TRADE CHAT Windows 11 is here, and we’ll just have to like it
THE GREAT DAY has finally come. As I’m writing, it’s early October and Windows 11 is here! Was it worth the wait? It’s hard to say on this showing, though our experiences with the preview builds, running in various virtual machines and on spare hardware,
Take former MaximumPC editor, Alan Dexter. His attempt to upgrade from 10 to 11 ended up with a non-functional chimera, a blend of two operating systems that was far from ideal. It had Windows 10’s taskbar, but Windows 11’s rounded-cornered windows, and we dread to think what Geiger-esque blasphemy the Start menu would have presented had he been able to pop it up. If ever there was an argument that Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with a facelift, that’s it right there. Windows 10.5 is possible, you just wouldn’t want to try to use it.
Elsewhere, the wisdom of carrying out a clean installation rather than an in-place upgrade has been borne out. Known issues include compatibility problems with Intel’s Killer network drivers; a memory leak in the File Explorer; the Start menu search bar not working; Oracle Virtualbox VMs not starting when Windows 11 is the host; the empty widgets board; and Vietnamese web browser Côc Côc (hello readers in Vietnam!) refusing to play ball. More niggles are bound to be uncovered soon.
Then there’s gaming performance. Microsoft’s virtualization-based security features host security apps in an area of memory isolated from the rest of the OS so malware can’t touch it. This appears to have a deleterious effect on game performance, reducing frame rates by as much as 28 percent, according to tests carried out by our friends at PC Gamer. Games such as FarCry6 are less affected, but anyone who is playing Metro Exodus, HorizonZeroDawn, or ShadowoftheTombRaider should watch out. VBS is only switched on by default if your PC is from a big OEM, such as HP or Dell. A fresh install on your custom machine’s SSD won’t apply it unless you want to, and upgrading from Windows 10 won’t either.
New OSes always have teething problems, and we’re encouraged to upgrade quickly as the new version is always better for gamers. That may be true, and we fell for it with Windows XP and Thief:Deadly Shadows’ OS exclusivity, but we’re still not sure what we got for the price of the upgrade (apart from a decent OS that was superior to Windows Me in every way).
However, Windows 11 must be the first time an OS has launched without many of the features that were used to make the case for having it in the first place. While Auto HDR and DirectStorage appear to be in the release build, Android App support is still absent, even from the Windows Insider dev channel, home of the newest ideas and flakiest builds.
Everything else feels as if it could have been added to Windows 10—we didn’t need a new OS just for greater Teams integration and an easier way to toggle between virtual desktops. We didn’t need to be put through the gauntlet of TPM and VBS just to get a panel of widgets, something Apple removed from its OS with 10.15 Catalina.
Windows 11 will probably be fine in about a year’s time. Coming after Windows 8, version 10 had an easier time of it at launch but has bedded down into such a wellliked and stable OS that whatever followed was always going to look like a new Vista in comparison. Windows 10 was meant to be the last version of Windows, but now we have a new one, and we might as well make the best of it.
Whatever followed Windows 10 was always going to look like a new Vista in comparison
Ian Evenden’s first PC was a 286 with 640kb of memory. And who could need more than that?