Replace my Desktop with a Laptop?

Are there any advantages to going to Windows 11?

I have a 4yr old HP Spectre x360 convertible 15 with Windows 10 Home. It runs Lightroom Classic very well and I have no problems. Looking yesterday to try to find why I might want to move to Win 11. I couldn't find anything compelling but some reasons not to as already mentioned.
On that old a machine? Unless you have an I5 or better and a minimum of 16 gb, avoid 11.
 
What about the desktop is not present in Windows 11 that you have in Windows 10?
Yeah, basically all the useful Win10 start features were removed. Typing a few characters to hit enter and launch a program is also massively slower in Win11, which is bizarre and definitely degrading something that wasn't broken. Microsoft also killed right clicking on a start menu icon to pick from a recent list of files to open, too. Again not broken and didn't need fixing.

Ungroup remains unavailable on the taskbar, yet another breaking of something that wasn't broken and hugely asked for fix that Microsoft's doubled down on ignoring. People who put the taskbar left, right, or top can't do that in 11. Which, last I checked, was the single most requested Win11 fix in Microsoft's Feedback Hub. But Microsoft execs went on record to say they weren't going to do anything about it because other work was higher priority. Not cool, particularly for a company that had US$ 70 billion available to fix it last year.

It's not the desktop per se, but there are similar regressions in the File Explorer menus. I'd consider those part of the core use we're talking about and yet another example of how Win11 makes something that was easy unnecessarily more time consuming and harder to do. Would barely matter if it was a one off task but this is routine stuff like renaming files.

Why do they keep trying to foist things of people which have repeatedly shown themselves to be unpopular?
As far as I know it's mostly linked to internal political battles within Windows client. Not sure why they don't get nuked from orbit CEO level. In this case it seems what happened is the Win10X team got their incomplete and obviously problematic rewrite of the Win10 taskbar shipped in Win11. There's some good engineering fundamentals underneath that but Win11 seems pretty obviously a rush job.

The app thing Win8 started and consequent split in Microsoft's user interface APIs that developers program against and users experience is apparently the result of another Windows political influence battle.
 
Yeah, basically all the useful Win10 start features were removed. Typing a few characters to hit enter and launch a program is also massively slower in Win11, which is bizarre and definitely degrading something that wasn't broken. Microsoft also killed right clicking on a start menu icon to pick from a recent list of files to open, too. Again not broken and didn't need fixing.

Ungroup remains unavailable on the taskbar, yet another breaking of something that wasn't broken and hugely asked for fix that Microsoft's doubled down on ignoring. People who put the taskbar left, right, or top can't do that in 11. Which, last I checked, was the single most requested Win11 fix in Microsoft's Feedback Hub. But Microsoft execs went on record to say they weren't going to do anything about it because other work was higher priority. Not cool, particularly for a company that had US$ 70 billion available to fix it last year.

It's not the desktop per se, but there are similar regressions in the File Explorer menus. I'd consider those part of the core use we're talking about and yet another example of how Win11 makes something that was easy unnecessarily more time consuming and harder to do. Would barely matter if it was a one off task but this is routine stuff like renaming files.


As far as I know it's mostly linked to internal political battles within Windows client. Not sure why they don't get nuked from orbit CEO level. In this case it seems what happened is the Win10X team got their incomplete and obviously problematic rewrite of the Win10 taskbar shipped in Win11. There's some good engineering fundamentals underneath that but Win11 seems pretty obviously a rush job.

The app thing Win8 started and consequent split in Microsoft's user interface APIs that developers program against and users experience is apparently the result of another Windows political influence battle.
Agree about Microsoft (and many others ... ) fixing things that aren't broken, and ignoring things that people are screaming the bloody house down about!

My clients have practically kissed me for installing Classic Menu/Classic Shell on their computers. This little program fixes a multitude of sins on the part of MS ...

MS have taken to hiding things under multiple layers, like Apple has always done ... e.g. Network Connections is now (W10) three layers down, as against directly available from the system tray (XP Pro).

If I wanted a locked down, turnkey system, I would buy an Apple product ...
 
There is no rush to move to Windows 11. Microsoft would tell you it is much more secure, and it certainly is in some areas. There is Fluent UI, a redesigned interface that may or may not be your cup of tea. If you like to snap multiple windows into layouts, that has enhancements. And there has been plenty of discussion above about the Start menu and taskbar. Many changes have also been backported to Windows 10, making it less compelling. So, up to you really...

Fanless Windows laptops: I do not think any of them are completely fanless, but I have been using recent models where the fans are virtually silent almost all of the time. My work laptop is an HP Elitebook, and it mostly spins up only when enterprise software is doing a scan of one kind or another, or I am compiling or testing something sizeable. My personal laptop - recently purchased - is an ASUS Zephyrus G15, which has five keyboard-selectable fan modes that trade performance and heat for silence, or you can set a custom 'fan curve' to decide at what temps the fans will spin up and how high to spin them. The system will override you if you try to set up something beyond the hardware thermals. In day-to-day mode I almost never hear the fans. That changes if gaming, of course. Being a 'gaming' laptop with a discrete GPU (Nvidia mobile 3070) it is considerably higher priced than many laptops. I paid about $1500 USD and that was on sale. You can get quiet laptops for a lot less than that, but you'll need to check reviews, nearly silent laptops are definitely out there. (Also I highly recommend an nvme drive, so fast!)

Edit: I should have mentioned the work HP runs Windows 10 and the personal ASUS runs Windows 11.
 
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There is no rush to move to Windows 11.
Yeah, Microsoft claims 10 is going to be supported until October 2025. My main non-work computer won't be Windows 11 eligible unless Microsoft increases support for 7ᵗʰ gen and earlier processors, which is looking unlikely.

The one 11 installation I deal with regularly is for work, so I do get paid to put up with it, and the lack of taskbar ungrouping (never combine) is only thing I really dislike about 11. The rest is stupid, sure, but not nearly as intrusive as the slowdown when switching between multiple instances of programs via the taskbar. Alt+tab is sort of a workaround and, while that's more intrusive in 11 than in 10, there's actually a design reason for it.

Apparently the earliest Microsoft might fill some of the feature holes they (needlessly) created in 11 is 23H1. IT at my work will presumably roll all of the 11 eligible machines forward from 10 at some point but hasn't said anything about when. Knowing how they move, I'm guessing probably not until next year. Fine by me.

It's unfortunate Microsoft blocked the registry keys people were using to get around 11's interface limitations in its preview builds, though.

My clients have practically kissed me for installing Classic Menu/Classic Shell on their computers.
StartAllBack (US$ 5), Start11 (US$ 6), and ExplorerPatcher (donation) seem popular as well.
 
I think you can run WSL2 on Windows 10. I know there were people running X apps on Win10 WSL but perhaps it was not fully supported.

Some of the registry tweaks still work. e.g. I used the one to go directly to the expanded context menus in explorer. I think I used a couple others I have already forgotten, but that one I found an absolute necessity for me. I think the ones that let you move the taskbar still work, and the one that 'downgrades' explorer, but I decided to put up with most of the defaults for a while to see if I was just being a curmudgeon lol (with some exceptions like context menus). Even had the taskbar centered - had, it's now aligned back to the left. I'm thinking about trying to move my taskbar, I miss that as I value vertical screen real estate. Otherwise I am getting fairly used to things as they are out-of-the-box. Incidentally, a lot of the old shortcuts work, including commands like compmgmt.msc and appwiz.cpl and even the "god-mode control panel", so that helps.
 
Agree about Microsoft (and many others ... ) fixing things that aren't broken, and ignoring things that people are screaming the bloody house down about!

My clients have practically kissed me for installing Classic Menu/Classic Shell on their computers. This little program fixes a multitude of sins on the part of MS ...

MS have taken to hiding things under multiple layers, like Apple has always done ... e.g. Network Connections is now (W10) three layers down, as against directly available from the system tray (XP Pro).

If I wanted a locked down, turnkey system, I would buy an Apple product ...
XP was my favorite MS operating system. It just worked for me and when it didn't the fix was usually easy to find. Windows 10 is, I admit, remarkably stable, but continually moving options from the Control Panel to Microsoft's cartoonish "Modern" "settings" pisses me off. I hated the "Modern" look when they first trist to foist it on us, and I still hate it. I am, moreover, older and grumpier :)
 
The HP does have 16 gig but I have read all the reasons not to so will be sticking with Win 10. From another thread on this forum I have been considering the MacBook Pro as my next computer. The main appeal is having one system for photos.
 
XP was my favorite MS operating system. It just worked for me and when it didn't the fix was usually easy to find. Windows 10 is, I admit, remarkably stable, but continually moving options from the Control Panel to Microsoft's cartoonish "Modern" "settings" pisses me off. I hated the "Modern" look when they first trist to foist it on us, and I still hate it. I am, moreover, older and grumpier :)

Not to beat a dead horse or get too far off track, but... You may or may not find this useful, if you do not already know about it.
* Create a new folder on your desktop.
* Name it exactly as shown, include the leading period. If you wish, you can put a label in front of the period which will show in the window you open but not on the folder label for some odd reason - yet another mystery from the mind of Microsoft .
.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
* You really, really need to make a new folder. If you rename an existing folder you will lose access to the contents! They will still be there, but you will have to rename the folder to something innocuous from a command line. That will set things back but it cannot be done from the Windows GUI.

I do not recall where I first ran across this, or how anybody figured it out, but it is an interesting trick. There are a few registry keys with that GUID that make references to shell32.dll which if I recall correctly is part of the graphical interface software, and has been around forever. I suspect the secret sauce is in there.
 
Not to beat a dead horse or get too far off track, but... You may or may not find this useful, if you do not already know about it.
* Create a new folder on your desktop.
* Name it exactly as shown, include the leading period. If you wish, you can put a label in front of the period which will show in the window you open but not on the folder label for some odd reason - yet another mystery from the mind of Microsoft .
.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
* You really, really need to make a new folder. If you rename an existing folder you will lose access to the contents! They will still be there, but you will have to rename the folder to something innocuous from a command line. That will set things back but it cannot be done from the Windows GUI.

I do not recall where I first ran across this, or how anybody figured it out, but it is an interesting trick. There are a few registry keys with that GUID that make references to shell32.dll which if I recall correctly is part of the graphical interface software, and has been around forever. I suspect the secret sauce is in there.
Thank you. That should prove useful.
 
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