In-place Upgrade To Windows 11
Having written the article Five Reasons Why Windows 11 Sucks back in February you would be forgiven for asking why I bothered to install Windows 11 at all. But then, one needs to experiment and since I have five or six modern machines at my disposal, it was a question of suck it and see, so to speak. I held off upgrading my main gaming machine for a long time because I hadn’t decided how I was going to carry out the upgrade. My normal path is a clean install following a data backup but quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle of reinstalling programs and reconfiguring my game installations. In fact, some paid programs will see a newly installed Windows as a different machine requiring me to contact tech support of the said program, blah blah. So instead, having been notified that my machine was eligible, I did an in-place upgrade which took about half an hour and everything worked out fine, much to my relief.
Windows 11 – Niggling Issues
For the time being, I’m leaving Windows 11 at default desktop settings with the Taskbar centered, although I may eventually install Start 11 from Stardock because I’m entitled to a discount since I already own Start 10. I still don’t understand why Microsoft decided to fiddle with the Taskbar so much, in that you can’t drag and drop programs, right-clicking the taskbar only brings up Taskbar Properties and Settings has decided to play hide and seek. Anyway, I fixed this by right-clicking Task Manager and Settings and pinned them manually.
I also noticed that Windows Defender wouldn’t open with a message saying that it wasn’t linked to an app, which was easily solved by opening Power Shell as admin and pasting this line into it:
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.SecHealthUI -AllUsers | Reset-AppxPackage
I also used a trick to hide the shortcut arrows on the desktop with a couple of registry hacks which I downloaded from Major Geeks which revealed another issue in that I couldn’t open the .reg files as they had also lost their associations. In the end, I backed up the entire registry and imported the .reg file directly, thus getting rid of the pesky arrows.
Windows 11 Performance
One of the first things I noticed following the upgrade is how quickly the desktop appears from a cold boot. It’s impressively rapid and can be measured in seconds. Mind you, that will always vary from one machine to another, depending on the hardware configuration, and with my specs, I would expect nothing less:
- Ryzen 5600X CPU
- 32GB RAM
- Western Digital Black 500GB NVMe
- RX 5700 XT GPU
On the whole, I’m very pleased with the upgrade, especially since it was free of charge and the fact that Windows 10 support (End Of Life) ends in October 2025.
Besides, Windows 11 will bring new features such as the rumoured Explorer With Tabs and other UI enhancements in version 22H2 which is said to arrive in the middle of this year. I’ve already played with Widgets and other features, so I’m back in familiar territory by tweaking Windows where I can.
Maybe Windows 11 doesn’t suck quite as much as I previously thought!
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What took you so long? I’ve enjoyed it since early beta days. 🙂
Not that surprising 🙂
I think I remember you didn’t like Windows10 either?
Not sure what you said about Windows 8 !…
Nice post though. Great stuff.
I’ve always liked Windows 10, Colin, but Windows 8 was a shambles.
Windows 11 is very good with some nice touches and I held off because I wasn’t sure about doing an in-place upgrade which, in the end worked out just fine.
What do you think of the Hibernate being removed from Power Options / Advanced? I’ve been enjoying not being able to stop the mouse from wakening the laptop from sleep after following every rule in the book. I went to set it to Hibernate instead, only to find Hibernate isn’t there anymore in the sense that one cannot have it to automatically hibernate on its own.
I tried 11 and my Basilisk X Hyperspeed Mouse couldn’t find the sweet spot on a 3-inch window and my glorious Modular Keyboard went crazy that fried. Went back to 10 imediatley.
I will be one of the holdouts for Windows 11, I will keep Windows 10 going as long as it is supported. I also have some computers that I would have to bypass Windows 11 requirements which may not be supported at some point.
I had Windows 11 on a new laptop till yesterday but had to return it because of the thrilling & persistent bluescreen(s).
There was no way I could stop the mouse from waking up the computer so I thought I’ll do the Hibernate instead.
Going to the Power Options / Advanced, I had the great joy of finding out there was no Option to automatically Hibernate any longer because Microsoft removed it. Hard to understand why they do things like that. Not impressed!