Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:
The demand for new machines will be high, driving up cost.
The supply of unsupported machines will be high, driving down the used market.
Are you all ready?
The taskbar is one thing, but it’s horribly slow, even on a rather high spec laptop. The delay from clicking start menu icons to programs starting is very noticeable, and some programs freeze regularly. MS Office are actually some of the worst offenders. I tried it for 2 weeks and then did a fresh install of Windows 10.
I didn’t even mind ME, for me it was running pretty stable. I heard most issues came from people updating from 98 or 98SE to ME, a clean install was usually stable.
I skipped Vista though, went straight to 7. Still my favorite Windows. 8 was crap, 8.1 was not bad once you applied the taskbar fix.
Hm. Not been my experience going back and forth between 10 and 11, but that’s always the case with Windows, isn’t it? Bit of a crapshoot in general.
Honestly, I have no idea how to evaluate real laptop performance these days. Most of the performance issues I have on battery devices are some unholy combination of horrific power management, bad software and semi-deliberate online weirdness with services throttling you out of adblocker spite.
People are out there telling you how well Youtube is meant to perform playing video and how long the battery is meant to run based on that and I don’t even know what they mean anymore.
Funny that this started with 10 in my experience. Our family laptop did an involuntary upgrade back in 2016, and its 2 cores, 4 gigs of ram and hdd just couldn’t handle it. And none in our family was savvy enough to downgrade to 7. Thankfully same did not happen to mom’s similarly weak one, it was saved from running an EOL system by Linux)
I just upgraded my work surface book 3 to 11 and for me it seems that program start faster, not slower 🤔
I actually liked the full screen Start menu from 8/8.1 for the specific use case of my living room PC. You got a big 10-foot UI by default with nice large icons you could punch from across the room.
The whole put-your-mouse-in-the-corner-and-swipe for the charms menu was baffling, though. I get that this was supposed to be a tablet UI thing, but why make it mandatory for the mouse interface as well?