News Windows 11 starts October 5

[dullard]

The day I see reputable benchmarks showing consistent increased gaming performance in Win 11 I will seriously consider replacing 10 and not before. (in other words I doubt I'll ever use beyond the minimum to be familiar with the GUI)

There is no reason to expect any gaming difference between the two during games. Faster loading with Win 11, but no real difference with frame rate or frame rate consistency. So, I agree, you will stay on Windows 10.

 

[Red Squirrel]

If you mean left that way 24/7 often unattended (AND un-patched!) then I fully agree, however PC's are not all that useful sans internet for most stuff these days.

Having said that however, updated Win 10 is EXPONENTIALLY more secure then Win 7/8.0 and substantially better then 8.1 as well... at least 8.1 is still "officially" supported unlike the other two.

Directly is the keyword. Ex: plugging straight into a modem and being fully exposed to the internet. As long as you have even a basic NAT firewall you are going to be protected from almost everything. If you have zero port forwards even better, but sometimes those are needed for certain things. I have a vlan I reserve for that. Anything that requires a port forward is on that vlan, and I treat anything on that vlan as if it were directly connected to the internet.

Of course for things like web servers that are in a data centre you kinda need it to be directly connected as you don't have physical access so you need SSH etc to be open to the internet and don't have physical access to setup physical devices like a firewall. Not ideal but you kind of take that risk and secure it as best as you can at the OS level.

 

[Captante]

I don't game.

I browse. I use spreadsheets/word processors (LibreOffice), Quicken (old copy), IP cameras/NVR, some photo editors like IrfanView and I need networking between machines and devices. And I have a weather radar program witten by an M$ fanatic that won't write it for anything else.

Honestly if you don't game then Linux is almost a no-brainer.... most likely straight Ubuntu.

 

[lxskllr]

Quicken and the weather program might be problems. If they can't be lived without, they may work in wine, or they may not. Only way to know is to try. You can do a full real install to a thumb drive. That makes it easy to check on the exact hardware you want, and to try installing problematic programs. There's other ways of doing it, but that's gonna be closest to seeing what you get from an install. It'll be slow launching programs of course.

 

[JujuFish]

7 was not only faster then 10 in most games, it was snappier in pretty much everything else too plus the GUI was more easily usable. (and far better looking!)

Wow, my experience was literally the exact opposite (except the GUI, agreed there).

 

[Captante]

Wow, my experience was literally the exact opposite (except the GUI, agreed there).

YMMV depending on hardware/drivers and the games you played? Eventually 10 caught fully up in performance and (shortly before 7 support ended) 10 surpassed it in new games.

But then wth do I know? I liked Vista's GUI better then 7 or 10!

 

[mikeymikec]

Quicken and the weather program might be problems. If they can't be lived without, they may work in wine, or they may not. Only way to know is to try. You can do a full real install to a thumb drive. That makes it easy to check on the exact hardware you want, and to try installing problematic programs. There's other ways of doing it, but that's gonna be closest to seeing what you get from an install. It'll be slow launching programs of course.

I personally run one app via Wine (my calendar), because I need it quickly enough not to wait for a VM, then I have a Win7 VM for anything else (e.g. photo printing, Epson Scan, Xara, Microsoft Access).

 

[pcgeek11]

(Really wish I knew Linux.)

Then get in there and learn something. It isn't hard just different. There is a ton of help on the internet for those wanting to put in the time and effort.

 

[Shmee]

I recommend Xubuntu, has a nice interface.

 

[lxskllr]

Xubuntu's a good one. I really like the xfce desktop. Classic interface that can be made fancy enough to look fairly modern, without a ton of overhead or confusing options. I also like Plasma. That can look very fancy with modest specs, but setup can be a bit confusing. I use both.

I first tried Ubuntu in 2005, with the old gnome2 desktop, and I thought that was perfect. A panel on top with information and a few launchers, and a panel on the bottom with a task switcher. I setup every desktop the same way regardless of which desktop I'm using. If a desktop couldn't be setup that way without retarded hacks(gnome), I wouldn't use it.

 

[JujuFish]

YMMV depending on hardware/drivers and the games you played? Eventually 10 caught fully up in performance and (shortly before 7 support ended) 10 surpassed it in new games.

But then wth do I know? I liked Vista's GUI better then 7 or 10!

I don't know. 10 felt like it was designed with SSDs in mind, maybe? Everything was snappier for me, from gaming to general use.

 

[nakedfrog]

YMMV depending on hardware/drivers and the games you played? Eventually 10 caught fully up in performance and (shortly before 7 support ended) 10 surpassed it in new games.

But then wth do I know? I liked Vista's GUI better then 7 or 10!

TBH, I didn't start using Vista until after they'd worked out all the bugs, and I never had any real problems with it (for all the hate it gets). But at least going from Vista to 7 was a pretty smooth experience, I didn't really have any specific complaints like I did with going to 10.

 

[Captante]

TBH, I didn't start using Vista until after they'd worked out all the bugs, and I never had any real problems with it (for all the hate it gets). But at least going from Vista to 7 was a pretty smooth experience, I didn't really have any specific complaints like I did with going to 10.

I snagged a "retail" copy of Vista @ Best Buy shortly after its release (I have a Bill Gates signed/numbered copy lolol) and installed it in dual-boot with XP.

Aside from an otherwise perfectly good AGFA flatbed scanner inexplicably not being supported in 64-bit I really had very few problems with Vista even right off the bat. EXCEPT it was slow as molasses compared to XP especially in games. As drivers improved that became far less of an issue.

The reason I actually DO prefer the user-interface in Vista is that M$ had yet to go down the "multiple-levels of menu clicking" to reach commonly used utilities.

In Win 7 MANY items that were 1-2 clicks from the desktop in Vista became 3-5 clicks/menus deep for no good reason, then in 10 MANY of those same items went to 6-7 clicks down ... -OR- just moved. (apparently at random)

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I'm a'skeert of the little guy ......

(There should be a 7 on that binkey.)

 

[nakedfrog]

I snagged a "retail" copy of Vista @ Best Buy shortly after its release (I have a Bill Gates signed/numbered copy lolol) and installed it in dual-boot with XP.

Aside from an otherwise perfectly good AGFA flatbed scanner inexplicably not being supported in 64-bit I really had very few problems with Vista even right off the bat. EXCEPT it was slow as molasses compared to XP especially in games. As drivers improved that became far less of an issue.

The reason I actually DO prefer the user-interface in Vista is that M$ had yet to go down the "multiple-levels of menu clicking" to reach commonly used utilities.

In Win 7 MANY items that were 1-2 clicks from the desktop in Vista became 3-5 clicks/menus deep for no good reason, then in 10 MANY of those same items went to 6-7 clicks down ... -OR- just moved. (apparently at random)

Yeah, I really didn't like how they seem to expect you to just hit/click Start and then type to find the thing you want, as it involves more needless switching between the mouse and KB.

 

[sactoking]

I'm not too keen on getting Windows 11 at any time in the next few years, Windows 10 is perfectly fine. Which works well for me because my i5-6400 is apparently "too old" to run 11.

 

[nakedfrog]

I have a few machines that will probably be getting switched to Linux when Win10 goes out of support, if an i5-6400 is "too old".

 

[ultimatebob]

I have a few machines that will probably be getting switched to Linux when Win10 goes out of support, if an i5-6400 is "too old".

My hunch is that Microsoft is going to break with their foolishly strict upgrade requirements and upgrade everyone eventually.

Windows 11 Specs and System Requirements | Microsoft Windows

Find an overview of Windows 11 specs and features from Microsoft. Learn about the device specifications, versions, and languages available for Windows 11

www.microsoft.com

These are the "real" minimum requirements. It looks like my 8 year old Dell XPS 9300 would run it without issue.

 

[Captante]

I have a few machines that will probably be getting switched to Linux when Win10 goes out of support, if an i5-6400 is "too old".

Keep in mind that by the time support for 10 ends, Win 11 should have been around for long enough to work out a lot of the bugs!

I installed 10 well prior to release but my primary PC/OS was Win 7 Pro until right before all its security support ended.

 

[IronWing]

Integrating Teams into the OS carries echoes of integrating IE into the OS simply to stomp out competition rather than improving the user experience.

 

[ultimatebob]

Integrating Teams into the OS carries echoes of integrating IE into the OS simply to stomp out competition rather than improving the user experience.

Yeah, they already basically killed Slack by bundling it for "free" with Office 365.

 

[IronWing]

Yeah, they already basically killed Slack by bundling it for "free" with Office 365.

It's a direct attack on both Zoom and Google. I don't think MS much cares about Zoom but Teams fronts Sharepoint and Teams works much, much better with an Outlook account than a gmail account and outclasses Google Docs. Giving it away renders Google Docs pointless and pushes users to use Outlook instead of gmail.

It is also another step in MS' push to convince users to load their files onto MS servers.

 

[nakedfrog]

My hunch is that Microsoft is going to break with their foolishly strict upgrade requirements and upgrade everyone eventually.

Windows 11 Specs and System Requirements | Microsoft Windows

Find an overview of Windows 11 specs and features from Microsoft. Learn about the device specifications, versions, and languages available for Windows 11

www.microsoft.com

These are the "real" minimum requirements. It looks like my 8 year old Dell XPS 9300 would run it without issue.

I think TPM is probably the biggest hurdle? Is a laptop that came with an i5 2540M likely to support it?

 

[ultimatebob]

I think TPM is probably the biggest hurdle? Is a laptop that came with an i5 2540M likely to support it?

I've heard that Windows 11 will work with TPM 1.2, which has been around on many laptops since 2012.

 

[MrSquished]

See you in fall 2022 Windows 11!