Discussion My Impressions

[Heat_Fan89]

So I performed a clean install on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q with an Intel 8100T 4 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 250GB HDD 5400rpm, Intel 630 GPU. Here my quick impressions so far.

1) One Drive isn't working, it crashes each time saying there's a problem. However it appears it downloaded all my files.

2) Installation process: It was pretty smooth although it took a LONG time to complete, more on that in a moment. Yes you do need an internet connection or you won't be able to complete the installation. However some good news. One reason for that is that now Windows on a clean install will search for any available drivers for your PC and it will download and install them. A few of the drivers were out of date but most of them were current.

3) This OS was designed for an SSD, it mud slogging slow on a 5400 rpm drive. My Lenovo PC came with a Samsung NVME but it's now in my gaming rig. But yeah get either an internal or NVME SSD or you will have to be patient for all the basic stuff.

4) Aesthetically the UX looks nice and functional. Call me crazy but I do like the icons in the middle even with a keyboard and touchpad. Find stuff will take some getting used to but MS appears to want you to search for stuff. By default Power Shell is once again the CLI and I have not found to switch it to Command Prompt even by right clicking on the taskbar and bringing up the Taskbar Settings.

So far the interface is attractive, the menus look nice as well as the themes. It's pretty much like it was with W10 but a little more enhanced this time giving you more options such as themes. I also concur with others who have said the Start Menu reminds them of Windows 8, i'm not seeing that. When you call up the Start Menu and then click on "All Apps" it switches to the apps popup menu (slide over effect).

5) Bloatware galore. I had to uninstall quite a few Apps such as preinstalled Tik Tok, FB, Instagram and a few other Social Media apps. Not the end of the world, just annoying.

6) The installation takes about 22.6GB and that's after I deleted the hibernation file.

7) So far just going by first impressions it isn't that bad but I need to see some gaming benchmarks posted before I install this on my gaming rigs.

 

[punkncat]

I just installed it on a 11600K based system and the install went very smoothly. In your own case, and you already mention, that the main hinderance to your experience is based in that HDD. It should be illegal for manufacturers to use them any more, much less at that RPM.
Even a super cheapy cheap SSD would vastly improve your experience.

I didn't find too many things pre-installed and none of my settings were changed from the fully updated 10 to 11. Everything seems to be working as it should aside from a bit of additional RAM use, presumably from the added security features (?).

I am happy to utilize and learn more about. My main impression is a prettied up 10. Seems a lot the same under the hood.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I've jumped on the Day 1 install on my main machine. However, I did a clean reinstall of Windows 10 first, installed the drivers that I needed, then upgraded to Windows 11. The experience with that and setting it up were:

• Upgrading took about half an hour, but otherwise was fairly painless.
• I noticed a lot less stuff to go through on the "first time setup"
• My sound card (a Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5) drivers needed to be reinstalled for some reason, but reinstalling it wasn't a problem.
• The new settings app is nice, if a little jarring to get used to due to the way it's now organized. But I was able to get to what I want.
  • A big complaint I have is if the list of items in a category overflows vertically and you have to scroll down to get to somewhere, when you go back to the top-level, it starts at the top of the list rather than roughly where you were. This makes settings privacy options more annoying since you have to constantly scroll down
• I really like Windows 11's Dark Mode as it feels like a "proper" Dark Mode (i.e., using darker grays and lower contrast colors). Windows 10's felt like a bastard child of one of the High Contrast themes.
• You can still create a local user account. However since I bought a license through my Microsoft account, I'm not sure what the experience is trying to install Windows 11 with only a local account.
• Overall, no other major complaints so far.

But now for the more negative or jarring things:

• I'm forced to use app grouping in the Task Bar now. Call me weird but I liked the "Never group" or "Group when full" option. In practice this may not matter as much since I rarely have more than one instance of that app open (it's mostly Firefox or VS Code), but still.
• Task Bar and Start feel bugged. When pinning apps to the Start Menu, they don't show up until you restart explorer.exe in some way (either logging out and logging in or force quitting it). Similarly when one of the app groups became colored to get my attention, I closed the window through the preview. This caused the coloring to remain even though the thing that was trying to get my attention was closed. Restarting explorer.exe fixed this
• No more Live Tiles, but to be fair I only used it for the Weather app, and even it never really refreshed often enough and I end up opening the app anyway.
• Alt + Tab is now full screen. A little jarring, but no functional changes so no biggie.
• Minor gripe is if you get to the old style context menu, the selection highlight covers just the height of the text rather than including some padding. It doesn't look right.
• One of my bluetooth adapters no longer works. Though it's a cheapo one from Best Buy and the chipset (a Broadcom one) stopped being supported back in 2015.
• No more clock on the second monitor's task bar.

Of note, I've moved to Vista and 8 as my main OS within their year 1 window (I believe I switched to 8 practically near launch). I'm going to sound like I'm shilling for Microsoft, but I actually never had much of a problem with either of those OSes. Slight hiccups and jarring things sure, but not outright "this sucks, I'm switching back." Though in terms of which was the "worst" experience to switch over to, I'd put Windows 11 in second place, with Vista being ahead. If anything, 7 felt more like an incremental upgrade and 10 didn't feel like anything at all. If anything, I'd say 10 felt worse with more things I had to go through to get it where I wanted.

Features that were removed (except where mentioned above) in 11 don't bother me that they were removed because I likely didn't use them in the first place. Not to say someone else made great use of them, but I try to keep how I use the OS to a minimum to avoid jarring changes. It's the only reason why Windows 8 wasn't a bad experience for me: I don't click on the Start button (I use the Windows key) and I don't use the All Programs listing much (I use Start Search to launch what I want)

 

[sjenvey777]

For me it was very clean and easy to do, It was a very smooth process.

As for Windows 11 itself I like the look and feel as of right now. I haven't ran into any problems..

 

[LeviTech]

I've jumped on the Day 1 install on my main machine. However, I did a clean reinstall of Windows 10 first, installed the drivers that I needed, then upgraded to Windows 11. The experience with that and setting it up were:

• Upgrading took about half an hour, but otherwise was fairly painless.
• I noticed a lot less stuff to go through on the "first time setup"
• My sound card (a Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5) drivers needed to be reinstalled for some reason, but reinstalling it wasn't a problem.
• The new settings app is nice, if a little jarring to get used to due to the way it's now organized. But I was able to get to what I want.
  • A big complaint I have is if the list of items in a category overflows vertically and you have to scroll down to get to somewhere, when you go back to the top-level, it starts at the top of the list rather than roughly where you were. This makes settings privacy options more annoying since you have to constantly scroll down
• I really like Windows 11's Dark Mode as it feels like a "proper" Dark Mode (i.e., using darker grays and lower contrast colors). Windows 10's felt like a bastard child of one of the High Contrast themes.
• You can still create a local user account. However since I bought a license through my Microsoft account, I'm not sure what the experience is trying to install Windows 11 with only a local account.
• Overall, no other major complaints so far.

But now for the more negative or jarring things:

• I'm forced to use app grouping in the Task Bar now. Call me weird but I liked the "Never group" or "Group when full" option. In practice this may not matter as much since I rarely have more than one instance of that app open (it's mostly Firefox or VS Code), but still.
• Task Bar and Start feel bugged. When pinning apps to the Start Menu, they don't show up until you restart explorer.exe in some way (either logging out and logging in or force quitting it). Similarly when one of the app groups became colored to get my attention, I closed the window through the preview. This caused the coloring to remain even though the thing that was trying to get my attention was closed. Restarting explorer.exe fixed this
• No more Live Tiles, but to be fair I only used it for the Weather app, and even it never really refreshed often enough and I end up opening the app anyway.
• Alt + Tab is now full screen. A little jarring, but no functional changes so no biggie.
• Minor gripe is if you get to the old style context menu, the selection highlight covers just the height of the text rather than including some padding. It doesn't look right.
• One of my bluetooth adapters no longer works. Though it's a cheapo one from Best Buy and the chipset (a Broadcom one) stopped being supported back in 2015.
• No more clock on the second monitor's task bar.

Of note, I've moved to Vista and 8 as my main OS within their year 1 window (I believe I switched to 8 practically near launch). I'm going to sound like I'm shilling for Microsoft, but I actually never had much of a problem with either of those OSes. Slight hiccups and jarring things sure, but not outright "this sucks, I'm switching back." Though in terms of which was the "worst" experience to switch over to, I'd put Windows 11 in second place, with Vista being ahead. If anything, 7 felt more like an incremental upgrade and 10 didn't feel like anything at all. If anything, I'd say 10 felt worse with more things I had to go through to get it where I wanted.

Features that were removed (except where mentioned above) in 11 don't bother me that they were removed because I likely didn't use them in the first place. Not to say someone else made great use of them, but I try to keep how I use the OS to a minimum to avoid jarring changes. It's the only reason why Windows 8 wasn't a bad experience for me: I don't click on the Start button (I use the Windows key) and I don't use the All Programs listing much (I use Start Search to launch what I want)

I really don't have that issues mention.
I've installed yesterday the final version, and until now, everything seems to work fine and smooth even in a low budget laptop with 4Gb ram.

Points that I agree with:

• No more clock on the second monitor's task bar.
• No more Live Tiles
• Forced to use app grouping in the Task Bar now

Other than that, no complains.

Cheers!

 

[Colif]

By default Power Shell is once again the CLI and I have not found to switch it to Command Prompt even by right clicking on the taskbar and bringing up the Taskbar Settings.

Or you know, just open up windows terminal and click the drop down arrow to find CMD & Powershell are all integrated into that. Just make it default as CMD if that is what you want to see each time.

Dark mode... so why is task manager still white?

They replacing control panel with the new Windows Tools menu which to me looks like Control panel again

 

[hotaru.hino]

It figures, the moment I buy a new Bluetooth adapter (an ASUS one), Broadcom pushes a driver for the one I was using.

And rubbing salt in the wound, the ASUS one is janky.

 

[Colif]

Asus just rebrand other makers. So its likely it either uses realtek or Intel chips inside and you can most likely use drivers from them rather than Asus.