Is it worth upgrading to Windows 11?

jonwil

n00b
Joined
Dec 29, 2014
Messages
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My current specs:
Intel Core i5-9400F
Asus Prime B365M-A
16GB Kingston HyperX DDR4-2400 RAM (4x4GB sticks)
MSI GTX 1660 Super
500GB WD HDD
500GB WD 2.5 SSD
250GB Crucial 2.5 SSD
500GB Crucial P1 NVME SSD (my boot drive)
DVD RW drive (mostly used for playing DVDs from my collection or the tiny number of disk-based games I own)
Windows 10 Home (updated with all the patches Windows Update offers me)

With this hardware would I get any benefit from upgrading to Windows 11 or should I stick with Windows 10?
 
Well, it may be just a "facelift," but as the IT support person in my family, this upgrade would generate a lot of "support calls." I'm not the kind of guy who is well-suited for a support job. :rolleyes: And right now my 2016 laptop will never run Win 11, unless I "cheat."

That said, I already bought a TPM card for my 2019 desktop, and my wife's 2019 laptop apparently supports the upgrade. I keep my desktop motherboards at least 4 years, so I'm sure that at some point, I will need to upgrade. (I will upgrade my 3900X when AMD brings out the second generation of its new CPU architecture.
 
What is your use case? Games...video editing...office productivity...etc

I doubt there would be a performance uplift for a intel 9400f.


I went to Windows 11 back in December after upgrading my system to alder lake. It so far has been mostly stable. Personally don't like the appearance limitation and changes such as the taskbar not resizable or able to make it vertical on left/right side of screen. I'm no fan of the rounded corners and want my square corners back (which there are fixes for these things like startallback or disableroundedcorners). Also for the love of god whey do so many windows program appearances have to be white while having a dark theme enabled, like task manager, control panel and 3rd party programs are all white still. Windows wins being lazy at this still....

Be careful around updates as with anything window! So far I have had a desktop/filemanager issue where moving/copying/extracting files won't show up until you do a refresh manually. Found and trying a registry change with this one.

Just yesterday out of nowhere my pc when from being activated to not activated and was giving me Windows activation error 0xC004F211 that says I made a major hardware change which I haven't done. The troubleshooter would not fix on its own. Tried Microsoft tech chat and tried some basic things like sfc and dism, then system restore which none fixed. eventually found for some reason my Microsoft account made a duplicate system and had to re-activate on the 2nd system, but now my account still has 2 systems and doesn't say which one is not active so I could remove it from the list without worry that will mess up the one I just activated, grrrrr.

My advice, don't bother with windows 11. I fell for the hardware upgrade trap.
 
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What is your use case? Games...video editing...office productivity...etc

I doubt there would be a performance uplift for a intel 9400f.


I went to Windows 11 back in December after upgrading my system to alder lake. It so far has been mostly stable. Personally don't like the appearance limitation and changes such as the taskbar not resizable or able to make it vertical on left/right side of screen. I'm no fan of the rounded corners and want my square corners back (which there are fixes for these things like startallback or disableroundedcorners). Also for the love of god whey do so many windows program appearances have to be white while having a dark theme enabled, like task manager, control panel and 3rd party programs are all white still. Windows wins being lazy at this still....

Be careful around updates as with anything window! So far I have had a desktop/filemanager issue where moving/copying/extracting files won't show up until you do a refresh manually. Found and trying a registry change with this one.

Just yesterday out of nowhere my pc when from being activated to not activated and was giving me Windows activation error 0xC004F211 that says I made a major hardware change which I haven't done. The troubleshooter would not fix on its own. Tried Microsoft tech chat and tried some basic things like sfc and dism, then system restore which none fixed. eventually found for some reason my Microsoft account made a duplicate system and had to re-activate on the 2nd system, but now my account still has 2 systems and doesn't say which one is not active so I could remove it from the list without worry that will mess up the one I just activated, grrrrr.

My advice, don't bother with windows 11. I fell for the hardware upgrade trap.
You're a beta tester! :p
 
My use case is gaming, general web browsing (including Netflix, YouTube etc) and also software development and Visual Studio work.

Sounds like the effort required (in my case it would be a full reinstall for a number of reasons) isn't worth it.
 
Stating the obvious. One day, there will be no choice. But, for now, if you want to avoid the headaches, I'd likely put it off.

Adoption has been slow since Microsoft has wielded the "hate" weapon at everyone (TPM 2.0 requirement). I know some "say", well you can do the "workaround" to make what Microsoft says is totally "unsupported" work (if you have TPM 1.x), but is that what we really should do? I'm still thinking that Microsoft may relent on this. We'll see.

Btw, TPM 1.x is still pushed on new configurations TODAY. Just saying. And of course, often times optional (no TPM).

"What were they thinking..." comes to my mind.
 
The great thing about Windows 10 is MS have stopped messing with it, what you get will remain the same, finally!
Stick with that.
+1. I think that Microsoft has won (or lost ???) the features war with itself. Keeping all those programmers busy is no justification for foisting a new OS on us when we don't want it.
 
Personally don't like the appearance limitation and changes such as the taskbar not resizable or able to make it vertical on left/right side of screen. I'm no fan of the rounded corners and want my square corners back (which there are fixes for these things like startallback or disableroundedcorners). Also for the love of god whey do so many windows program appearances have to be white while having a dark theme enabled, like task manager, control panel and 3rd party programs are all white still. Windows wins being lazy at this still....

Be careful around updates as with anything window! So far I have had a desktop/filemanager issue where moving/copying/extracting files won't show up until you do a refresh manually. Found and trying a registry change with this one.

Do you have network storage? My pc does the same refresh thing when I have added NAS or similar storages...

Totally agree on appearance and all too. I got some program to change it back to w10 or 7 styling after manually changing it as much as I could. I don't remember the name, I'll grab it and edit my post or reply... made it world's better but still need to tweak it though
 
+1. I think that Microsoft has won (or lost ???) the features war with itself. Keeping all those programmers busy is no justification for foisting a new OS on us when we don't want it.
Won't be finished until there's some sort of automated "assistant" that guess exactly what we are trying to do and prevents us from making horrid mistakes /s
 
I think the answer now is not yet. Aside from the latest hardware, Windows 11 offers very little over 10 especially for older app compatibility issues which will exist for a while.
 
I grabbed my Surface Pro (Gen 1) and was like.. what happened to my laptop.. and realized it upgraded. VERY old CPU... i5-4300 or something... been using it here and there and not really digging it.
Tried upgrading the wifes laptop yesterday... i5-7500 and NOT SUPPORTED!!!!! WTH!!!! my old old old cpu is but this one is not. even google many people asking for this cpu to be upgraded..

now to your question...
Should you upgraded... well is your hardware going to run it? I know you listed it above.. but run the win11 precheck utility... and make your choice..

what I have done was installed Windows 11 on a VM in Proxmox so now I have access to a full blown windows 11 instance for me to toy with, look at and get familiar with (surface pro is small and really dont use it much)

I am building a new machine and will be going win11 just because ya gotta rip the Band-Aid off.
 
I grabbed my Surface Pro (Gen 1) and was like.. what happened to my laptop.. and realized it upgraded. VERY old CPU... i5-4300 or something... been using it here and there and not really digging it.
Tried upgrading the wifes laptop yesterday... i5-7500 and NOT SUPPORTED!!!!! WTH!!!! my old old old cpu is but this one is not. even google many people asking for this cpu to be upgraded..

now to your question...
Should you upgraded... well is your hardware going to run it? I know you listed it above.. but run the win11 precheck utility... and make your choice..

what I have done was installed Windows 11 on a VM in Proxmox so now I have access to a full blown windows 11 instance for me to toy with, look at and get familiar with (surface pro is small and really dont use it much)

I am building a new machine and will be going win11 just because ya gotta rip the Band-Aid off.

It's trivial to bypass the installation requirements, and there are about 7 different ways to do it. I have Windows 11 running on 15+ year old computers and it runs great. The only real requirement (that can't be bypassed) is that you need a 64-bit CPU. Even a 64-bit Pentium 4 can run Windows 11.

Apps with 16-bit installers like Atomic Bomberman. There isn't a 32-bit version of Win11 in order to have backwards compatibility with 16-bit apps.

No one is running 32-bit versions of windows anymore unless it's a special-purpose computer.

I'd argue that the better solution would be to run your 16-bit apps in a VM so you can keep using a 64-bit host OS, and still be able to run 64-bit programs.
 
To add to the 32 bits Windows 10-11, that would mean to run the latest Windows with 2.0 to 3.x gig of ram (minus your gpu VRAM for some program), which seem just a strange limitation and maybe you can use smartdrive like the DOS days to help, it seem a no brainer to use the nice easy free VM that came with windows nowaday for that.
 
wait for the first big feature update (due in the 2nd half of 2022) before upgrading to Windows 11
 
Apps with 16-bit installers like Atomic Bomberman. There isn't a 32-bit version of Win11 in order to have backwards compatibility with 16-bit apps.
rip the files or download it, point the cfg to the correct location and it runs fine, no compatibility mode either. or try winevdm.
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Apps with 16-bit installers like Atomic Bomberman. There isn't a 32-bit version of Win11 in order to have backwards compatibility with 16-bit apps.
Are you saying that Win 11 runs only 64-bit programs. That's what Apple does with its recent OS releaes, and I read forums where they catch a lot of flak over that decision.

I sure hope it isn't true for Windows. "Say it ain't true Joe." [Ok, where is this from?]
 
Are you saying that Win 11 runs only 64-bit programs. That's what Apple does with its recent OS releaes, and I read forums where they catch a lot of flak over that decision.

I sure hope it isn't true for Windows. "Say it ain't true Joe." [Ok, where is this from?]
its not.
 
My Win10 system for work/play (Ryzen 5900/32gb) is now pushing me with nags to install the Win11 update...
Gaming performance in W11 is about identical to W10? I suppose MS Office performance is same.
How is memory handling? I sometimes get CTD's when playing YouTube videos
 
My Win10 system for work/play (Ryzen 5900/32gb) is now pushing me with nags to install the Win11 update...
Gaming performance in W11 is about identical to W10? I suppose MS Office performance is same.
How is memory handling? I sometimes get CTD's when playing YouTube videos
ok...
yes.
fine. its basically just a facelift for 10.
 
My Win10 system for work/play (Ryzen 5900/32gb) is now pushing me with nags to install the Win11 update...
Gaming performance in W11 is about identical to W10? I suppose MS Office performance is same.
How is memory handling? I sometimes get CTD's when playing YouTube videos

I run Windows 10 Pro to avoid being nagged about anything I don't want to be nagged about. As for the crashing while watching YT, I don't think it's being caused by your OS. I get years of continuous crash-free uptime on all my Win 10 systems.
 
its basically just a facelift for 10
Pretty much this. It took me a little time to get used to, but I like it better than 10 now and I never have crashes. I can't say for sure if gaming performance is better than on 10, but it's not worse.
As for the crashing while watching YT, I don't think it's being caused by your OS. I get years of continuous crash-free uptime on all my Win 10 systems.
This as well. I think it's more likely a component issue. Could be any variety of things.
 
IMHO, it's really not even a facelift. It's a change, sometimes subtle, sometimes just plain weird. Feature wise 11 adds a few things and also (important) regresses on others (that is, there are some things today that you can do with Windows 10 that you can't do in 11, and I'm talking base OS functionality). On the regressions, these are things "promised" in future 11 updates. If you didn't see any regression, just means you never used that particular feature. As with all things Microsoft, they will force your hand at some point.

"I see 11 in your future.... or Linux..."
 
I've been on Windows 11 since the beta. There aren't many things it does better than Windows 10 does in terms of functionality. More/better HDR options and quick-sizing for apps are the only things that come to mind. Someday we might have true Android support, but right now it's worthless. The other changes are aesthetic (which you might appreciate), or they're steps backward. Performance is more or less the same unless you're on an Intel 12-series machine.

I'm using it mostly for HDR functions and I like the look.

Personally, I'd download a copy of Macrium reflect and do an image backup of your current install if you can. That'll let you install Windows 11, but you can go back if you don't like it. I think you can uninstall it and go back to 10 normally, but that always breaks things and/or leaves tons of bullshit you don't want. Reverting back to previous images = the drive equivalent of an old savegame.
 
I'm waiting to see DirectStorage performance numbers before 'upgrading' to W11
 
I've already got a ghost image of my boot drive, but will update it.
The CTD issue is weird and has been happening on/off for several years. Never while gaming or running any productivity app - only happens 1-2 times a month when playing a YT video... best guess is that my 6600XT runs out of free memory eventually if I don't hard reboot at least twice a week.
 
The 22H2 version of Windows 11 is expected to be finalized in a couple weeks. It won't roll out to most people for a couple months, but ISO's will be available within a few days of it going gold. I'd hold off for that considering how soon that is. It's going to restore some Win 10 functionality to the Start Menu, File Explorer, and Taskbar. Frankly, it's probably what Windows 11 should have been at launch...although with REAL Android implementation, which has been mostly forgotten at this point.
Here's all the stuff it adds/changes: https://www.neowin.net/news/what-is...2-the-first-feature-update-for-the-newest-os/
 
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I think the update looks good, and yes, that's what Windows 11 should have been at launch. I'll probably try to get the ISO when it comes out and do a manual update, if that will be an option for existing W11 users. But I have to grumble about the ads, news widgets, etc., all the exact things I don't use my computer for.
 
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