Time to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11?

[JamesT]

TPM v2 as well, I believe

I’m not sure which generation of chips started it, but recent ones have a fTPM (firmware TPM) built in, so you don’t need one on the motherboard. When I upgraded my Ryzen 3600 system it was a matter of enabling it in the bios.

 

[bavvo]

Unusually for me - I have held off the latest update and will continue to do so for as long as I can or until they "fix" it or make user-configurable changes to it. I have several machines and I have installed it on a couple of lighter-used ones so I can see for myself. And for me (accepting that everyone's views and priorities differ) the issues are just two annoyances; annoying enough to keep me away.

1: The taskbar is not resizable and it's much bigger (i.e. wastes too much screen) than the small option on Win10. There is a registry hack for that (why should that be needed?) but it spoils the display of the clock. Let me resize it without doing registry edits, please.

2: The context menu is two layers with what they consider the main things on top and the rest under a click. So - an extra two clicls for each and every use of one of these items. Again - let me choose this behaviour.

If your machine is slowing down then Win11 won't cure it any more than a fresh install of 10 would.

On point 2, this was really annoying, and the first thing I fixed when my computer was upgraded. There is a registry hack detailed here (Microsoft Community) that reverts this to the old standard. It does involve editing the registry, so not for the faint hearted, but the instructions are fairly clear.
Regarding performance, my old laptop (Dell, probably 5+ years old) was noticably slower once upgraded, so I would be cautious about upgrading existing hardware, even if it is possible.

 

[Yew]

Is there the ability to run Linux in an "enterprise" environment? The organisation I work for is weaning itself off Microsoft Office, but I think they are stuck with Windows forever.

It's certainly possible, with companies like RedHat offering paid-support solutions, but generally it's something more focused on Software Developers or specialist roles, rather than for general office usage.

 

[Bevan Price]

Every upgrade that Windows 10 performs leaves thousands of megabytes of useless files on my computer once the upgrade has finished. Ideally, Windows could be programmed to delete all those temporary files on completion of the upgrade - but it does not. All those temporary files consume loads of memory and make Windows run slower and slower.

You can get utilities - some free, some paid for, mostly perfectly safe, that will search for and remove all the temporary / useless files - and your computer will thank you, and run faster. (Maybe not quite as fast as when it was brand new, but a lot faster than before you removed all the clutter.)

In addition, some utilities allow you to examine and edit the start menu. Edit to delay or stop items that you don't really need to start every time.
Also there may be some applications you have downloaded but find you never need or use. Consider deleting them.

 

[Lucan]

Do you think they [Microsoft] would actually do as described? I can't imagine they would get away with it, and the negative publicity would be atrocious!

Microsoft were never bothered about negative publicity; they have had it in plenty but are so entrenched in the corporate world, and in the pre-loaded consumer PC business, that it hardly makes a dent in their business.

Is there the ability to run Linux in an "enterprise" environment?

Yes, I know that Google do for example, although I expect the finance department run their software on Windows because Linux is not strong in that area. The film industry also uses Linux heavily. Many corporates use Linux on their file servers, even if the workstations are Windows.

 

[bspahh]

Microsoft were never bothered about negative publicity; they have had it in plenty but are so entrenched in the corporate world, and in the pre-loaded consumer PC business, that it hardly makes a dent in their business.


Yes, I know that Google do for example, although I expect the finance department run their software on Windows because Linux is not strong in that area. The film industry also uses Linux heavily. Many corporates use Linux on their file servers, even if the workstations are Windows.

Commericial office software is cheaper than the cost of training new hires to use open source equivalents.

I work for a software company. We have an application which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. I hear more grumbles from our developers about Apple and Ubuntu than about Microsoft. Most of our users run Windows, so thats what I use for my work laptop.

With my own money, I recently bought a Chromebook, which can also run Linux applications. Chromebooks were great for my kids when they were at school, to avoid documents going missing on a laptop at home, on a USB key or computer at school. My mum is really happy with a Chromebook, to read email, browse WWW sites and watch TV.

Personally, I would avoid Ubuntu as they have form for releasing buggy code into the wild. Mint is based on Ubuntu, but has some of the rough edges cleaned up.

 

[Ediswan]

Commericial office software is cheaper than the cost of training new hires to use open source equivalents.

The last place I worked tried open source for office applications, including the mail server. Internally, that did work. However, after a few years, it was admitted (reluctantly) that the ongoing additional time consumed interacting with customers who used Microsoft was costing far more than a Microsoft subscription.

As to the original subject. My W10 laptop cannot be upgraded; I will likely keep it until W12 is available. The 'gaming' W10 desktop may get a TPM added and be upgraded to W11.

 

[adc82140]

Every upgrade that Windows 10 performs leaves thousands of megabytes of useless files on my computer once the upgrade has finished. Ideally, Windows could be programmed to delete all those temporary files on completion of the upgrade - but it does not. All those temporary files consume loads of memory and make Windows run slower and slower.

You can get utilities - some free, some paid for, mostly perfectly safe, that will search for and remove all the temporary / useless files - and your computer will thank you, and run faster. (Maybe not quite as fast as when it was brand new, but a lot faster than before you removed all the clutter.)

In addition, some utilities allow you to examine and edit the start menu. Edit to delay or stop items that you don't really need to start every time.
Also there may be some applications you have downloaded but find you never need or use. Consider deleting them.

I swear by the free version of CCleaner for this. My desktop PC is ancient, but is still lightning fast as I keep on top of the junk. My Windows gripe remains with the 2nd Tuesday of the month updates, which nick all the system resources and seem to take a boy 6 hours to install. That's where Linux wins out, the last updates took about 5 minutes to complete.

 

[Pinza-C55]

I'm a bit of a Luddite so I was running Windows 7 Pro until a year ago but I upgraded to Windows 10 home on both my PCs and a few days ago I upgraded to Windows 11 home. It runs well but finding stuff is baffling compared to W7 and the task bar is horrible.

 

[contrex]

Every upgrade that Windows 10 performs leaves thousands of megabytes of useless files on my computer once the upgrade has finished. Ideally, Windows could be programmed to delete all those temporary files on completion of the upgrade - but it does not. All those temporary files consume loads of memory and make Windows run slower and slower.

You can get utilities - some free, some paid for, mostly perfectly safe, that will search for and remove all the temporary / useless files - and your computer will thank you, and run faster. (Maybe not quite as fast as when it was brand new, but a lot faster than before you removed all the clutter.)

In addition, some utilities allow you to examine and edit the start menu. Edit to delay or stop items that you don't really need to start every time.
Also there may be some applications you have downloaded but find you never need or use. Consider deleting them.

There is a built-in Windows feature called Disk Cleanup which can delete files left by Windows upgrades. Also, I don't see how temporary files can make Windows 'run slower', unless the system drive is practically full, maybe, so that swap file size is severely limited.

I swear by the free version of CCleaner for this. My desktop PC is ancient, but is still lightning fast as I keep on top of the junk. My Windows gripe remains with the 2nd Tuesday of the month updates, which nick all the system resources and seem to take a boy 6 hours to install. That's where Linux wins out, the last updates took about 5 minutes to complete.

My Windows Update Tuesday updates take around two minutes maximum and that's unusual. There must be something badly wrong with your system. Even on my old 2008 Dell laptop with 2GB RAM they don't take more than about 5 minutes.

 

[PeterY]

I use windows 10 and because everything is running fine, I won't upgrade until I'm given no choice.

 

[bspahh]

There is a built-in Windows feature called Disk Cleanup which can delete files left by Windows upgrades. Also, I don't see how temporary files can make Windows 'run slower', unless the system drive is practically full, maybe, so that swap file size is severely limited.

If the size of temporary files from Windows update is an issue, I would get a bigger disk. A 1TB SSD costs ~ £50. If you get a USB caddy, then its easy to swap over the old and new drives, and you can keep the old one as a backup.

 

[Ediswan]

If the size of temporary files from Windows update is an issue, I would get a bigger disk. A 1TB SSD costs ~ £50. If you get a USB caddy, then its easy to swap over the old and new drives, and you can keep the old one as a backup.

For a temporary conection like that, a USB-SATA cable would suffice. Plus suitable disk cloning software of course.

 

[matt]

I'm still happily running Windows 10. My processor doesn't support 11 but it's still running as fast as ever helped by Windows being on a SSD.

 

[Bevan Price]

I swear by the free version of CCleaner for this. My desktop PC is ancient, but is still lightning fast as I keep on top of the junk. My Windows gripe remains with the 2nd Tuesday of the month updates, which nick all the system resources and seem to take a boy 6 hours to install. That's where Linux wins out, the last updates took about 5 minutes to complete.

You can change that to a date & time of your own choice.
Go to Settings / Windows Update / Advanced Options /Pause Updates, and select a date of your own choice.
Then you can either let the updates occur automatically at the new date, or you can manually choose "check for updates" at a time convenient for you, rather than let Microsoft choose that time.

 

[MasterSpenny]

My laptop can’t run Windows 11 yet, but at some point I will try to get it to 11. I don’t think that I will do it anytime soon though

 

[TheSmiths82]

Do you currently have an SSD? If you are still using a hard drive I would upgrade that to an SSD, it makes a massive difference. Also you really need 16GB of RAM for a comfortable experience these days, although 8GB is still OK for light use. Also if you do use an SSD I would check the health of the drive, like hard drives they do they get slower as they wear out or start running out of space. SSDs wear too but in a different way to mechanical hard drives.

I've been using Windows 11 on my desktop since it came out with no issues, and recently installed it my 7 year old ThinkPad X250 despite it not been officially supported it runs better than Windows 10 did on the same specs.

I do like Windows 11, but it doesn't really feel like I am in control of the operating system, it feels like Microsoft owns my PC and Linux isn't really an option as I need to run Adobe applications.

 

[JohnMcL7]

I swear by the free version of CCleaner for this. My desktop PC is ancient, but is still lightning fast as I keep on top of the junk. My Windows gripe remains with the 2nd Tuesday of the month updates, which nick all the system resources and seem to take a boy 6 hours to install. That's where Linux wins out, the last updates took about 5 minutes to complete.

You can't really claim your PC is lightning fast but takes six hours just to run the monthly updates, there's something very wrong there and it's certainly not normal. I have a number of old Windows 10 systems that are on their original installs and have no performance issues despite not running CCleaner plus the slowest Core-m systems can still run the monthly patches in a few minutes. Ccleaner has a use many years ago but I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole on modern systems.

 

[Harpers Tate]

Not that I recommend it (for reasons of design I noted above) I can say with direct experience of two machines here, that the quoted minimum spec. for Win11 can, quite easily, be worked around and Win11 can be used on some older machines. Not wanting to "risk" the upgrade on the two machines I use most frequently, I forced a Win11 install on the two older machines I still have for evaluation and they are both happily running Win11. The older of those laptops is a series 2 I5 without the security requirement that Win11 supposedly requires. Sure - it's not just a matter of hitting the install button; that will refuse to complete. There is a workround that involves changing certain pre-requisites including editing the registry and tweaking the BIOS. If those tweaks are made then the refusal screen in the installer becomes a Warning that you can choose to ignore - and proceed. Caveat: I did this on two older, non-compliant machines, both already running the the current version of Win10. They both worked just fine - but it's only a small sample.

 

[najaB]

Is Windows 11 a better version than Windows 10, and would updating to Windows 11 improve my laptop's speed?

It's different, but I wouldn't say that it's better. At least not yet. Typically Windows editions get 'good' by the third or fourth major update.

Every upgrade that Windows 10 performs leaves thousands of megabytes of useless files on my computer once the upgrade has finished. Ideally, Windows could be programmed to delete all those temporary files on completion of the upgrade - but it does not. All those temporary files consume loads of memory and make Windows run slower and slower.

Files only consume memory if they're loaded. Temporary junk that's left behind only affects system speed if you're still using a HDD for your primary system drive (due to fragmentation). A SSD that's 20% full will perform exactly as fast as one that's 80% full.