Windows 11 Verdict

[Wavicle]

1 minute ago, Greycat said:

 

No difference here. (And I can go from a W10 to W11 machine to compare.)

😞

 

I’ve been having the same problems in FFXIV…

 

does that seem to indicate it’s my specific machine with the problem? Maybe the video card?

[Greycat]

2 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

😞

 

I’ve been having the same problems in FFXIV…

 

does that seem to indicate it’s my specific machine with the problem? Maybe the video card?

 

Couldn't say. There are a few different types of lag/latency. Driver updates and the like aren't a bad idea. (Hell, I have a friend who's not in game because, for some reason, COH *shuts down* his new computer - still on W10. Been trying things to resolve *that* for a while. It's only COH.)

[nightroarer]

On 1/27/2022 at 7:16 PM, Shenanigunner said:

So my turn to update to Win11 came along, just as I was winding down for an evening, so I told it to go ahead. (Short version: I've never hesitated to move forward with OS updates because I use too many high-end, demanding tools to try and hack them into working on old platforms. And I've never had significant problems since the era of having to wait for new drivers—even my WinNT to Vista upgrade was flawless. Of course, I didn't try to use it on a 5 year old Win95 laptop...)

 

Anyway, I haven't heard anything about Win11 that would make me want to wait, and the increased security and virtualization is a 110% improvement no matter how much it knocks down insane framerates.

 

But.

 

My very first experience when the system came up again was that the taskbar was now on the bottom of my center monitor.

 

Guess what.

 

You can't move it. At all. Unlike every other OS including Windows back to 7 if not Vista.

 

You can have it bottom center on your defined main monitor. You can have it on the bottom of all your monitors. And — what the hell am I complaining about! — you can group all the icons in the center, or shift them to the left! And you can make the taskbar hide, too.

 

There are registry hacks, but they have downsides. There is a lot of furious bitching in the forums. There is silence from Microsoft. And no one can figure out what in the holy hell of the Shadow Shard's ass they were thinking to cripple this UI feature. It's made my day about 10% less productive for a number of reasons.

 

Other than that brain-dead, oh-dint-we-tellya, BillG's boys are so smart piece of idiocy, though, Win11 is just great. Ooh, and rounded corners again without the total Fisher-Price look of XP.

 

Sigh.

FYI, you can move the taskbar to the left. I hated it centered too.

 

Right click on the taskbar and select Taskbar Settings

Click on Taskbar Behaviors (near the bottom of the settings screen)

In the dropdown next to Taskbar Alignment select Left

 

As for Gaming in Windows 11 in general, I run CoH, LOTRO, STO, and SWTOR with no problems so far.

[Wavicle]

11 minutes ago, nightroarer said:

FYI, you can move the taskbar to the left. I hated it centered too.

 

Right click on the taskbar and select Taskbar Settings

Click on Taskbar Behaviors (near the bottom of the settings screen)

In the dropdown next to Taskbar Alignment select Left

 

As for Gaming in Windows 11 in general, I run CoH, LOTRO, STO, and SWTOR with no problems so far.

 

But what you can't do is move the POWER button to the left of the Start menu!

[Shenanigunner]

1 hour ago, nightroarer said:

FYI, you can move the taskbar to the left. I hated it centered too.

 

Thanks, but that's not the issue. (And there are 500 "how to fix the Win11 taskbar" sites out there with the same info.

 

Having the icons centered on the taskbar is bad enough; just "different" for its own sake, no thanks, MS.

 

My complaint, and that of many-many, is that you can no longer reposition the whole taskbar anywhere but bottom edge of your main monitor. Since at least Win7 and maybe earlier, and on nearly every other OS, you can stick the taskbar to any edge of any monitor. Putting it way left or right saves a ton of screen space and gets it out of the way of nearly everything.

 

But no, it had to get "fixed" - literally - this round.

[nightroarer]

1 hour ago, Shenanigunner said:

 

Thanks, but that's not the issue. (And there are 500 "how to fix the Win11 taskbar" sites out there with the same info.

 

Having the icons centered on the taskbar is bad enough; just "different" for its own sake, no thanks, MS.

 

My complaint, and that of many-many, is that you can no longer reposition the whole taskbar anywhere but bottom edge of your main monitor. Since at least Win7 and maybe earlier, and on nearly every other OS, you can stick the taskbar to any edge of any monitor. Putting it way left or right saves a ton of screen space and gets it out of the way of nearly everything.

 

But no, it had to get "fixed" - literally - this round.

Ah, this is true. I just liked the bottom left, so it worked for me. I misread that part of your comment.

Edited January 30, 2022 by nightroarer

[nightroarer]

3 hours ago, Wavicle said:

 

But what you can't do is move the POWER button to the left of the Start menu!

Yeah, that's annoying.

[kwsapphire]

On 11/27/2021 at 4:45 PM, Greycat said:

... which may be an issue of it considering hardware as "too old," or just not having TPM enabled in the bios, because apparently that's a thing now.  (And you can get around both, apparently. I'm not bothering.)

 

Thanks, I wondered why my 2 year old gaming rig can't support Windows 11. MSFT wants me to download and install a piece of software to tell me what criteria my computer isn't meeting. HAHA yeah right no thanks. I have to assume this TPM thing is the issue. I'm honestly surprised the upgrade is free, but I'm in no hurry.

 

 

19 hours ago, Wavicle said:

I don't really know for sure, but it definitely SEEMS like my game has gotten WAY laggier since upgrading to Windows 11. Anyone else?

 

My husband and I have both been seeing increased lag (rubberbanding and/or temporary reduced frame rate) for at least a week. 

[Shenanigunner]

18 hours ago, Wavicle said:

 

But what you can't do is move the POWER button to the left of the Start menu!

 

15 hours ago, nightroarer said:

Yeah, that's annoying.

 

Well... I agree with the annoyance of changing things that don't really need changing. But on the other hand, MS has done a bunch to try and clean up two or three generations of UI mess with the Win11 changes.

 

OTOH... all they did was move it 10% across the screen, in the same pop up menu, and you only use it once per session. (Me, I use it perhaps once per week.) Two weeks and your ancient digital memory will have retargeted. 🙂

 

OT3H, completely removing an important UI configuration option, for less than no reason... that's more than annoying.

[Greycat]

1 hour ago, kwsapphire said:

Thanks, I wondered why my 2 year old gaming rig can't support Windows 11. MSFT wants me to download and install a piece of software to tell me what criteria my computer isn't meeting. HAHA yeah right no thanks. I have to assume this TPM thing is the issue. I'm honestly surprised the upgrade is free, but I'm in no hurry.

 

If that's all it is, it can typically be enabled in BIOS. It's generally not turned on by default. There are also hardware versions you can buy, but... not spending money on something that can just be switched from off to on.

[Shenanigunner]

And just for further amusment, I just had a power outage (that interrupted some important work; still checking if my work was saved). Win and the apps are good about saving sessions and data, which is nice.

 

But my taskbar is now on the TOP edge of my main monitor and a few minutes of looking at the control panel shows no way to even put it back on the bottom. Sigh.

 

And if I select "Show on all displays," I get one up and two down. It's kind of like Whac-a-Mole.

[golstat2003]

13 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:

And just for further amusment, I just had a power outage (that interrupted some important work; still checking if my work was saved). Win and the apps are good about saving sessions and data, which is nice.

 

But my taskbar is now on the TOP edge of my main monitor and a few minutes of looking at the control panel shows no way to even put it back on the bottom. Sigh.

 

And if I select "Show on all displays," I get one up and two down. It's kind of like Whac-a-Mole.

 

Soooooo waiting a few more months before even looking at windows 11, gotcha.

 

That would annoy the shit out of me to no end.

 

Thanks for being an early adopter. 😄 

[Shenanigunner]

19 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:

But my taskbar is now on the TOP edge of my main monitor...

 

It's still there, but at least I figured out why.

 

I attempted the registry hack that is supposed to put the taskbar on the left (with some functional breakage). It never worked. But the hard-hard system reset of the power outage apparently made Win look at the hacked registry value... which I now find puts the taskbar on top, Mac-style, not on the left.

 

I've fixed the registry change, but even a full power-down/power-up hasn't put the taskbar back on the bottom.

 

I suggest, from long experience with this stuff, that even the most desperate Win11 user avoid the registry hacks for this. Every article makes it clear that this is down into hand-axe hack, not a sneaky tweak to unlock an MS option. It breaks, it breaks other things and only some variants can be said to 'work' at all.

 

This is me, waiting out MS's stupidity on the point. And wondering just how hard a reboot I have to do to get the bar back where it belongs...

[Fireside]

31 minutes ago, Shenanigunner said:

I've fixed the registry change, but even a full power-down/power-up hasn't put the taskbar back on the bottom.

 

Judging by what you've said I figure you already checked this but Win11 doesn't have the fast startup feature from Win10 enabled by default does it?  If it does turning the machine off then on won't actually power cycle it because fast startup causes it to instead enter a deep sleep state.  A restart, unplugging and plugging it back in (after selecting "shutdown"), or just disabling this feature and then power cycling the machine would all have the same effect of actually power cycling the machine as you expected.

[Shenanigunner]

10 minutes ago, Fireside said:

Judging by what you've said I figure you already checked this but Win11 doesn't have the fast startup feature from Win10 enabled by default does it?  If it does turning the machine off then on won't actually power cycle it because fast startup causes it to instead enter a deep sleep state.

 

Thanks — that's likely it. I know laptop/mobile functionality has slowly taken over many aspects and change the way big old desktop systems work. I didn't realize even a cold start would use the warm-boot process. Off to kill... something. Or at least "defeat" it. 😄

[Fireside]

10 minutes ago, Shenanigunner said:

 

Thanks — that's likely it. I know laptop/mobile functionality has slowly taken over many aspects and change the way big old desktop systems work. I didn't realize even a cold start would use the warm-boot process. Off to kill... something. Or at least "defeat" it. 😄

 

Yea I found out about it the hard way a while ago since it actually breaks some of Microsoft's own updates.  They even have a support article about it.

[Shenanigunner]

4 minutes ago, Fireside said:

Yea I found out about it the hard way a while ago since it actually breaks some of Microsoft's own updates.  They even have a support article about it.

 

Well, it hasn't solved Problem A despite a couple of rounds. I suspect the registry edit is persisting. At least I've disabled the fast boot, which is 99.9% useless to me since I restart my system about once every three weeks. I'm sure that will cure a few annoyances down the road.

[Marshal_General]

For those having problems vs those who are not:

Did you upgrade or have a clean install?

I think Windows never does well with upgrades from what I have experienced with the past versions.

[oedipus_tex]

I am able to run Homecoming fine on my newest laptop with Win 11. However, modding the game on my private server is not possible on Win 11 as far as I've been able to figure out.

[Shenanigunner]

2 hours ago, Marshal_General said:

For those having problems vs those who are not:

Did you upgrade or have a clean install?

I think Windows never does well with upgrades from what I have experienced with the past versions.

 

Generally true, but more so when doing an update on a system with marginal specs for the new OS..

 

The hate for Vista was widespread... not only because too many people tried to upgrade to this first general version of "NT" Windows from the old DOS-based versions, and on mangled installations, but because MS lowered the requirements too far in a marketing/accommodation move. Me? I'd been running NT for a couple of years and built a new, full-power system for Vista. It had teething problems, but was not the dog most users perceived it to be.

 

These days, it's not reasonable to replace a system every time there's a modest OS update. So updates are the rule, not clean installations. And the last totally clean updates I did were for Windows 7, which was updated all around to Win 10 and its midding upgrade versions. I had zero trouble with the Win11 update (and this is my main, moneymaking, OMG-it's-gotta-work system... never thought twice after reading the early reports).

 

And bare-metal installs aren't for everyone, by a long shot.

 

But as for features... knowing about the stupid task bar, which is now stuck in a halfway point (to the top of the main monitor, where it's not supposed to be after carefully resetting the registry to original specs) might have make me delay a bit. The advantages (and the very smooth 1+ hour update) aren't worth having my working UI crippled.

 

Short form: I wouldn't try to update really old Win10 systems, or really marginal ones. Lock them on Win10 and plan for a new system in the near future.

[Bill Z Bubba]

4 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:

Lock them on Win10 and plan for a new system in the near future.

 

This has been my plan all along. Unfortunately, with the state of chip manufacturing/delivery these days, I'm not looking forward to the price tag on a new rig seeing as how vid cards are still sitting at 2x MSRP. I'd be ecstatic if they were down to 1.25x.

[Shenanigunner]

39 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

This has been my plan all along. Unfortunately, with the state of chip manufacturing/delivery these days, I'm not looking forward to the price tag on a new rig seeing as how vid cards are still sitting at 2x MSRP. I'd be ecstatic if they were down to 1.25x.

 

Yeah, I guess I am lucky to have built a beefy new main system last spring. (I build a new main system about every five years, and sometimes update the video card in the interval.)

 

But, y'know, I've been using GTX1050Ti's since they came out and haven't found a reason to go with anything newer or more expensive, as either a gamer or a graphics/video designer. I used to run the best and hottest (literally) all the time, but that card hit such a high mark and high value ratio... got better things to mess around with.

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Shenanigunner said:

But, y'know, I've been using GTX1050Ti's since they came out and haven't found a reason to go with anything newer or more expensive, as either a gamer or a graphics/video designer. I used to run the best and hottest (literally) all the time, but that card hit such a high mark and high value ratio... got better things to mess around with.

 

I still love my 1080, it handles what I need it to for the most part, but I've been itching for a 3080 since Sep of 2020 or at least since I bought Cyberpunk.

[DoctorDitko]

My 2060 Super handles 1440p Cyberpunk at max settings just fine.

Now if only my reflexes were up to the task...

[Shenanigunner]

6 minutes ago, DoctorDitko said:

My 2060 Super handles 1440p Cyberpunk at max settings just fine.

Now if only my reflexes were up to the task...

 

Oh, for the old Infocom games, where typing speed was irrelevant...