WINDOWS 11: The Review!
so Windows 11 has been out since October 5th I've been using it for about a week now and I have some thoughts the first thing you'll notice when you boot up Windows 11 is the new design I think it looks good but that's something that's going to boil down to personal preference Microsoft has opted for a sort of frosty glassy look for this version of windows and this is most noticeable in some of the darker themes you can really get a sense of the difference the transparency effect makes if you open something like the new settings app and then toggle the effect on and off while using a darker theme it just gives everything a fresh vibe even though transparency effects are nothing new in the world of windows which has had them since vista
if I'm not mistaken in terms of customization you can go to settings personalization themes and select one of the modern themes presets or you can open the contrast options and select one of these if you're looking for more of a retro look or if you need them for accessibility reasons you also get some new wallpapers and if a particular theme has more than the one you can toggle them by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting a new desktop background for the lock screen you can set a single image or you can use spotlight as per usual and one thing that I noticed on the lock screen is that windows now gives you a password hint in case you get it wrong just once now I can't exactly remember
if this is a hint that I set for myself when I created my current password or if something else is going on in the background but it's there and it is a correct association for a particular portion of my password windows and menus now have rounded corners which a lot of people say is reminiscent of mac os although I personally feel like it's more reminiscent of windows 7 and vista I guess it just depends on
how you look at it icons have also been redesigned although I should note that we've already seen this particular design in a windows 10 update earlier this year they're now much more colourful which should make it a bit easier to tell them apart at a glance, for the most part, this is just optics but I do want to point out that the folder icon no longer shows the contents of the folder like it used to in windows 10 so this might even have some impact on productivity all the folders
now look the same with the only difference being between empty folders and folders that have content the difference is very very subtle and I can only guess that they did this for the sake of uniformity another thing that will almost certainly catch your eyes as soon as you boot up windows 11 is the new start menu which is now centred by default alongside icons for programs that are pinned to the taskbar
now when I first saw this start menu in the leaked version of windows 11 my initial thought was that it looked much less robust than the one in windows 10 and honestly, I thought that they would change some things by the time they release the os to the public however visually at least they really haven't aside from the added search bar the start menu looks pretty much identical to the one I tested last summer the one that I got by default was pretty bare-boned i had my search bar on the top followed by my pinned apps and recommended section a user button on the bottom left and a power button on the bottom right however if you open up settings and then navigate to personalization start folders you can actually add several links including settings file explorer documents downloads etc
you can also push the start button and menu back to the left and to do so you need to go to personalization taskbar task bar behaviours and then in this little dropdown menu select left that will not only move the start button to its well-known position but all these other icons as well in this version of the start menu Microsoft is ditching tiles and replacing them with pinned apps which is a concept that does serve its purpose however also has some shortcomings in comparison to what we previously had just to give you a couple of examples I for one would like to organize my apps in different groups or at least create larger icons for the ones I use more frequently but as of now neither of these things are an option you do have the option to move pinned apps to the top or just move them around by dragging and dropping them to a certain position but in terms of an organization that's pretty much it for
now by this point, i've already mentioned settings several times and as you can tell the settings app has been completely redesigned as well right off the bat you'll notice that settings no longer have a home page you have 11 main sections on the left and the contents of those sections appear on the right since the system section is first on the list the moment you open the settings app you'll be presented with a variety of system settings on the right these sections also may display something Microsoft is calling hero controls which basically include things like frequently used settings information associated with the particular section etc one thing that I find extremely useful is the new breadcrumb feature which makes it very easy to know exactly where you are within the settings because of this and the fact that the main sections are always displayed on the left I just find it so much easier to navigate through this settings app as opposed to its Windows 10 counterpart another
a new feature in windows 11 are snap layouts if you hover over the resize button you'll be presented with many snap presets which allow you to pin a window to a particular part of the screen now fundamentally snapping is nothing new to windows however these new layouts do expand on what was already a pretty useful feature in previous versions of the os, for example, pinning four different windows to four separate corners can easily be done in windows 10 by manually snapping the windows to the desired corners but having three vertically-aligned windows would require a bit more work you would first need to snap two windows to two separate sides separate them in the middle and then manually position and resize the window you want in the middle with snap layouts you now have a preset for this particular use case which makes the
the whole process so much easier furthermore let's say you have one of these layouts set up and for whatever reason, you decide to jump to your desktop windows will now minimize your layout to a group on the taskbar so when you decide to go back to it you can simply click on the group and continue where you left off, in my opinion, it's a great little quality of life feature and I really think Microsoft did a good job with it game DVR works pretty much exactly like it did on windows 10. some of the settings for it are organized a bit differently but other than that everything looks and feels very familiar I was really hoping that the screen recording capabilities would be improved but unfortunately they haven't now don't get me wrong game DVR is still serviceable but it still cannot record within regular windows or on the desktop and the resolution still maxes out at 1080p
which I just find so disappointing especially given the fact that Windows 11 was said to be designed with the next generation of gaming in mind the Microsoft store has been substantially redesigned in windows 11 and reportedly this new design will soon be available on Windows 10 as well according to Microsoft opening the store and navigating between pages should be around 35 faster than before now I don't know if it's exactly 35 per cent faster but there certainly are some improvements here Microsoft has added some new animations which just make things feel smoother and I gotta say that my user experience has been a pleasant one so far there's also a new pop-up tool or widget for when you're installing an app from outside the store
so let's say you're on a website and you want to install an app from it if you see a little get from microsoft badge you can click on it and that will open up a sort of mini strip down microsoft store window instead of the full store app now there is one thing that is currently missing from the microsoft store and it's actually something that was a huge headline feature during the launch event but i'll get to that a bit later first let's talk about widgets okay so this is something that i played around with over the past week mostly for testing purposes and i gotta say that in this state i really didn't find much use for it but i do see potential and i'll tell you what i mean wouldn't it be great if one of the widgets you could add here was a clipboard or imagine if you had something like a mini file explorer that you could access without having to minimize the window you're currently working in imagine having a music player or a note widget well right now you get none of that instead you get a really limited number of widgets that at least for me have very little value for productivity and the newsfeed that apparently pays absolutely no regards to the interest that you specify in the settings
now you do get a nifty internet search bar that i would actually love if only it respected my default web browser settings which it doesn't so i am hopeful that microsoft will build upon this because i really do feel like it can be transformed into something that a lot of people would actually find useful as of now it's not performance okay so as shameful as it is for me to admit this is probably going to be the most lackluster category of this video so for a deeper dive into performance i'm going to have to direct you to more technical sources unfortunately the equipment i have or lack there of doesn't really allow me to engage in side-by-side benchmarks i only have one high-end computer now what i could have done was do some benchmarks prior to installing windows 11 and then do the same thing after i completed the upgrade but i didn't in any case what i can say is this as it usually goes with new versions of windows at launch there is potential for performance tips here amd has reported that the company is working with microsoft to fix a couple of bugs that may slow down amd processors up to 15 on the other hand
we also have reports that something called vbs short for virtualization based security is causing performance dips as well although i do find it kind of hard to understand whether vbs is causing the worst case scenarios that are being reported or some other unknown factor from my own experience and i use my pc almost exclusively for productivity and gaming everything that runs on windows 10 runs pretty smoothly on windows 11. as for gaming i played some cyberpunk 2077 gta 5 and shadow of the tomb raider and i can pretty confidently report that i haven't seen anything in the realm of a 15 performance dip even though i do have a ryzen 5900x which according to amd is currently susceptible to reduced performance bottom line is if your performance reduction tolerance is equal to zero you might want to wait until things get optimized and fixed which brings us to quirks and there are some here for example in windows 11 you currently cannot drag and drop files into programs that are pinned to the taskbar i mean sure it's usually not the recommended way of importing files into programs but we all do
it it's just fast and easy especially for something like video or image editing i don't know whose idea this was or what the reasoning behind it was but if they don't fix it like really soon this is going to be a problem moving on right clicking on the taskbar now brings up only one option and that is to go to taskbar settings which sort of reminds me of what apple used to do on the iphone and still continues to do to some extent where they would refuse to put certain controls on quick access menus instead in order to utilize them you would have to go deep into the system settings and i guess that the reasoning behind that was that they didn't want people to do something by accident i don't know this just feels like an unnecessary limitation and i really hope that they change it soon and by the way as for the task manager you can access it by using the standard control shift escape hotkey combination or by right clicking on the start button and selecting it from there i already mentioned how the widgets app refuses to respect my default browser settings i don't want to come off as overly negative so i'll mention just one more quirk the options on context menus just don't feel like they were fully thought through i find it very inconvenient that properties are no longer on the bottom of the menu and the fact that i have to switch to a second menu when i just want to rename a file would practically drive me crazy]
if i didn't have the habit of using the f2 hot key the two potentially game-changing features that i was looking forward to the most in windows 11 are not available at launch and i'm talking about direct storage and android apps now i already made a video in which i talked about both of these things so i'm not going to waste too much time here but since this is a practice i really do not like i just have to say one thing stop advertising products with features that are coming soon i don't want it to come soon i want it to come now all right give it to me right now giggity so after all that the big question is should you upgrade and as always i'm going to be 100 direct with you if you use your pc for productivity like video editing or image editing then my answer would be not now i mean just the fact that you cannot drag and drop files into programs that are pinned to the task bar as a deal breaker if you're a gamer who's afraid of experiencing any sort of dips in performance from the miner to the major a good rule of thumb is to avoid being an early adopter and the same thing applies here just wait
it out a couple of months and look at your options once things get optimized which I'm practically certain that they will on the other hand if you're someone who uses their computer for web browsing media consumption or maybe just a casual game here and there or if you're somebody who just likes to test out new software then if you have a compatible system yeah back up your files and give it a try if you like it that's great and if you don't you do have a 10 10-day period to roll back anyway I hope that you found some value in this video feel free to leave your input in the comments below and subscribe if you haven't already thanked you so much for watching and as always stay strong
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