Windows 11

Pladio said:

Do you know if Win 10 users get free upgrades ?

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There will be a free upgrade path for Windows 10 users. The only requirement will be moderately up to date hardware.
AFAIK, the upgrade is supposed to work from Intel 7th gen on up, i.e. you will need a CPU like an i7-7700K as min spec, although the verdict on that is not final yet. Motherboard makers are currently rolling out BIOS updates for older boards since a TPM and SecureBoot is a requirement for Windows 11.

What Couch did not mention is that October 5th is the official release date for Windows 11 on new PCs/laptops only. The rollout for existing Win 10 users as a free upgrade will happen in waves, as with the Windows 10 upgrade, in the first half of 2022.

Your Windows Update service on Windows 10 will not regularly offer you the upgrade until some time next year.

As always, you will certainly be able to skip the line and download Windows 11 installers (like the current beta) before you are officially eligible for the upgrade.

I will probably patiently wait for my turn. The features that matter for us gamers the most are DirectStorage (no supported games on the horizon so far) and Auto HDR if you have a HDR capable screen.
Windows 11 might also be interesting for people who buy a new Intel Alder Lake CPU later this year as Windows 11 has a new task scheduler with optimizations for big.LITTLE designs (Alder Lake i9-12900K has eight big cores and eight smaller ones).

Other than that, it is probably best to just wait with Win 11 until next year when the first few updates will hopefully have fixed the most glaring issues.

Couchpotato said:

You should as long as your key is legit and has no errors.

Link - https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-...wnload-how-to-get-microsofts-free-update-now/

All non WIN 10 users will have to pay or find another-way.

I 'm looking at you Win 7 users.

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Moriendor said:

There will be a free upgrade path for Windows 10 users. The only requirement will be moderately up to date hardware.
AFAIK, the upgrade is supposed to work from Intel 7th gen on up, i.e. you will need a CPU like an i7-7700K as min spec, although the verdict on that is not final yet. Motherboard makers are currently rolling out BIOS updates for older boards since a TPM and SecureBoot is a requirement for Windows 11.

What Couch did not mention is that October 5th is the official release date for Windows 11 on new PCs/laptops only. The rollout for existing Win 10 users as a free upgrade will happen in waves, as with the Windows 10 upgrade, in the first half of 2022.

Your Windows Update service on Windows 10 will not regularly offer you the upgrade until some time next year.

As always, you will certainly be able to skip the line and download Windows 11 installers (like the current beta) before you are officially eligible for the upgrade.

I will probably patiently wait for my turn. The features that matter for us gamers the most are DirectStorage (no supported games on the horizon so far) and Auto HDR if you have a HDR capable screen.
Windows 11 might also be interesting for people who buy a new Intel Alder Lake CPU later this year as Windows 11 has a new task scheduler with optimizations for big.LITTLE designs (Alder Lake i9-12900K has eight big cores and eight smaller ones).

Other than that, it is probably best to just wait with Win 11 until next year when the first few updates will hopefully have fixed the most glaring issues.

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Thanks both.

I'm in no hurry to upgrade to win11. I think I'll wait to see all the negative changes they plan on bringing over. Plus that'll also give me a more stable experience.

It will be annoying to upgrade to 11 in the future, on new hardware. I currently have a win10 retail copy. Will I have to constantly go through win10 to get to 11, and future iterations? Or will my win10 key work on win11 copies?

It was already painful enough to leave Win7 for Win10, I'll probably get Win11 as late as possible (if I don't switch entirely to Linux by then).

danutz_plusplus said:

It will be annoying to upgrade to 11 in the future, on new hardware. I currently have a win10 retail copy. Will I have to constantly go through win10 to get to 11, and future iterations? Or will my win10 key work on win11 copies?

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Your Windows 10 key should work, I guess, but as far as I know, Microsoft will make a Microsoft account mandatory for Windows 11. At least for the Home version.

Your copy of Windows 11 will then be bound to your Microsoft account so if you want to reinstall then you just need to log in to your MS account and -voila- your copy is activated.

It is already like that for Windows 10 if you want to. You can bind your Windows credentials to your MS account. I have Windows 10 Pro, which I upgraded from Windows 7 Ultimate so the last and only key I have for Windows is a Windows 7 Ultimate key.

When I clean installed my Windows 10, I logged into my MS account to establish a link between my copy of Windows 10 and my MS account.

After Windows 10 setup was completed, I returned to a local account for login so that I do not always have to use my MS account. I hope that we'll be able to do the same with Windows 11. I do not want to have to use my MS account permanently but five minutes during setup just for authentication would be tolerable.

Directstorage will be coming to win10.

My relatively new touchscreen laptop still hasn't displayed any significant bugs, so I decided to install it on my main machine. That's a dual boot Arch Linux machine, but I wasn't expecting any issues because the Windows drive is untouched; all the custom boot stuff is handled by functionality on the separate Linux drive. Just remove the Linux drive and set it to boot from the Windows one, and you have a standard Windows box.

Alas, the upgrade process kept on coming up with arcane errors and failing. One of the errors was something about not being able to determine if I had enough storage space. This was weird, because I had oodles of storage space, even on the hidden partitions that Windows likes.

Eventually I worked out that something was wrong with the recovery partition, but only because when going into recovery mode there weren't as many entries as there should have been. Anyway, fixed that via the command line and then it installed without a hitch.
If only they put something meaningful in their errors.

Now I get an error where the taskbar doesn't show up properly sometimes. Logging out and back in usually fixes it. It's being reported by quite a few guinea pigs users at the moment, so I imagine that there will be a fix for that pretty soon. Weird how my much more niche laptop is the one without issues.

Anyone here have Win 11 on their gaming PC yet?

Despite it being an awful time to buy hardware, I've been thinking of getting a new gaming PC soonish as my wife's 10+ y/o PC is showing it's age... Main thing I haven't decided on yet is whether to just get win 11 for it or install 10 and then maybe upgrade to 11 when support ends in 2025...

I've been reading about the win 11 security causing performance issues. It sounds like you can easily disable it (Virtualization-Based Security) and there are supposed to be fixes on the way. There's also an issue with Nvme SSDs being slower on Win 11 than they should. Apparently there's a patch for that one already... But reading about these things has made me hesitant to get Win 11 now.

daveyd said:

Anyone here have Win 11 on their gaming PC yet?
[...] There's also an issue with Nvme SSDs being slower on Win 11 than they should..

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I have on one of our household gaming machines, and haven't noticed any performance issues. It has an nvme SSD and it seems pretty darn fast. If there is a performance drop, I haven't noticed it, fast is fast. (what sort of drops are we talking?)
These days it is completely glitch free.
I just updated our other gaming machine's hardware last week and my experiences thus far makes me have no problem with it updating to Windows 11 very soon (it was a 4th gen i5, now it's a 10th gen i5 and meets the requirements).

I've just installed win 11 today, i will report on game usage.

From initial thought it's just win 10 updated. Even my browser reopened with same tabs I had closed. This isn't a full scale OS update from first things.

Just renaming something for the sake of branding I think.

Quick update:

I've not run any games yet, one nag that needs some work.

1. The context menu is truncated to what MS thought was useful. I needed to edit registry to put it back.

Pladio said:

Quick update:

I've not run any games yet, one nag that needs some work.

1. The context menu is truncated to what MS thought was useful. I needed to edit registry to put it back.

Click to expand...

I might need to Google how to do that. I have to use the "show more options" more often than I'd like.

daveyd said:

Anyone here have Win 11 on their gaming PC yet?

Despite it being an awful time to buy hardware, I've been thinking of getting a new gaming PC soonish as my wife's 10+ y/o PC is showing it's age… Main thing I haven't decided on yet is whether to just get win 11 for it or install 10 and then maybe upgrade to 11 when support ends in 2025…

I've been reading about the win 11 security causing performance issues. It sounds like you can easily disable it (Virtualization-Based Security) and there are supposed to be fixes on the way. There's also an issue with Nvme SSDs being slower on Win 11 than they should. Apparently there's a patch for that one already… But reading about these things has made me hesitant to get Win 11 now.

Click to expand...

I've been using Win 11 on my gaming PC for a few weeks now. I originally wanted to wait for the official rollout to existing Windows 10 owners in the first half of 2022 which was Microsoft's original plan but it seems like they changed plans because I got the upgrade offer via the regular Windows Update service on Win 10 a few weeks ago.

I've had a flawless experience with Win 11 as far as gaming is concerned. It's fine and the same thing as Windows 10.

Some things take a little time to get used to:

- The taskbar/start menu is now centered by default but you can also move it back to the left side. I got used to the centered bar much quicker than I thought I would.

- Stupid change #1: If you right click on the taskbar the only option that comes up now is "Taskbar settings". You can no longer switch quickly to the desktop or call up the task manager by clicking anywhere on the taskbar. You have to specifically right click on the start button for those options (or use the keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+ALT+DEL or Win + D, respectively).

- Stupid change #2: In the taskbar settings you can no longer choose to show all icons in the taskbar corner (very right side of the taskbar). In the "taskbar overflow menu" you now have to manually select each icon you want to show on the right side. This is a bit tedious.

- Stupid change #3: The right click context menu. I think enough has been said about it at this point so nothing I can add except agree that it is stupid.

- Stupid change #4: The start menu. Same as above. Enough has been said about it already but if I understood MS correctly then fixes are on the way to make it easier to use and navigate again.

- Disappointing: The so called "Auto HDR" feature. Contrary to what the name suggests you have to actually permanently enable HDR for auto HDR to work. I was not able to get a reasonable desktop image quality with HDR enabled on my setup (my screen is the ASUS PG43UQ with HDR 1000). I have stopped using HDR altogether because my entire experience with HDR has been a negative one. I never got the appeal anyway and I did not buy my screen because it had HDR. It's been a useless gimmick for me and I was hoping Auto HDR might somehow make it viable but it doesn't. It remains useless for me.

^ All of the above are a little annoying and tedious but no deal breakers. I'm generally content with Windows 11. It's fine and gaming is working just as well as before.

It's not a big change anyway. MS effectively decided to rename Windows 10 update 21H2 (second half of 2021) to Windows 11 for some reason.
It's still Windows 10 with some really stupid usability-hampering changes just for the sake of changing stuff but on a whole it's only an incremental update.

Well good to read all this and see it isn't a big issue. I have a new PC on order and decided to have it come with win 11. I tend to like to get these things over with instead of looming ahead of me.

Shagnak said:

I might need to Google how to do that. I have to use the "show more options" more often than I'd like.

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This is it:
https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/windows-11-classic-context-menus

Moriendor said:

I've been using Win 11 on my gaming PC for a few weeks now. I originally wanted to wait for the official rollout to existing Windows 10 owners in the first half of 2022 which was Microsoft's original plan but it seems like they changed plans because I got the upgrade offer via the regular Windows Update service on Win 10 a few weeks ago.

I've had a flawless experience with Win 11 as far as gaming is concerned. It's fine and the same thing as Windows 10.

Some things take a little time to get used to:

- The taskbar/start menu is now centered by default but you can also move it back to the left side. I got used to the centered bar much quicker than I thought I would.

Click to expand...

- Stupid change #1: If you right click on the taskbar the only option that comes up now is "Taskbar settings". You can no longer switch quickly to the desktop or call up the task manager by clicking anywhere on the taskbar. You have to specifically right click on the start button for those options (or use the keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+ALT+DEL or Win + D, respectively).

Click to expand...

You can right-click on the start menu and task manager is there.
Alternatively CTRL + SHIFT + ESC

It's not a big change anyway. MS effectively decided to rename Windows 10 update 21H2 (second half of 2021) to Windows 11 for some reason.
It's still Windows 10 with some really stupid usability-hampering changes just for the sake of changing stuff but on a whole it's only an incremental update.

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Yup

Pladio said:

You can right-click on the start menu and task manager is there.

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Yes, I know, and I actually said so myself in the part you quoted but I'd still consider this one of the real puzzling unnecessary dumb changes. What was wrong with the right click context menu when clicking on the taskbar? Right. Nothing. Why change it? Less clutter? It wasn't bad at all and we now have more screen real estate than ever with much higher resolutions than back in the Windows 95 days. It would be nice to be able to use that space or allow us to use it via options. Windows should generally be more customizable and modular in my opinion.

The thing is, a lot of the code regarding the UI, most notably the taskbar, is still there. There is a paid program called StartAllBack which fixes a lot of the above mentioned issues. I'm sure that you could do it for free within the registry or with free tools (I'm already using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker on Windows 10), but this one is really convenient. I think I will use it once I update to Windows 11. My biggest problem with its UI is they removed the option to move the taskbar to other edges of the screen, and I'm one of those weird people who has mine on the left.

Moriendor said:

Yes, I know, and I actually said so myself in the part you quoted but I'd still consider this one of the real puzzling unnecessary dumb changes. What was wrong with the right click context menu when clicking on the taskbar? Right. Nothing. Why change it? Less clutter? It wasn't bad at all and we now have more screen real estate than ever with much higher resolutions than back in the Windows 95 days. It would be nice to be able to use that space or allow us to use it via options. Windows should generally be more customizable and modular in my opinion.

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Sorry, not sure how I missed that Must have read too fast.

I agree, I don't know why they like removing options. I do understand that they're trying to make the context menus simpler for non-power users, but I completely agree that it should just be an option. Why do I need to play with the registry ?

Ivanwah said:

The thing is, a lot of the code regarding the UI, most notably the taskbar, is still there. There is a paid program called StartAllBack which fixes a lot of the above mentioned issues. I'm sure that you could do it for free within the registry or with free tools (I'm already using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker on Windows 10), but this one is really convenient. I think I will use it once I update to Windows 11. My biggest problem with its UI is they removed the option to move the taskbar to other edges of the screen, and I'm one of those weird people who has mine on the left.

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I've never understood you peoples

Just started using Win 11 on my new rig. Any tips on what the latest must-have tweaks are? I can't say I like it very much so far, but maybe it just takes getting used to? What's up with needing to be signed into my Microsoft account all the time? Is there a way around that?

Also, what's the best ad/pop-up blocker now? I had a good one installed on my last system, but I can't remember the name of it. I'm using Chrome.