upgrade to Win 11?

[Liddo-kun]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

NP.

As an aside, there is still good value in keeping HDDs around because of their longevity. SSDs need periodical use (i.e. just being powered on) so that the onboard memory controller can ensure the cells remain energized and the data is properly retained (the MC will, if needed, rewrite a weak cell to restore the charge back to normal levels). If you unplug an SSD and let it sit around, the electric charge in each cell will start to dissipate much faster than a HDD's. Compared to spinning mechanical platters, SSDs still have a shorter lifespan in terms of memory retention, even though they've come a long way since their first generations.

Case in point, I still have several thirteen-year-old SATA HDDs (and one PATA/IDE) from my father's computer that I keep around for archival purposes and I recently fired them up to find old pictures of his. I found that the data is still accessible, though not at a blazingly fast rate. An SSD, on the other hand, would have gone blank by now.

If you want to invest in an HDD (just for pure data/archival storage; it's still highly advised to have a M2 NVME or 2.5'' SATA SSD as home for your main partition just for sheer speeds), just make sure it's a CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) rather than a SMR drive (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and be careful as the manufacturers do not particularly go out of their way to specify it. Western Digital, one of the most reliable brands out there, was caught lying about that some time ago and they lost some goodwill from their clientele afterwards. SMRs have higher data density on the magnetic platters but since each cell is "shingled" (i.e. physically overlapping its neighbors), the MC has to work double time to make sure the adjacent cells do not get accidentally overwritten/corrupted, which results in inefficiency.

on the subject of HDD..

I own three pc. Only the newest one is fully SSD. The two older ones have an SSD for booting and an HDD for storage. Newest has a 10600k using Win 10, the older pc has a 2600k and it also use Win 10, the oldest one is literally a dinosaur with Q9500 and still runs Windows 7 - the HDD equipped on this one is probably as old as the ones you have, I use it for playing retro games.

using the 2600k pc to type this message now. Star Rail, a game I play everyday is stored in the HDD, works just fine.

________

back on topic. It's now 2025. I do hope no problems arrive for Windows 10 users.

[Renegade334]

Windows 10 users will be fine until a major security weakness or showstopper bug is found but Microsoft declares itself no longer obligated to patch it.
The bigger incentive to upgrade to Windows 11 will materialize when much of the software and hardware ecosystem begins migrating to 11 and no longer bothers looking back for stragglers. Take computer games, for example: there are already many (MSFS2020, CP2077, Halo: Infinite, Forza Horizon 4, etc.) that have dropped support for Windows 7. The same process will repeat itself with Windows 10 within a couple of years, and it'll be accelerated by peripheral developments e.g. new DirectX versions, changes to driver architecture/standards, etc.

It is rather troubling that Microsoft seems overly reliant on purchases of new hardware (esp. laptops) to drive up W11 adoption numbers. It's not a good strategy, especially in these economically troubled times...and Microsoft is being increasingly restrictive on the upgrade paths: it recently instructed manufacturers like Dell, HP and Lenovo to no longer bundle Windows 11 Update 24H2 with 8th/9th/10th-gen Intel CPUs. Now, don't be alarmed: those CPUs will run Windows 11 just fine and will not deny you the 24H2 update, it's just that the hardware's security features are no longer sufficient in Microsoft's eyes and they want the OEMs to move on to more modern (and also more expensive) CPUs.

[Renegade334]

For those still rocking Windows 10, you might have an additional reason to keep doing so...

Recent testing of the freshly-released Ryzen 9 9950X3D, AMD's most powerful gaming-oriented CPU yet, on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, showed that, in certain cases, Microsoft's previous operating system could outperform its successor by almost 20%, especially in the 0.1% lows.

For those who've never come across this type of metric, a "1% low" reading represents the average of the lower 1% of framerates (FPS count) recorded during a test run. It isolates the worst-case performance scenarios that occur 1% of the time during gameplay or a benchmark run. The closer your 1% low reading is to the average, the smoother the video footage. Being further away means there's a higher chance of stuttering.

This difference is also noted in the averages, too. Your mileage will nevertheless vary according to which game you choose to play and whether the code is more CPU- or GPU-intensive. Fortnite, CS2, Baldur's Gate 3 and others will fare better on Windows 10, whereas Kingdome Come: Deliverance will feel better at home in Windows 11. In some of the aforementioned cases, the FPS averages' gaps are much narrower.

The culprit? A mechanism called VBS. It's not Visual Basic Script, but Virtualization-Based Security, AKA Core Isolation. It's a feature that uses Windows Hypervisor and hardware-based virtualization to shield the OS kernel from potential malware lurking around in your system. It's off by default in Win10, but on from the get-go in Win11. Once you deactivate it in Win11, the performance gap shrinks by at least half. That said, one has to ponder for oneself whether it's worth doing away with this extra layer of security, just to squeeze out more frames per second. You decide.

Another finding: this gap is quite noticeable in 1080p gaming, but it seemingly decreases quite a bit when switching to 1440p.


I must also note that Windows 11 has, for some time now, been suspected of being poorly optimized for AMD CPUs - at least when hedged against its performance on Intel platforms. Remember that for a time, "Wintel" was a prevalent thing; MS and Intel were very chummy with one another (some even whisper that W11 was created with the 12th-generation Intel Cores in mind). Case in point: the consternation felt during the release of the 9000-series AMD CPUs, when benchmark enthusiasts noted the inexplicably low performance gains between the 9000s and the precedent desktop CPU generation, the 7000s. Microsoft helped fix this discrepancy afterwards by issuing a Windows Update patch (KB5041587, which optimizes branch predictions, allows higher power levels and improves core-to-core latency) and AMD introduced Precision Boost Overdrive (with came along with a bump from 65W to 105W for CPU power draw in certain models) to BIOS settings, but despite that, suspicions over Windows 11's code efficiency persist.

That said, I'm rather satisfied with my own PC's performance on Windows 11 (still have plenty of gripes with the surfeit of live services and certain -but not all of them!- UI design choices). It's not like I play a lot of twitch shooter games nowadays, and I haven't seen stuttering/microstuttering in a while. Still, the performance loss is an unfortunate situation despite it being caused by a security feature that, in my opinion, should not be treated as unwelcome.
Speaking of security, I recently flashed my motherboard BIOS to version f4c not too long ago (f3h and another earlier brew had a bug wherein settings tooltips showed up in Spanish instead of English, but f4c seems to have fixed that) and was a bit annoyed to discover that the change did not play well with Windows Hello (sign-in system), forcing me to reset my PIN. Whilst Hello was awaiting action from my part (had to do the reset thrice, to force the refresh), Windows Defender remained nonfunctional.

[Renegade334]

Small heads-up - Microsoft is apparently cracking down on the OOBE\BYPASSNRO workaround that I referenced on page 2, essentially forcing you to install Windows 11 with an online MS account.

There is another method available to us, though, when the Out-of-Box-Experience (OOBE) installer makes it mandatory to connect to the Internet in order to complete the installation of Windows 11:
- press Shift+F10 to open the command-line interface.
- type start ms-cxh:localonly and press enter.
This will allow you to create a local account and proceed to the next installation step.

[Renegade334]

https://x.com/phantomofearth/status/1907862062610444340

Yes.
YES.
YEEEEEEEES! MAKE IT HAPPEN, MICROSOFT.

[Renegade334]

Microsoft is fielding its new Recall feature on Copilot+ computers and the majority of wise people wouldn't want to have that up and running.

Here's how to neuter it.

TL;DR…

The Settings route

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

TL;DR…

The Command-Line Interface route

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

Note that for now, MOST people don't have Recall. It's so far only available on Copilot+ laptops (most of them ARM, but next-gen Intel mobile CPUs will support Recall) with 40TOPS NPUs that were released after June 18, 2024.


Also: "2025-04 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5055523)" creates a new, empty folder called "inetpub" in your C:\ drive. Don't delete it, it's apparently part of Windows' protective mechanisms - though they still have not specified in which manner it's used.

[CIRQUAN]

So, I have been using Windows 11 for some time now and have started to grow accustomed to it. However, little bastard has been pestering me to update it with constant notifications every few minutes today.
I have gone afk for a couple of minutes and when I got back, it went and updated itself.
At first I didn`t see any difference, but then I noticed a change when I right clicked and saw tall menu like in Windows 10. I have started to like old Windows 11 right click menu with icons for cut, copy and paste. And now they made it like it is in Windows 10.
ಠ_ಠ

[larethian]

Originally Posted by CIRQUAN

So, I have been using Windows 11 for some time now and have started to grow accustomed to it. However, little bastard has been pestering me to update it with constant notifications every few minutes today.
I have gone afk for a couple of minutes and when I got back, it went and updated itself.
At first I didn`t see any difference, but then I noticed a change when I right clicked and saw tall menu like in Windows 10. I have started to like old Windows 11 right click menu with icons for cut, copy and paste. And now they made it like it is in Windows 10.
ಠ_ಠ

If you don't want auto-update, a workaround to prevent Windows from downloading updates is by marking the network interface you're using as a metered connection.

[scififan]

Windows 11 is resource hog compared to Windows 10, similar to Windows 8/10 as the resource hog compared to Windows 7.

The positive side of Windows 11 is it has better support to virtualization. Windows 10's sandbox was horrible. Windows 11 is not improving it yet. WSL(Linux virtualization) in Windows 11 is an improvement over Windows 10. The unethical story of getting support from AppGet creator. to create WinGet gives Windows' its own Linux style package manager. WinGet was horrible in Windows 10, but it is better in Windows 11. I feel the current WinGet is more natural to use than chocolatey, which was the best package manager for Windows.

[Renegade334]

In my last month of using Windows 10, I was constantly eyeballing my resource monitors (HWiNFO64, Task Manager's Performance tab, etc) because of my RAM instability and I was rather surprised to see my RAM usage often go from 3-4GB out of 8 (yes, I know, I was skirting what is today the minimum for a good experience), right after logging in, to 7 out of 8 after a couple of minutes, without even starting up a game like CP2077. Just going on YouTube or opening MS Word. I didn't recall W10 being this RAM-hungry before, but at that point it was just another reason for me to at long last upgrade.

Windows 11 has much better virtualization support because its built-in security suite uses it pretty heavily for sandboxing (the VBS I mentioned above), at the cost of some system performance.

@CIRQUAN:
To get back to the old right-click menu (I do not know if you've ever tweaked with the registry, like I have, to get the old W10 menu back, so the following may or may not help you), you could open the Terminal and type the following:

reg.exe delete “HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32” /f /ve

Then either reboot or go to Task Manager to restart explorer.exe.
I do however advise you to first open the registry editor to see if "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}" does even exist in the first place. Otherwise the delete command (which returns the contextual menu back to the original W11 standard) won't do anything.

To revert the above change (and recover the W10-style CM), use the following command:

reg.exe add “HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32” /f /ve

Winget can be a lifesaver. There are only three commands you should memorize.

1. Winget update --all --include-unknown
2. Winget pin add --id (insert app name here) --version (insert app version here)
3. Winget list

#1 is for automatically updating all software recognized and supported by Winget.
#2 is to "pin" an app in place and prevent it from being updated to a newer version than the number you've specified. I've used it to "freeze" an old version of mIRC I own, because the software developer reneged on his lifetime license promise and forced all paid users into a subscription-based business model to pay for his server/development costs - and I don't want my copy of mIRC (which I now use very rarely TBH) to implement those changes.
#3 is to find all Winget-registered/supported apps on your PC.

It's so convenient I even created a desktop shortcut with C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powersh ell.exe -NoExit -Command "winget update" as the destination. You can add " --all" after "update" if you want to kickstart the update process from the get-go.

Another shortcut some other users might be interested in:

C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe /r /fw /f /t 0

This immediately reboots your PC to your UEFI/BIOS if you ever have the need to go there (no need to press "F12" when POSTing). Just make sure you have everything important saved and closed beforehand.

[CIRQUAN]

Thank you all for your advices.
Weird thing happened. I just checked right click menu and there are cut, copy, rename and delete icons at the top of the menu. Weird. But I am glad they are back.