Are you ready for Win 11?

[Keyrock]

Out of curiosity, is there anything tied to Win11 as an incentive to upgrade? In the past, Microsoft has sometimes tied a new version of DirectX to a new version of Windows in an effort to force incentivize people to buy the new Windows. Is there a DirectX 13 or DirectX 12 Super Duper tied to Win11?

[Sarex]

10 hours ago, Sarex said:

They already fixed the taskbar icon bug.

Nvm, seems like it's intermittent.

54 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

Out of curiosity, is there anything tied to Win11 as an incentive to upgrade? In the past, Microsoft has sometimes tied a new version of DirectX to a new version of Windows in an effort to force incentivize people to buy the new Windows. Is there a DirectX 13 or DirectX 12 Super Duper tied to Win11?

Nothing really outside of better multimonitor support. They are forcing it by shorter support for win 10.

[Zoraptor]

There was DirectStorage which should have been a decent boost, but apparently it's coming to Win10 as well now as of July.

So that leaves AutoHDR and- lol- xbox app integration as win11 exclusives gaming wise at least. Otherwise... it can run android apps? Yet another GUI reorganisation?

Not really much, but then most of its features probably weren't originally intended to be a full OS iteration and that was forced by the hardware requirements, ie they didn't want win10A for old computers and win10B for new ones so we got Win11 instead.

Edited November 23, 2021 by Zoraptor

[Jozape]

x86 emulation for ARM is limited to Windows 11. Most people probably don't care about that

[Blodhemn]

On 11/2/2021 at 7:03 PM, ComradeYellow said:

Gaming is certainly better because it now has built in software to reduce hardware usage freeing up resources to improve gameplay.

Would that be Game Mode? I thought win 10 had it. I just went from win 7-11, and like it for the most part. Some plusses and minuses, nothing major. Also massively upgraded hardware, so everything is snappy and I have available memory for days. Definitely the only good thing going for me.

[majestic]

Is there any way I convince this terrible looking operating system to look like Windows 7, or maybe at least like Windows 10? If I wanted a MacOS taskbar, I'd get myself an overpriced piece of crap from Apple. This is... this... why? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, MICROSOFT?

[Pidesco]

51 minutes ago, majestic said:

Is there any way I convince this terrible looking operating system to look like Windows 7, or maybe at least like Windows 10? If I wanted a MacOS taskbar, I'd get myself an overpriced piece of crap from Apple. This is... this... why? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, MICROSOFT?

This might help.

[Sarex]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

Is there any way I convince this terrible looking operating system to look like Windows 7, or maybe at least like Windows 10? If I wanted a MacOS taskbar, I'd get myself an overpriced piece of crap from Apple. This is... this... why? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, MICROSOFT?

It's not that bad. The biggest thing that triggers me is the new clock.

[majestic]

8 minutes ago, Sarex said:

It's not that bad.

No, it's worse.

The hell is that supposed to be?

[Sarex]

Same as Windows 10 just in the middle. You get used to it pretty quick. Although I removed the search and desktop switcher icons. When you update to the latest version the at a glance icon will move to the left.

[Bartimaeus]

49 minutes ago, Sarex said:

You get used to it pretty quick.

I've been using Windows 10 for a while now, and I still think the start menu on it is garbage compared to Windows 7. Feel free to take a bet on whether I'll "get used to it pretty quick" when/if I ever upgrade to Windows 11, .

[Wormerine]

2 hours ago, Sarex said:

Same as Windows 10 just in the middle.

The first thing I did was move it to the left. I do miss tiles from Windows 10 (I had everything nicely organised) but "pinned" is enough for my every day needs (which is calculator, microsoft office, steam and gog).

[ShadySands]

First thing I did was move it back to the left too.

[Pidesco]

I'm now using a 49" screen at work with windows 10, and having everything in the middle would be kind of a meaningful option, at least.

[Totally not Gorgon]

What do i need it for exactly.

Just turned down the upgrade because it would mean spending hours and days removing all the bloatware from search and what's her name, the Bing lady. Corona ?.. Cortana. 

[Blodhemn]

I have 2 recurring bugs on Win11. The most frequent is that audio will randomly cut to just the left channel. I play music daily so this happens every week. The other problem is related to Chrome, which just quits working on occasion, as if I were low on ram, but I have 32gb ram.

Sidenote: audio quality in general is worse than my 15 year old system. Is tech using worse components? My mobo is $320 and the onboard sound is pure garbage still. My old soundcard had coax out - new soundcards widely use optical instead - coax is better, and may be the reason why my new beast of a system has worse audio quality than my ancient system. Disappointing as I can't use my old card to check as it has a now obsolete connector.

 

[Humanoid]

Digital output, whether it be coaxial or optical, means you're bypassing the onboard audio processing altogether and the audio quality will therefore be entirely dependent on what you have connected up at the other end of the cable. The entire notion of a sound card is made irrelevant by using a digital interconnect (other than sometimes you need to add the physical connector for cheap motherboards that don't have an optical out).

[Blodhemn]

I tried HDMI through GPU, which I thought passes onboard audio through, and it indeed sounded terrible. Next I put in a Soundblaster Z, used optical and while it's clearly better than GPU HDMI out, it's clearly inferior to the old Audigy 2 ZS coaxial out. Maybe I'll pick up a newer card at some point, but I doubt it'll make much difference. The ASUS cards have coaxial, but they are notorious for audio cutouts with newer versions of Windows. Seems like there's no great option for high quality audio anymore, which is just bizarre. 

[Humanoid]

If any of those solutions sounds terrible, it's not the fault of the device outputting the digital signal - after all, they're just outputting a stream of 0s and 1s. It's the device on the other end that's doing all the heavy lifting and which determines audio quality. Buying another sound card would be throwing good money after bad, unless you use one of its analogue outputs.

The primary role of a sound card is to take a digital signal and convert it to analogue (i.e. a DAC) and then amplify that signal to a level suitable for output (i.e. an amplifier). If you simply use it to output a digital signal, which optical, digital coax, USB and HDMI all are, then you're using exactly none of that functionality.

[Blodhemn]

Yeah, which is why I thought I could kill two birds with one stone with HDMI, but no, the sound was brittle lo-fi for some reason. Soundblaster Z optical isn't bad, but it's not quite as solid as the old coaxial. Old setup had all sound spectrum represented, plenty of headroom kind of sound and as much low end as you could possibly need. Now it sounds more scooped, missing some low mid warmth and upper mid sparkle. I dunno, maybe it even simply comes down to Creative drivers or the way modern Windows handles audio. Who knows? It's disappointing, for sure.