Vocal Voices

I read from an article on the latest W11 update that:

The Start menu now has folders and has an adjustable pinned area, which should help with keeping apps pinned to the Start menu neatly organized.

If this is correctly executed then it is the removal of one of the last blockers to my move. The final part is the quick launch area on the Taskbar. Along with launch menu folders I use it as my daily Go To place. When they removed Taskbar from W11 it killed that.

I know I can get an add on to put it back, but I have always hated moving to a new Windows and having to use an add on.

I will go play with my Virtual machines and see how it might work for me.

It is a more than a decade long climb down from the Windows 8 madness. Hopefully they will complete it and give me back features which I truly use.

They can keep all their fancy frippery for themselves. I just want the fundamental features which make windows so indispensable.

I never lost the Taskbar, it was always there but it was centred. I didn't like that so hunted for a reg tweak to sort it. All my regularly used programs are on it. Still have the systray. Hardly ever use the pinned area of the Start menu. It just has a few things that I might use and saves a bit of time scrolling through the All apps list. My desktop has no, not one, app, shortcut, hot link or whatever. It is clean, unlike my real desktop.

What bugs me about these updates is that they very often override my personal settings and I have to go into settings to get them back my way. I have no use for all the bells, whistles and toys so I kill them.

Sorry I should have been more specific. Custom taskbars or folders mounted on the taskbar. My preferred solution to the W8 start menu insanity. In W11 they ripped it out. Yes I could install a patch to override the MS BS, but I don't want to. If they have rowed back on folders in the start menu, then custom taskbars may yet come back.

I'll continue to wait and buy hardware that makes W10 fly like the wind. W11 will, for me, remain where it belongs. In the corner covered in barge pole marks.

BEWARE of this latest full update!!! Windows 11 22H2 Oct 1 2022. (0x80242016)

My laptop updated overnight then turned itself off. Ik think it was trying to restart but failed. When I turned it back on all I got was the welcome screen then a black screen - 100% black - no toolbars or icons, nothing. The only keyboard stokes that worked were Ctrl+Alt+Del and from there I could get to Task Manager, but from there nothing worked, turning things off and turning back on again. I tried to run explorer.exe - nothing, regedit - nothing. Tried Win+Ctrl+Shift+B to kick in the graphics card - nothing.

Thankfully I have my old laptop so was able to get online for clues but none of them worked. Most of them seem to be for machines that upgraded from Win 10. So I tried the old hard shutdown and then restart. If you do it three times and turn off again before it boots it now goes into Startup Diagnostic mode, but that did not help, it used to go to troubleshooting but no more, so I gave it a rest for a while

I then tried the three times hard shutdown thing again but this time hitting some known key combinations before the Startup Diagnostics completed and believe it or not the Enter key got me into troubleshooting. From there I went to Advanced Options and uninstalled the latest features update and here I am, back again.

This laptop is only a few months old and a true Win 11 machine not one with an upgrade from Win 10, and all the drivers are up to date. I have reported this to Microsoft so await their reply.

More frustrations....

I rolled back to Win 11 21H2 to get rid of the problems mentioned above... or so I thought. I now find that a right click on the Start button does nothing when once I got a small menu with such things as Power, Run, Search, Device manager etc. Now nothing. It was not used very often, but handy to have.

I have searched for fixes and a lot of them come down to reg hacks from random people, so a bit of a no-no. I do not mind altering the binary data numbers from 0 to 1 or vice versa to turn things on and off but adding new strings and D-Words are out. The eventual easy fix was found in a blog. Go to a Win 11 computer without the latest update. Find the WinX folder and copy the Group 1, 2 and 3 folders within it. Now go to the broken computer. Go to WinX and rename those same folders as .old. All mine had the date stamp of 01 Oct 22 (the damned update). Now copy in the folders from the old computer. Restart and done. The folders I copied in have a date stamp of 12 Nov 21.

Another bug is this, and it is in Edge - also updated. When I have tabs open they have name titles: BBC News; Sky News; VV Index etc. When I hover over them I got a pop-up telling me the exact same thing! Why? I know what BBC News and VV Index are! However, the kiddies have been playing so instead of just getting a useless pop-up I now get a small image of the BBC News page or VV Index. WHY? WHAT THE HELL FOR?

Give it a rest Microsoft!

Making me happier with W10 and once a year updates.....

Feel your pain.