I have to admit as to being quite shocked how difficult I found navigating Windows 11 compared to 10 in trying to find every buried thing I wanted to change settings wise etc.
One of the first programs I uninstall
I thankfully managed to get all those away through the normal settings/privacy functions possibly because I’m on Win11 Pro which provides for more lock-down for businesses.
However, inspite of all location settings being disabled - I stumbled upon the Widget screen that I knew nothing about (on a touch screen swipe from the left of the screen in) which had a whole ton of news and weather widgets happily showing the weather for my location.
I just removed all the widgets, true I could have used regedit/group policy editor to fully disable the feature, so if that’s something you don’t want/need in Win11 and it’s still hiding away, you may wish to consider removing it.
The reason I would only go Win11 was if I could get Pro was to keep my local account, I mean I do have a MS a/c but that doesn’t mean I want it for my login. Even in Pro they’ve made it more of a pain though, in Win10 you could disable ethernet/wifi and it would realise you had no internet so force the option of a local account, even in 11Pro you now have to shift+F10 on install, and run a command to restart the Out Of Box Experience with networking disabled to get the local account creation to work - annoying.
Hi Ofiaich,
Had the same problem 12mths ago. I had W7 and my old PC was slowly dying.
I’m 74 and fortunately have a very tech savvy daughter.
Went to a well known shop and purchased a not too expensive laptop with W11 and have never looked back. Also upgraded my broadband to 150mb., which has helped.
The old PC went to the tip.
I don’t do anything too complicated, but that’s where the daughter comes in handy.
It’s also all run by Wi-Fi now.
Good luck.
There is a simple workround to installing Win 11 on non-TPM machines, I’ve used it on numerous occaisions for my older (10 years) laptop and friends even older laptops.
Google it, you’ll find numerous links.
Win 11 is definitely better than Win 10, both in terms of speed and footprint, with the obvious advantage of on-going updates and support.
If you look at laptops for sale on eBay you’ll find lots with new Win11 installs that are running on unsupported cpus.
I feel this is going to be an issue for non-tech savvy buyers who’ll buy them in good faith and then, potentially, find MS refusing security patches for such devices which they already stated they would likely introduce at some point.
How they managed to break file searching so badly after XP is beyond me
Ha ha, windows and laptops are one of my pet hates now.
Been waiting and waiting this morning as Mrs A said yet again my laptop has updated (I paused updates on it) and now the HP printer doesn’t work. Yet again uninstalled the app and reinstalled it, messing around for ages with it.
My laptop was binned years ago, hated it and windows with a passion.
Absolutely no useful info here, I just liked to have a rant:grin:
I’m using a W11 laptop at home and a W10 desktop in the office, and in all honesty I can’t tell the difference. I think the laptop updated some while ago (its not that new and started off with 10) and didn’t seem impacted in any way, and anything I had to do to get it to look the same I’ve long forgotten about. Point of the story is don’t fear updating to W11, its just the same, (I think).
How many of use any thing like the power our machines have. I rarely go anywhere near the start button (is it still called that?) everything get launched from a desktop shortcut, or from a task bar shortcut, including frequently accessed documents pinned to the taskbar shortcut.
Did W11 stop you arranging the pinned taskbar docs in the order you want ? If so then, yeah, that omission over W10 was really annoying at first.
I had a corporate copy available of Windows 8 when I built my desktop over a decade ago. I absolutely hated it’s user interface and found Start 8 from https://www.stardock.com which replicates the Win 7 UI as well as being customisable.
About 6 years ago I purchased a good quality ink tank photo quality printer and had to upgrade Win 8 to Win 10 because of the lack of drivers for the obsolete operating system. So back to another hated interface so I purchased Start 10 to get back to the practical and efficient user interface.
They do sell Start11, albeit with an increased purchase price (£10 rather than the original £5 a decade ago). I believe they offer a trial version for evaluation.
For those of you would like to easily revert back to the Win-7 UI, this just might be the way to go.
Ooh, I do like this one.
I’ve been using Agent Ransack for years which is a more traditional file search but I like the reverse way of working that Everything uses.
I’m running a kosher Win11 Pro on my main PC but have installed “fixed” Win11 Pro on a couple of older laptops and an Intel NUC which fail processor / TPU check with absolutely no problems and all stable. All with offline accounts only. I’m also running StartAllBack on these for the Win7 look.
I’ve just had a look at that on a couple of YouTube walk-throughs. It’s interesting.
It seems to answer most of my questions about how to simplify usability and declutter the appearance, but doesn’t mention anything about dumping all traces of the nags.
When the laptop visits me again next week I’ll talk him through it and see if he wants to give it a try.
$5 after the 100 days free trial seems a bargain.
I will keep my fingers crossed for you, but I don’t think the i7 6500u cpu is on the list of supported processors I’m afraid. It’s possible MS have expanded support to more devices
It is also possible to install W11 on an unsupported cpu and I know they are currently still providing updates and patches to non-supported configurations. If the above doesn’t fix your error you could potentially do that whilst you decide whether to buy a new laptop. Instructions for installing on a non-supported device are below (under ‘other ways to install Windows’):
As a free alternative to Start8 /10/11 (I too bought Start 8 to rid myself of win8’s Start) there’s also Classic Shell which works well, in fact all our business PCs where I used to work ran it during the Win8/8.1 era
I unfortunately use more than the power my machine wants me to have at times
Since you have an x360 (me too! ) based HP, if you do go the Linux route you’ll need to make sure you’re running your Desktop in Wayland mode as opposed to X11 mode as Wayland supports touch more akin (but sadly not perfectly) to Windows 10/11 (basically when you login to your machine you choose the option to launch one over the other after Linux is installed) - unless you always use it with just the keyboard/trackpad and don’t bother with touch input.
With those specs I’d certainly keep the machine whatever OS you run on it as there’s definitely alot of life left in it.
Best of luck with purchasing a new laptop should you choose to go down that route! I would say though, you don’t need to spend quite so much as £800+ given what you use the device for based on your previous posts. Whilst on paper a higher level Intel core ‘i’ processor would seem to be the better device, unless you are doing demanding tasks such as video editing and 3d modelling it’s totally unnecessary. A bit like buying a Porsche 911 versus an MX5 when you only want to enjoy top down driving on nice windy roads.
I recently bought the Asus below for £599 for my partner, who uses it for similar purposes as you previously mentioned, ie online shopping/banking plus video chats and some casual gaming, and he has found it to be quite suitable for his needs.
I suppose it depends on your preferred form factor, this is a compact 15" notebook, but my point is you may be able to spend a bit less and still get just what you need.
Stick with an Intel Core i processor and avoid ‘Celeron’, or alternatively the AMD Ryzen are also solid processors. Go for something with an SSD hard drive and at least 8GB of RAM and you will be fine in the £500-600 price bracket
Also avoid Pentium / Pentium Gold, and some things are listed with the cpu number, not with the processor family name to add to the fun meaning you have to search the number to find out what on earth it is. Also cpu numbers don’t always make sense:
Classic Shell is great. Use it on our Lenovo laptops with Windoze11
We got a decent Lenovo laptop off eBay from Argos as a damaged returned product. It was about £500 and £300 less that new. The only damage was a scratch on the lid where the original owner must have used a knife to slice open the packaging.
Don’t be frightened of looking on eBay for good kit from Argos/Currys etc
Good luck!
next March so laptop and printer are much more convenient for that!