Windows 11 [2021]

[swaaye]

I can't really remember what was wrong with early Edge. It was pretty bare bones because it was built from scratch. It was really fast on slow hardware. Current Edge is I think the fastest Chromium-based browser.

I mostly putter along on Firefox unawares. Though lately I got into Vivaldi because the Android version of that is quite nice.

 

[Scott_Arm]

My windows 11 stuff literally just breaks. My current windows install isn't very old. I think maybe 3-4 months? If I right click the little speaker icon in the task bar, and try to open "sound settings" or "volume mixer" nothing happens. No errors, no warnings. Nothing tries to open. Just nothing. Really awesome stuff. No idea how to fix it. Also I have no sound in firefox anymore. Just nothing. No way to fix it. Had to move all of my bookmarks logins etc over to edge, because I tried every single fix I could find online and nothing. Honestly, I used to think people were overly critical of microsoft, but I'm pretty much in their camp now.

 

[swaaye]

I think I had to do a reinstall of 11 in early 2022 because I lost sound. And there was the Win11 22H2 update snafu that caused crazy WMR stuttering and took 2 months to get patched. And on a few 10 & 11 systems a few times a month the lockscreen wants Ctrl-Alt-Del even though that's not enabled.

 

[homerdog]

Damn, a lot of people don't like Windows 11 huh?

I love it and think it's the best Windows has been in a long time. Mind you I've been in the Windows Insider Program for forever, so I've had a long adjustment period.

The biggest thing I hate about Windows 11, is that there's no "never combine" for apps on the taskbar.. but that's coming in the near future.

I've also switched from Chrome to Edge (have for a long time now) and Edge is just much better to me. Edge before chromium was so silky smooth though.. there's no denying that. It was a lot smoother and responsive than the new chromium version is now. Unfortunately it just lacked the features and support that people wanted from it.. and just had a negative reception to it overall because of the whole UWP thing.

I'm probably going to switch to Edge for most things. Chrome has weird performance problems on all my computers, notably in Youtube when I move the mouse over the video and the video overlay/controls appear, the video stutters. In Chrome my laptop (Ryzen 4300U) can't keep up with 1080p video in 1.5-2x speed and goes out of sync and drops frames. These things don't happen in Edge.

 

[Albuquerque]

I've been using Edge almost since they started testing with the Chromium engine, as part of one of the fast-ring insider builds of the OS. I'm a big fan of Edge over Chrome, especially recently with the addition of Edge support for standard Chromium browser extensions.

As for Windows 11, I've had basically no issues at all and I think I like it better than Win10. I know many are unhappy with the advertising; I've not seen any of it. I suspect it's because I've piholed basically everything in my house which does a really decent job of killing a ton of tracking and advertising on the rest of my home devices (Rokus are super chatty to the outside, so is my bigass Samsung TV.) As for my personal laptop, I run pihole as a VM under Hyper-V for bandwidth savings while on the road, and it seems to murder all the inbuilt advertising there too.

All that to say, I have nine Windows devices in the house between various desktops, laptops, tablets and one Lumia 950XL phablet running WoA, and they all run various versions of Win11 RTM or insider builds. Except for the Lumia phone which is a full-on hack job, all the rest are in-place upgrades from Win10, at least three of those are in-place upgrades from Win7 and one is an in-place upgrade from Win8.1. The only PC I've fully installed Win11 from bare metal is my new-ish gaming rig I built last year.

The only thing I'm still unhappy about is how they've buried the full image backup option. It was difficult to find in Win10, it's nearly impossible to get to in Win11. I know MS would rather I just use their file recovery and OneDrive to magic everything into recovery, but that doesn't solve for other problems I'd prefer to avoid. I'll probably end up creating my own ImageX-based backup process to replace what appears to be a function they're trying to ditch. Sad face is sad

 

[swaaye]

They do like to hide things. Hidden might be the wrong term. It's more like they just haven't gotten around to getting some things sanely organized. Their OS configuration is a nightmare because they passive aggressive hate the control panel and their Settings thing for some reason needs more than a decade to be completed.

For backups I started using a little program called FastCopy, or maybe Clonezilla.

You guys ever check out Vivaldi browser? I've been alternating Edge, Firefox, Vivaldi for awhile now. Edge is fastest and I like a lot about it overall. Firefox has my favorite desktop UI, and Vivaldi has all sorts of curious stuff but definitely my favorite browser on Android. Sidebar, bookmarks home, swipe nav, customizable AdBlock, repositionable navigation elements, etc.

 

[homerdog]

I've been using Edge almost since they started testing with the Chromium engine, as part of one of the fast-ring insider builds of the OS. I'm a big fan of Edge over Chrome, especially recently with the addition of Edge support for standard Chromium browser extensions.

As for Windows 11, I've had basically no issues at all and I think I like it better than Win10. I know many are unhappy with the advertising; I've not seen any of it. I suspect it's because I've piholed basically everything in my house which does a really decent job of killing a ton of tracking and advertising on the rest of my home devices (Rokus are super chatty to the outside, so is my bigass Samsung TV.) As for my personal laptop, I run pihole as a VM under Hyper-V for bandwidth savings while on the road, and it seems to murder all the inbuilt advertising there too.

All that to say, I have nine Windows devices in the house between various desktops, laptops, tablets and one Lumia 950XL phablet running WoA, and they all run various versions of Win11 RTM or insider builds. Except for the Lumia phone which is a full-on hack job, all the rest are in-place upgrades from Win10, at least three of those are in-place upgrades from Win7 and one is an in-place upgrade from Win8.1. The only PC I've fully installed Win11 from bare metal is my new-ish gaming rig I built last year.

The only thing I'm still unhappy about is how they've buried the full image backup option. It was difficult to find in Win10, it's nearly impossible to get to in Win11. I know MS would rather I just use their file recovery and OneDrive to magic everything into recovery, but that doesn't solve for other problems I'd prefer to avoid. I'll probably end up creating my own ImageX-based backup process to replace what appears to be a function they're trying to ditch. Sad face is sad

I haven't seen any advertisements. I guess my pihole is blocking that so I didn't even realize it was a thing.

My main complaint with Win11 (and Windows in general for years now) is what you're saying about them "hiding" things that work perfectly fine or better than the new stuff. Just getting the place where you can manage the network adapters is a convoluted process now and it used to take 2 clicks from the system tray which was always on the screen.

The best was on Windows Server 2012 when I couldn't figure out how to shut the thing down or reboot and eventually surrendered and used the command line. You had to move the mouse over to the top right of the desktop and leave it there for a second for the power options to appear. Regardless of how anyone feels about Metro UI, this is utter nonsense.

 

[swaaye]

Hehehehehe. I feel like MS is about 50% of the way towards some kind of unified interface. It's really something though how long it is taking them to make it coherent.

 

[doob]

They do like to hide things. Hidden might be the wrong term. It's more like they just haven't gotten around to getting some things sanely organized. Their OS configuration is a nightmare because they passive aggressive hate the control panel and their Settings thing for some reason needs more than a decade to be completed.

For backups I started using a little program called FastCopy, or maybe Clonezilla.

You guys ever check out Vivaldi browser? I've been alternating Edge, Firefox, Vivaldi for awhile now. Edge is fastest and I like a lot about it overall. Firefox has my favorite desktop UI, and Vivaldi has all sorts of curious stuff but definitely my favorite browser on Android. Sidebar, bookmarks home, swipe nav, customizable AdBlock, repositionable navigation elements, etc.

I'v been using Vivaldi for a good while its basically the old Opera browser before it was sold out. The best UI and memory management more so compared to that abomination called OperaGX "for gamers".
Despite being chromium based as long as the tabs are grouped together having a mouse over the grouped tab show a nice preview of all tabs within that group with a scrollable menu.
I'v got probably a bit over 100 tabs "open" of music and concerts from youtube mostly as well forums, and twitch and the whole memory usage is currently at around 1.2 to 1.3GB other browsers i'v tried go beyond that easily.
My favorite browser for quite a while, really recommend it, and since its chromium based extensions haven't been a problem to get rid of adds.
Edit: also having uMatrix and uBlock might probably lower cpu and memory usage a bit from blocking useless adds and other bloat .

 

[Scott_Arm]

Tried to repair windows 11 by doing an install while preserving apps and user data and it didn't fix anything. Cool.

 

[homerdog]

@Scott_Arm I'm sure you've already done this, but the only thing I would know to do is the system file check. From cmd as admin:

sfc /scannow

and if that doesn't work you can do

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

and then try sfc /scannow again.

 

[pharma]

Tried to repair windows 11 by doing an install while preserving apps and user data and it didn't fix anything. Cool.

A few times the Win 10 installation disk did not find any OS problems but the Windows 7 installation disk found and fixed the issue. Might be an option the next time.
That said I really enjoy Win 10 and intend to use my LTSC installation up to and possibly beyond it's 2029 EOL if extended.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

A few times the Win 10 installation disk did not find any OS problems but the Windows 7 installation disk found and fixed the issue. Might be an option the next time.
That said I really enjoy Win 10 and intend to use my LTSC installation up to and possibly beyond it's 2029 EOL if extended.

Good idea. This is the first time I've ever truly regretted upgrading my Windows installation. And now that I have it on, I'm going to do what I can to make it work and hope that MS regains some sense and stops with trying to make Windows unusable by professionals.

Regards,
SB

 

[Scott_Arm]

Good idea. This is the first time I've ever truly regretted upgrading my Windows installation. And now that I have it on, I'm going to do what I can to make it work and hope that MS regains some sense and stops with trying to make Windows unusable by professionals.

Regards,
SB

I enjoyed Windows 10 for quite a while until something happened fairly recently that made it unstable and then I decided to make the switch to 11, which has just been unstable and nothing but problems. A windows 10 or 11 LTSC would probably be good, especially since it has most of the garbage removed by default.

 

[Davros]

LTSC?

 

[pharma]

I enjoyed Windows 10 for quite a while until something happened fairly recently that made it unstable and then I decided to make the switch to 11, which has just been unstable and nothing but problems. A windows 10 or 11 LTSC would probably be good, especially since it has most of the garbage removed by default.

Don't you make weekly backups of your C: drive? I usually keep a weekly backup as well as one untouched backup from when I first installed.

 

[homerdog]

LTSC?

LTSC: What is it, and when should it be used?

Update 7/15/2019: The content in this post applies to PC and laptop type devices converted to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, and not devices purchased with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise pre-installed. Examples of the latter include kiosks, medical equipment, and digital signs, i.e. use cases where...

techcommunity.microsoft.com

 

[pharma]

LTSC?

Win 10 Enterprise Long-Term Servicing Channel. Currently using Win 10 LTSC Enterprise 2019.

What's new in Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC - What's new in Windows

Find out about new features and capabilities in the latest release of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC for IT professionals.

learn.microsoft.com

 

[pharma]

Newly Discovered Vulnerabilities in TPM 2.0 Specification Could Compromise Billions of Devices

It is a mandatory requirement for Windows 11, and yeah ... TPM2 has a nasty vulnerability. Quarkslab, a cybersecurity specialist, has identified two buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the TPM 2.0 spe...

www.guru3d.com

These vulnerabilities, known as CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018, affect the reference implementation of the TPM 2.0 specification and could impact billions of devices. Both vulnerabilities are caused by the way certain TPM commands are handled and can be exploited by an authenticated local attacker to obtain information or elevated privileges. While it is not yet clear which manufacturers are affected, TPM 2.0 is a key system requirement for Windows 11. It is important to note that exploiting these backdoors requires local access, but malware can be used to infect the TPM.
...
The solution for impacted vendors is to move to a fixed version of the specification, which includes one of the following:

• TMP 2.0 v1.59 Errata version 1.4 or higher
• TMP 2.0 v1.38 Errata version 1.13 or higher
• TMP 2.0 v1.16 Errata version 1.6 or higher

When it comes to the two TPM vulnerabilities, Lenovo is the only large OEM to have released a security advisory, warning that CVE-2023-1017 affects some of its systems operating on Nuvoton TPM 2.0 chips.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Don't you make weekly backups of your C: drive? I usually keep a weekly backup as well as one untouched backup from when I first installed.

Does Windows even allow you to do backups? The only thing I've seen is some bullshit one drive syncing. I'm not sure why Windows hasn't copied Time Machine from Apple yet. I basically treat my Windows box as an insecure piece of garbage full of data I'm fine with losing, because I don't want to worry about my data. I do all of my important stuff on an ancient macbook because Time Machine works, even though I've never had to use it. The only time I've ever had to use Time Machine on a mac was when I bought a newer macbook and had to sync everything over, or something like that. My Windows machine exists purely for gaming, and some hobby programming. It's just a pain in the ass to download and install stuff if something goes wrong.