Why wait?
I figured if I’m going to have to take the plunge someday, why not do it when I have downtime. And today, I have downtime. So much, in fact, that I decided to opt in for the update that’s been rearing its head in the lower right of my task bar for the past two months. Windows 11 22H2.
And after all that trepidation, I find it runs smoothly with mostly the same look and feel of Windows 10.
So why the wait?
Well, I’ve actually been making a lot of updates to my PC this year. It started with an NVM M.2 drive. It’s super fast, but not as fast as I expected. You see, it’s simply a replacement for a SATA4 SSD, which was fast enough. I figured this might be faster, but it’s hard to tell the difference.
Anyway, with the new M.2, I’ve decided to move all the programs that were installed on a separate HDD (platter type, not silicon) to the M.2. Everything seems to launch faster, which is nice, but really, that’s about it. There just isn’t enough opportunity to appreciate the speed gains.
Getting back to the OS, Windows 11 seems pretty stable, which is reassuring, but it also seems to have slowed down the launch speed of my apps. Before biting the bullet, I spent about two weeks with the new M.2 and made sure everything worked properly. During this time, most of my heavier programs (Trados, memoQ, Phrase, large PPT files, etc.) loaded in one or two seconds. Now, on Windows 11, everything seems to take at least five seconds, if not longer.
The one noticeable difference with W11 is the Start button. It no longer brings up the large array of apps I have installed. You have to click again to get those to show up, and they only show up in a scrollable list. I rather liked the tiled display but I’d rather not rely on a third-party app to accomplish that. It’s not that essential.
The other noticeable difference is that the taskbar icons are centered by default. The latest update 22H2 gives you the option of docking it to the left (not vertically, just left justified), which is how it was in W12.
A nice feature, for me at least, is the ease with which you can snap your open windows on the display. You drag it to the top center of the display and a drop down with different tiling patterns appears. Choose the one you want and you are prompted to specify the other apps you want to occupy in the pattern. Since I have three monitors, I usually rearrange my open windows based on the type of job I’m working on. A reference heavy job with multiple files to look at go on the right monitor, while my CAT and dictionary app occupy the center monitor. My general work related stuff like email and such occupy the left monitor, along with my main desktop.
Other than that, the corners of the dialogs are rounded, and everything looks softer than before, which is easy on the eyes and just the right amount of change to remind you that you’re on a new OS.
I’ll post more as I find out the inner workings of W11.