Star letter
I’m normally someone who likes the very latest version of Windows installed, so when the opportunity arose to try out Windows 11, I was happy to be a guinea pig. I have to say that the experience was, on the whole, a smooth one. The new font is lovely to look at and very clear to read. The new sound effects are subtle. The wallpapers are beautiful. There have been a large number of improvements in many areas, most notably the Settings screen.
Everything I tried just worked with no issues whatsoever – in spite of the fact that my PC is running a seventh-generation Intel Core i5 and, therefore, technically, not within the spec for Windows 11. There was just one fly in the ointment: the Start screen.
I tried to like it. I pinned my most-used programs to it and put up with the fact that I’d have to search for others that were used less often, but after a few weeks I did something I’ve never done before: I went back to a previous version of Windows.
I can’t think that I’m a very exceptional user, but the fact is that I have a lot of programs pinned to my Start screen and I have them nicely arranged into groups: one for Office apps, one for photography apps, one for video tools, one for music tools and one for utilities. This is easy to achieve with Windows 10 and works for me. It’s all very well pinning my mostused apps to the Windows 11 Start menu, but that means that when I want a lesser-used program, I often struggle to find it.
To give you an example, I like to store RAW images in a separate directory tree to the JPEG images so, after I’ve downloaded a batch of photos, I run RichCopy to move the RAW images. Only when it came time to do this, I couldn’t remember the name of RichCopy and it took several minutes to work it out. By that logic I should be pinning the least-used apps to the Start menu!
The really annoying thing is that Microsoft is being dictatorial about it. For the first couple of versions you could use a registry hack to revert to the Windows 10 menu, but that option has now gone. It’s all very well for an OS to be beautiful, but it has to be functional. So, I’m afraid I won’t be reinstalling Windows 11 until either I’m given the option to retain my Windows 10 Start menu, or some third party gives me a realistic alternative. John Williams