I didn’t really want to “upgrade” to Windows 11, but I must have agreed somewhere in their constant badgering and now I am there. I haven’t really looked it up, but what has this “upgrade” gained me? Overall, it seems slower to me without any other gains short of a slightly new UI. I used to use the search bar at the bottom left of Win10 a lot. If I wanted the calculator, I just go to that box and start typing c-a-l then enter and the calculator was up in less than a second or two. Now I have to open the search box, which takes a couple of seconds, then start typing and it takes several more seconds to find the calculator app, then hitting enter takes another couple of seconds to open it. I have a laptop with an i7 and plenty of memory which worked well for Win10.
I assume I can go back to 10, but haven’t looked yet.
Any reason to stick with 11 and just deal with it?
Update: I see now that since I did not go back within the 10 days (didn’t know about that time limit), I’d have to do a full new install of Windows 10. Grrrr…
Microsoft seems to use the old marketing ploy. When a product sales have slowed, the company either sells the product line to another company or they reformulate the product making it cheaper.
Then the advertisement says it is “New and Improved” (the two most overused words in advertising).
Quite a while back, Marie Callanders dinners were bought by a different company. To cut cost they removed the ‘spice packets’ (better known as salt and pepper) from the product. I wonder how THAT improved the product.
Many decades ago the big joke on Microsoft users was the 95 to 98 conversion. Many reviewers said that Microsoft finally found a way to charge users for mostly a bug fix version with little changes to the product.
I have a computer still running WIN7 because I have quite a few programs which will not run under WIN10. Microsoft makes no money from me because of that. Another gotcha was that people began using ‘in the cloud’ versions of things like Office. They bit the hook and started subscribing to a product that they used to own previous versions of. Think about it. They now pay for updates to software, many of which are ‘enhancements’ that they will never use.
I’ve stayed away from subscribing to any SW products. I use Quicken 2008 since, back then, I got tired of buying the latest version that had the same bugs in them. Their ploy at the time was to change the file format for downloading your bank info every 3 years to force you to upgrade. That was fine with me as I found I don’t pay as much attention to things when they’re just down loaded versus entering by hand.
Quicken does the subscription thing now, too, so I’ll use 2008 as long as possible and then go to something else that’s free. I use Google Sheets for everything that I used to use Excel and Word for, or I use my work computer that as the MS stuff. Plenty of features for me and easily accessible from my other devices.
My wife also keeps an old PC to run programs that she can’t run on her new PC and have also gone the subscription route.
I’m getting more and more bummed that I missed the seemingly “secret” 10 day go-back-to-Win10 window.
Be very careful running old versions of operating systems if they are connected to the internet. Companies stop producing updates to spyware, malware and virus detection for older OS’s. You are leaving yourself vulnerable to cyber attack.
Lucky for me that I still get Win7 security updates.
As Microsoft comes up with newer operating systems, they introduce more ways for people to break in. It seems that Microsoft used to hire lots of kids right out of college to code. Many had no real life experience. For quite a while many bugs were introduced because the code never checked to see if the software was walking off the arrays (bounds violation).
When Windows introduced networking, it appeared as though they forced the software open to allow the network access rather than redesign the software with the idea of sharing. Their ability to work with other systems and connect reliably is crude.
Windows was not designed as a multi-tasking, multi-user system, they just kept modifying it rather than rewriting it. That is why many of the viruses have been able to infiltrate it.
I do have a bit of background in operating systems, having been one of 4 who created a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system for a real time application. I also have been a software engineer and systems manager (including security) for hundreds of mainframes for over 17 years. The proprietary operating system we used ran rings around Windows and was well designed and had lots fewer issues. Now it is not just Microsoft, as IBM used to issue major updates to their smaller hardware mainframes weekly.
And yes, my first system was programmed with toggle switches and I used both punch cards and paper tape.
Yes, that is plenty. You might try uninstalling any of the apps you don’t need. Uninstall any old programs you don’t use and make sure the OS is completely up to date. A clean install every few years is not a bad idea if you do want to return to Windows 10. Just be sure to do a complete backup first.
I’ve tried to upgrade three times but it fails. Went to the MS and followed every step, disable this, uninstall that. The upgrade cranks along for twenty minutes and then says, “upgrade failed”.
Of course, it never tell me why so I could resolve it. Gave up.
I’ve used both punch cards and paper tape… I recall attending a multinational conference where speed of information was the issue, and while everyone else was way past the speed of paper tape, the US Army in the field was still at that speed (this was quite a few decades ago). They had a multi-hour backlog, but wanted to decrease our 45 minute reporting time. It was ludicrous.
Paper tape was used a lot by Burroughs and on the Friden Flexowriter, mostly as a machine-readable storage medium for I/O for accounting & Telex machines and early word processors,. It was used in the late 50’s early 60’s, it was relatively short-lived and gave way to magnetic data storage technology.
You have so many days to revert back to Win 10 after you “upgrade”. Once you restart you can find how to do that. I Googled it once for the directions and found that my time to revert had expired. Sorry i don’t recall how to do it, but it’s pretty simple.
I worked as a CNE Netware 5.0 back when. I was then “encouraged” to jump on the MCSE path by my then employer. I soon left IT as a career and started my own non-related company. What a great move looking back. I am very glad and fortunate to have done so.
It was amazing how Microsoft was reinventing the Netware wheel and doing a poor job of it. It just seemed like they were focusing on the GUI and the user experience rather than the underlying functionality and reliability of networking services. Unlike Netware many changes or configuration of the MS server side required a system reboot. I remember there being so many things Netware could do on the fly without a server reboot that required all users to take a break.
