your laptop unless you are prepared to remove stuff at registry level.

As we all know, good versions of Windows are always followed by bad ones.  I was stupid enough to use Windows Me and learnt my lesson.  Gosh, I suppose that was not much short of 25 years ago when I was paying £1,600 for a desktop from Time Computers.   

I was 'gifted' a Compaq Deskpro in the late 80s, an incentive for taking a job with the NHS. It cost over $10,500 and never got used

[Clive]

When I worked for BP we bought a Macintosh 128K that was the pride and joy of the lab.  But nobody could use it and the IT department washed their hands of it because they hadn't been involved with the purchase.  But we did have an Anita electronic calculator which was the size of a 32" TV.  It was a wonderful toy.

[zappaDPJ]

I bought a Macintosh II which I think came after the 128K while I worked in the NHS and that did get used a lot for desktop publishing but that was dead easy learn.

I vaguely remember the Anita, I think it ran on valves!

[zappaDPJ]

I've just wasted two hours of my life trying to get Windows 11 to discover a directory containing 150,000 files via my network on my old PC. I had it there momentarily after an hour but it then wanted 'credentials' that I simply don't have and after attempting to circumvent that hurdle my old PC vanished off the network forever.

I was in the process of trying to work out which physical drive I need to swap to the new PC when it dawned on me to check if my old PC could see my new PC and there it was. I suspect it was sitting there taunting me from the moment I powered both computers up and I really have wasted two hour of my life.

Windows 11... just don't

And just to rub it in... https://www.techadvisor.com/article/745965/will-there-be-a-windows-12.html

[Simon]

[Clive]

Microsoft know from take-up and feedback that 11 is unpopular and will want to ditch it sooner rather than later.  Maybe 12 will be better.   

[Postal]

As we all know, good versions of Windows are always followed by bad ones.  I was stupid enough to use Windows Me and learnt my lesson.  Gosh, I suppose that was not much short of 25 years ago when I was paying £1,600 for a desktop from Time Computers.   

You can see from the progress of Windows whether the tecchies or the customer facing executives hold the levers of power in Microsoft.  The tecchies keep inventing stuff and saying that this is good and we'll force the customers to have it so that they will learn to like it (Vista or Windows 8, anyone).  Then there is a customer backlash and those in Microsoft who aren't hiding in the tecchie silo manage to persuade the powers that be that forcing innovation they don't want on to a customer base gives the brand a bad reputation.  The tecchies have to row back from some of their "improvements" and the whole customer experience is improved (Windows 7 or Windows 10 perhaps).  Where is there anyone in a customer facing environment who would think that for example removing the capability to show seconds in the system clock or have small icons on the taskbar would not aggravate a vocal part of the customer base - and who in the tecchie silo would even hear that discontent?

[zappaDPJ]

What annoys me even more than the poor UI, the bloat and the general lack of innovation is when I find things that I've been doing easily for years now requires a degree in astrophysics e.g.

The command line in Windows 10 to perform a recursive delete, i.e. removing all text files from the current directory and every sub-directory below it: del /s /q *.txt
The all new command line in Windows 11 to do the same thing: Get-ChildItem * -Include *.txt -Recurse | Remove-Item

It took me all afternoon to get something that would work and the working string of commands makes little sense on any level whereas the old command prompt line by comparison is captain obvious.

[zappaDPJ]

I just ran a command line batch job on the new PC that used to take four and a half days to complete on the old one. It was done in just under four hours on the new PC. It's amazing to think that USB specs are now faster than RAM speeds where when I built my old PC.

The only thing I don't like is modern PC tech has no hard drive activity LED. That will take some getting used to.

[nowster]

Windows 10 really hammers the hard drive, and the most noticeable speed up is from changing its system drive from spinning rust to solid state.

[zappaDPJ]

Windows 10 really hammers the hard drive, and the most noticeable speed up is from changing its system drive from spinning rust to solid state.

Very true and stepping up a gear, SATA (III) to NVMe PCIe gets you a theoretical max speed upgrade from 600MB/s to 64,000MB/s. Where will it all end!

I just had a bit of luck with Windows. I've been trying and failing to use one of my legitimately purchased Windows licenses on my new PC. After hovering on Microsoft's buy button for while (£219.99 for 11 PRO) I Googled and found a company, Ecokeys selling the same license for £9.49. I bought one, fed it into the infernal machine and it's genuine. That was a very pleasant surprise and a saving of over £210.

[robinc]

Windows 10 really hammers the hard drive, and the most noticeable speed up is from changing its system drive from spinning rust to solid state.

........however, it is still hammering the drive, it's just that the speed of the SSD masks it. My guess is that SSDs running Windows 10 are running out of life faster than with other less aggressive operating systems.

[nowster]

........however, it is still hammering the drive, it's just that the speed of the SSD masks it. My guess is that SSDs running Windows 10 are running out of life faster than with other less aggressive operating systems.

If it's just reads, there's no extra wear to the SSD. The head seeking time is the biggest slowdown.

[zappaDPJ]

Here's a funny story... 

Since I built my new PC last June I've spent months on and off copying everything across from the old PC. All I had left to do was import thousands of emails and copy across a huge directory of documents, photos and random bits of work I've collected over the last 25+ years, a job that should have taken less than an hour.

So my old PC wouldn't boot. The motherboard error code suggested a dead C: drive but I was also unable to enter the BIOS. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the CMOS battery was dud which required dismantling the majority of the PC to get it replaced. To cut a long story short it became apparent that the motherboard was partially fried. That was Monday done and dusted until the early hours.

Today I took apart the new PC in order to connect the old C: drive which took some doing because it's old tech but was able to breathe a sigh of relief when I found it could be read. I copied over the monster directory, imported a bazillion emails and put the everything back together. I then spent the rest of the day today deleting all my unwanted emails working forwards from the oldest mail. One of the last (new) emails received was a 95% quota warning from IDNet which I thought strange because I'm paranoid about losing mail and always leave my email client open.

I logged into webmail and did a bulk delete. Award yourself 10 points if you know what's coming next All the email on all my devices had gone and being a completely dim idiot I couldn't for the life of me work out why.

It did finally dawn on me Outlook 365 had automatically set the account to IMAP and to be fair in the past it has always defaulted to POP3 but... I'm now leaning towards joining an Amish community and spending the rest of my life milking cows

[Postal]

In the unlikely event that the same sort of thing happens in the future it might be easier to take the HDD out of the old machine, strap it into a HDD caddy (less than £10 from Amazon), plug it into the USB on the new machine and just do a drag and drop.  I've done that the last couple of times I've had to transfer from a dead laptop to a new machine.

[peasblossom]

Oh zappa. Who among us, eh?    

[Simon]

Oh no!  So have you still got all the old emails on the old drive?  Or another backup somewhere?

[zappaDPJ]

I do have a backup but I don't know which of the eight physical drives I pulled out of the evil machine it would be on. However I was able to read the .pst file from the old C: drive and found a way to import it directly rather than use export/import. I just need to go through the lot for the second time and delete what's no longer relevant.

In the unlikely event that the same sort of thing happens in the future it might be easier to take the HDD out of the old machine, strap it into a HDD caddy (less than £10 from Amazon), plug it into the USB on the new machine and just do a drag and drop.  I've done that the last couple of times I've had to transfer from a dead laptop to a new machine.

I really should have done that but panic mode kicked in and I couldn't wait to find out if I'd had a drive failure.

[Simon]

It's strange how panic mode often seems to override normal brain functions.

[zappaDPJ]

Yeah and it's whole new experience for me. I'm thinking of standing as a candidate at the next General Election. I'm pretty sure I've become stupid enough to get elected

[Simon]