My Winrar demo has expired, so I know that I’ve been using Windows 11 for at least
40 days now. How is it? To put it simply: I get by. I can use Windows
11 to do stuff, I can run my games and applications, but many actions I took for granted in Windows
10 now take a few kliks(Philip) longer, or are hampered by stupid bugs of some sort.
For instance, I already typed up a script for this video, but I couldn’t search for
it because the search bar randomly stopped working and played a new error sound every
time I tried. That’s probably been the biggest problem I’ve encountered with it so far!
But it’s really annoying! You take the search bar for granted until it’s gone.
I never knew how frequently I was renaming files until Windows 11, either- it’s currently
hidden away behind an extra click. So now, you right-click on an icon, go down to ‘Show
more options’, then down to ‘rename’. This is HORRIBLE! Sure, it might only be an
extra click and mouse movement every time, but this quickly adds up when you’re renaming
multiple files, like the latest series of Rick and Morty episodes or whatever. I don’t
want this, Windows 11! Stop trying to minimalise, especially at the expense of functionality.
Anybody who actually uses the operating system will quickly grow to hate this feature! Why
are you doing this. And icons in the taskbar are grouped by default,
much like they were with Windows 10- however, there is no longer the option to separate
them all again. Which has been HELL! I have NEVER been able to familiarise myself with
this. If I have 2-3 of the same application open- which I often do for video editing,
then I like to see a bar for each at the bottom so I can tell how each render is progressing.
By combining ALL of this into one, and by condensing that down into a single, square
icon, I can’t see how the renders are progressing. I can’t even see how many copies of vegas
I have open until I hover my mouse over this icon for a few seconds. There is NO benefit
to this. Let me have separate visible tabs back!
Again, it seems like minimalism for no reason other than to hide everything for the sake
of it! I have a 4K screen. I have a taskbar that stretches across the whole screen- let
me use it, for crying out loud! Much like the renaming of files, I never knew how reliant
I was on separate progress bars in the taskbar until it was taken away from me.
And lastly, everything takes time. Click on a folder, double-click on an icon. Click the
rename button. Everything comes with a half-second ‘delay’ before it reacts. This was the
KILLER when I first tried Windows 11. But unlike the other things I’ve mentioned,
I have managed to acclimatise to it- to the point where I wonder if Windows 10 was just
as bad? But NO! It wasn’t. This delay is new to Windows 11. It isn’t to do with hard
drive spin-up times. It isn’t to do with a slow processor. It’s just built in delay.
Half a second of it, for everything. But much like gaming on a low framerate, or using an
unresponsive touchscreen, your brain does eventually iron the lag out. It just does
this by making my actions more sluggish. Again, impacting my productivity. Windows 11: a bit
like using an unresponsive touchscreen. Doesn’t sound great, does it.
I will stress that this is a Windows 11 beta. I have been using it since an alpha version
and have seen many improvements in that time. Previously untextured applications and windows
now look prettier. At one point, the background of the start menu would randomly go invisible-
and all the options on the screen would randomly disappear if I enabled HDR for some reason.
But this seems to be fixed now. I would not recommend you upgrading to Windows
11 if you use Windows for your work. It hasn’t stopped me, but it’s less ‘easy’ and
slower to use, even accounting for the muscle memory I’ve acquired in my years using Windows
10. I ACKNOWLEDGE that it’s a beta. I don’t expect it to be perfect- but right now I am
struggling to find anything about 11 that I prefer to 10. It makes me wonder why they
bothered. You’d think, after Microsoft promised that Windows 10 would be the final version,
if they WERE to make a sequel then there would have been good reason behind it, other than
Microsoft’s profit margins. But no, I can’t see a reason other than that just yet.
Fortunately, I eventually found the older Windows 11 video I had made, so coming up
are a series of benchmarks and first impressions, many of which I have long since forgotten.
ENJOY!
For me, my PC didn’t meet the requirements. I was lacking TPM 2.0, but I found an option
to enable it in the security section of my bios here like so, courtesy of this footage
I was able to capture thanks to a £350 capture card I bought that I’m now desperate to
get my money’s worth out of. I ran a series of benchmarks on Windows 10,
then immediately upgraded to 11 and ran them again and the results were reassuringly boring,
with there being a 1-2% performance drop on average. And this drop was quite consistent
in every test carried out, so although my testing wasn’t rigorous enough to say for
SURE, I feel like Windows 11 is just that little bit heavier to run than Windows 10
at the moment. The ONLY test where I saw improvements was in userbenchmark, which I included as
a kind of meme? But I’m pleased I did now because these findings were the most interesting
of the lot. The improvements from Windows 11 that I saw from this benchmark were only
in the range of 1-2% for my GPU and RAM, so well within the margin of error. But one place
I saw a substantial difference was with my SSD, where it scored 13% higher than on Windows
10. So in short: Windows 11 was 1-2% slower on average, but my SSD tested… significantly
faster. With all that done, I shut my PC down for
the night, then spent all night thinking about it.
Curious to see if this was anomalous, I ran the entire testbench again the following morning.
And a third time after a system restart, just to make sure. These ‘early morning’ tests
showed crippled CPU performance in cinebench, for reasons I cannot explain but which have
ruined any confidence I had in my testing methods. But aside from that, all other results
were similar to before… apart from my SSD speed, which userbenchmark now thinks is EVEN
FASTER, having climbed to 128% of the speed that it was on Windows 10. Hmm.
With hindsight: I hate benchmarks and I don’t know what’s going on, and I wish I had run
the tests on Windows 10 multiple times, because it’s not like I can now easily return to
Windows 10 again to retest it fairly. But then, this testing was only ever intended
to be a quick probe to see what might make for a more rigorous, follow-up test. And with
that in mind, if anybody else would like to test their SSD performance before and after
moving to Windows 11 then it could be interesting. But probably won’t be.
Just out of curiosity, I ran the cinebench test again about 24 hours later and the results
seem to have returned to normal. In fact, better than normal- beating the Windows 10
performance by about 1%! …So still within the margin of error, but this time ‘the
right way around’. And you won’t believe this, but I re-ran the userbenchmark test
as well and my SSD seems to have got even faster again.
So -aside from my SSD result, which was absolutely bonkers- I’m happy to conclude that my humble
little testing method yielded no particularly interesting results aside from questionable
variances which would randomly disappear again upon repeated testing- and I’ll bear the
brunt of that and spare this video a clickbait title about how Windows 11 will transform
your gaming performance. Because, let’s be honest- nobody’s moving
to Windows 11 for ‘performance’. They’re doing it because it’s new, and because it’s
got curved edges to stuff. So I’ll give you my first thoughts about it:
In short, I don’t like it. Because everything that stays the same, I
don’t notice, and everything it changes, I don’t like because it’s unfamiliar.
It takes more kliks to get to where I want to go, and menus seem to be hidden within
menus and then concealed by an icon for the sake of style over substance.
And the curved edges to everything makes perfectly cropping stuff in Paint IMPOSSIBLE.
The taskbar looks similar to before, only everything starts centralised at the bottom
of the screen. But it’s easy enough to return the start button to left again. But I don’t
like these small icons. …But I’ve already ranted about this, so
let’s skip onto my next ‘first impression’!
And I guess everything being in ‘windows’ makes sense, this being windows… but I don’t
like that either, because it makes everything feel too floaty and disconnected! For the
start menu to be separate from the bar along the bottom feels WRONG, like it’s just going
to wander off any second. Or that my cursor could slip down the crack. The notifications
panel on the right hand side has been swapped out for, you guessed it, another window. And
to shut down I have to reach right over to this corner, instead of it being located right
above the start button where it was before. A final ‘f-you’ before going to bed at
night. Jokes aside, I don’t care too much about
that stuff- it’s all superficial, isn’t it. But what I do hate is the start menu’s
reduced flexibility and functionality. I loved Windows 10 for this- you could pin the programs
you wanted to the start menu, customising their order and position and everything. It
was like a mini desktop that wasn’t hidden behind everything you had open at the time.
I couldn’t live without it. So Windows 11 does away with that, replacing
it with dozens of things it has chosen to pin for you. And some of these aren’t even
installed! Something I learned the hard way, when I clicked on photoshop and it commenced
a huge download that ended with it telling me to buy it. No thanks.
So of course, the first thing I’ll do after reformatting will be to remove everything
from this pinned menu. Which is made more difficult because it randomly swaps the order
of things in the drop down menu while you’re trying to unpin them, I kid you not.
Of-course, I immediately wanted to uninstall some of the pre-featured stuff that I didn’t
want there in the first place. And I quickly ran into a problem: there wasn’t an add/remove
programs screen any more. At least, not one in the ‘my computer’ bit of Windows anymore,
which is where I’ve traditionally headed if I’ve wanted to uninstall stuff. Instead,
I had to click the start button, type the name of the program and the uninstall button’s
there instead. It seems like Windows is moving away from icons on the desktop and towards
a centralised START menu where you can access everything from. And that’s an improvement.
I will say now: there is still the old ‘add and remove programs’ screen. A month ago,
it was hidden deep inside the settings somewhere. But it does now seem to show up when you search
for ‘add’ in the start menu. Honestly, the removal of programs and games has got
more fragmented in recent years now that so many things are downloaded through third party
services like Steam and Epic, so the importance of the add/remove programs screen has diminished.
So this change is one aspect of Windows 11 that I think brings it more in line with modern
day requirements. Because these days, I don’t often frequent the uninstall list. And by
the time my PC gets full enough to worry about such things, it’s straight to the reformat
for me!
Microsoft’s Films and TV app has always been a load of rubbish that can’t even run
half of the filetypes I watch. But that doesn’t stop it from automatically loading up every
time and requesting that I pay for permission to use certain filetypes. No thanks, I’d
rather use Media Player Classic, which is FREE! And better. Previously, I could change
my default ‘video’ player and it would automatically update it for every video filetype.
But I can’t find that screen any more- I could only find that horrible screen that
lets me manually change it for literally every filetype I try to load. And even then, after
I’ve done that, if I click on a video in the start menu… it’ll still use Films
and TV to try and load it. Horrible. As usual, Microsoft has employed fresh new
tactics to force you into using Microsoft Edge as much as possible. I have battled against
it for years but they integrate it so closely with so many filetypes and shortcuts and features
of Windows 11 that half the time, even when I try NOT to use it I still end up staring
at Microsoft Edge’s Bing search screen and it’s all like ‘oh just fuck off’. It
is EXHAUSTING to battle against Microsoft’s perpetual insistence that we use Edge and
if we refuse then are we sure? Yeah, but are we REALLY really sure? And are we really not
quite very sure that we don’t not want to not use it and so on. Be warned.
Oh and it pushed TEAMS in my face, too. I clicked ‘decline’, ‘ignore’ and all
that, thought I got rid of it… only to later receive an email from Microsoft, thanking
me for signing up to TEAMS. What the hell, Microsoft?
It’s now easier to change your resolution, background images and stuff like that now.
You know how Display Settings and Personalise used to be two separate things, and the option
to customise your desktop icons options was hidden in one of those, always being the last
place you thought of looking? That seems to be all condensed down into one big, functional
settings page now, for everything. There are still 2 separate buttons, but they lead to
roughly the same place. This menu in particular can feel quite unresponsive- it’s normal
for there to be a good half-second delay between clicking on something and it responding to
that klik. We shouldn’t have to be dealing with stuff like this if on an SSD! And…
after all this, the desktop icon settings was still in the last place I thought of looking.
And the desktop icons now intimidate me- it’s as though they’re staring straight into
my soul.The isometric perspective has always looked more appealing to me.
I like the new desktop backgrounds. I don’t know what most of them are meant to be, some
of them look like a developer got a little over-enthusiastic with a pringles can. But
this snowy image is bright, clean, pretty, and reminds me of my favourite images from
older versions of Windows before they got all abstract. And it’s just as well I like
this one so much, because when I browse for others, nothing shows up. Microsoft pls fix.
I eventually navigated to this folder and found ALL 4 DESKTOP IMAGES and immediately
had to ask: why is there a photoshopped sun in all of them? Why does it not match the
lighting in the rest of the image? Why has this iceberg disappeared? Microsoft, what
are you doing?!
I know I’ve been moaning a lot about some non-issues, but I also have some good news!
I noticed a change to notepad. Loading anything more than a few hundred KB would previously
grind it to a halt, but it seems like it can easily load multi-MB text files with ease
now. I love Notepad++ but it’s no longer necessary to address THIS particular shortcoming
with notepad’s functionality. And hey, get this- my desktop PC now has FLIGHT
MODE. Also, what’s with this? My internet connection
and sound icon are ‘grouped’. But that’s a lie, because which control panel it loads
depends on which side of it I click. And I instinctively left-click on it when I want
to change my sound properties, and then the menu that pops up BLOCKS me from being able
to select an option from the right click until I’ve clicked off the whole thing first.
It sounds like a small annoyance, but I was there trying to configure a second video stream
and in the space of half an hour this issue had developed from being a small annoyance
to being annoying enough that I literally ragequit and went on a walk.
And at one point, right clicking on the desktop randomly stopped working until I reset. How
does that even happen? Many of you may not remember a time before
Windows 10, but there was a time when a system crash would render ctrl+alt+del pointless.
It still happens in 10 from time to time but not that often. You can normally get to the
task manager, even when all else is burning down around you. But, since ‘upgrading’
to Windows 11, a program DID freeze on me, and I was unable to get my cursor to show
over the task manager, meaning that I had to hard restart my pc- something I haven’t
had to do in a while. In conclusion: I’ve tried Windows 11. I
will be returning to Windows 10 again soon because I’m not excited enough about Windows
11 to be their guineapig until it’s ready for launch. There was a time when I would
have been excited to have been on the cutting edge, but these days, Windows 10 does what
I need it to and with minimal hassle, and I value those qualities highly.
I know that, in a years’ time or whatever, that there will have been many changes to
Windows 11, a lot more polish and probably a few new features that will actually make
it better than Windows 10. But until then… I’m out. I don’t see why any of this needed
a new version of Windows. Many of the changes seem like change, for the sake of change.
So yeah, I’m not exactly the most positive about Windows 11. It’s been interesting
to use it though- I remember using Vista early and other than it feeling slower and less
compatible, I didn’t have much else to say about it. So my knowledge of Windows has certainly
improved since then, and in comparison to Vista, my grievances with 11 are minor. But
then, I am comparing it with Vista, so it’s not a high bar to beat.
Looking online, promised improvements include official integration of ‘Android Apps’.
I’ll confess, that is big news indeed! I’m horrified by how neglected Windows programs
are in comparison to their Android counterparts these days. And when my Mum messages me on
whatsapp I can’t wait for the day that I can finally respond using my keyboard instead
of fumbling about with my phone screen and its inferior WPM capacity.
And before you proudly submit that comment you’ve typed, stating that I should just
use an emulator- like that’s an acceptable solution- I’ll say, no: that isn’t an
acceptable solution. It’s ridiculous that we don’t have native support for stuff like
this. It staggers me that my phone is so much more functional for so many things than my
PC is, in 2021! So I will proudly state that official integration into the operating system
will be a BIG improvement. Oh and they promise better ‘Virtual desktop
support’, which is good because on Windows 10 it’s just a feature I accidentally enable
from time to time and there doesn’t seem to be any point in it whatsoever. It’s one
of those things that I want to like the idea of, but the downsides outweigh any possible
benefits to it. …and the other ‘improvements’ just seem
to hint that Microsoft’s gearing up to launch this as their next mobile Operating System.
At least this time it seems like they’re prioritising desktop users, instead of forcing
us to use Windows 8 and its mobile-phone optimised layout.
And HDR support should be better. I might be appreciating this already, but since I
only got an HDR monitor AFTER I switched to Windows 11, I can’t say how it compared.
Though sometimes after going fullscreen, my desktop goes super dark until I disable HDR
again so it isn’t flawless in Windows 11 just yet.
Operating systems are strange things, and talking about my experience with them feels
surprisingly personal, intimate, and leaves me feeling exposed and vulnerable. In my lifetime,
I have clocked up tens of thousands of hours on Windows operating systems. Compared with
everybody else I know, I am an expert at Windows. I can fix problems that other people have
-no problem, and when I have a problem I instinctively understand option screens and features that
I may never have seen before. I have no problem using Windows for what I need it for. BUT
ON THE OTHER HAND, in some ways I feel I have barely scratched the surface of what an ‘Operating
System’ is. After all, I have only ever used it as a tool to further my own interests!
And writing this video has forced me to question my knowledge of Windows- and it could very
well be that you will reach an entirely different conclusion about Windows 11 because you happen
to use its features in a different way, or use a different combination of programs and
shortcuts. If nothing else, experiencing an early and
buggy version of Windows makes me appreciate just how solid and reliable Windows 10 is,
and all the millions of man-hours that have gone into making it as polished as it is.
We take that stuff for granted.