Obviously, back up all the data you wish to save (data in the form of documents, images, music files-- not installed software). This should be occuring ANYWAY but you should definitely do it now.

Also, make sure you have all the installers and any proofs-of-license that certain software may need.

I still prefer clean installs over in place upgrades but since Windows 10 in place upgrades are good enough 99% of the time.
I've lost count of how many machines I've upgraded at work, typically from within Windows 10 and it's always worked well.
But if was for my personal use I'd probably boot of USB, just because its a bit closer to the clean install.

I would go with 23H2, bit more streamline rather than having to get security updates that'll just get superseded once you do install 23H2.

Is Win11 just a re-skin of Win10? yep
Do I love Win11? nope
Does it do it's job enough that I don't hate it? yeh. Although for my home computers I'll probably only upgrade when replacing the computer outright.

I did the upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, and then used this guide from Ars Technica to remove some of the most egregious annoyances. It's worked pretty well for me so far, although I am really not a fan of the new UI sounds in Windows 11. They're supposedly meant to be less mentally intrusive while working, but when I connect or disconnect a device or have a system event I want it to interrupt me!

Zup wrote on 2024-08-05, 18:05:

• What upgrading procedure should I perform? (Installing from zero is not an option) I mean, should I use setup.exe from Windows 10, or it would be better to reboot the computer into the installation USB?

I think the part in bold is the only way to do an in-place upgrade. Booting from the USB stick and selecting 'upgrade' will ask you to run Setup from your existing OS. At least this has been my experience.

Zup wrote on 2024-08-05, 18:05:

[*]As I said, I marked a bunch of options in Rufus. Are this options honored when upgrading or do they only work when booting from the USB?

I believe they are honored.

Zup wrote on 2024-08-05, 18:05:

[*]Windows PC health check seems only to check the general requirements for Windows 11. Is there any way to know if all the devices are supported in Windows 11?

Most Windows 10 drivers should work in Windows 11.

Zup wrote on 2024-08-05, 18:05:

[*]Is Windows 11 23H2 a good start point, or is it better to get another release for upgrade?

I think it's a good option and mature enough; I just installed it on a new PC myself not too long ago.

How did this work out? Is is true that windows 11 actually has to connect to micro$oft to work and can't be used offline?

ncmark wrote on 2024-09-07, 12:40:

How did this work out? Is is true that windows 11 actually has to connect to micro$oft to work and can't be used offline?

You can bypass that, but they make it more and more difficult to bypass. 24H2 is the hardest...

ncmark wrote on 2024-09-07, 12:40:

How did this work out? Is is true that windows 11 actually has to connect to micro$oft to work and can't be used offline?

You dont need to be online for it to work and you can install it offline (with some basic workarounds), but once a network connection is made it will be calling home constantly to tell microsoft everything about you and sell that data to whoever wants to buy it. I'm totally sure that microsoft is not like the other big tech companies and nobody will steal all that data in the future.

They won't sell it - will just be part of the next data breach

I appreciate the irony here. I am on a computer website bashing computers. Back into the 90s I was so into computers - always upgrading hardware - more memory, faster processors, bigger drives, etc. Not sure what happened. Actually I DO no what happened - it started with XP

ncmark wrote on 2024-09-07, 13:08:

I appreciate the irony here. I am on a computer website bashing computers. Back into the 90s I was so into computers - always upgrading hardware - more memory, faster processors, bigger drives, etc. Not sure what happened. Actually I DO no what happened - it started with XP

What happened is the same thing that happened to many of us:
1) You got older.
2) Hardware innovation massively slowed down, particularly after the C2D/C2Q.
And I don't just mean processors, but peripherals, accessories, etc. Some entire categories of peripherals (e.g. removable storage or computer-centric speakers) are entirely dead. Same with networking - gigabit Ethernet became ubiquitous on home networks around the time of the C2, and here we are today, and there are still few good multi-gig wired options for home/enthusiast equipment, it's all about the wifi (for the record, it sickens me to see an enthusiast motherboard with built-in wifi). Monitors have stagnated, in part because of Windows' traditionally poor support for scaling. Etc.
3) Windows operating system development went sideways after 7. I still think Vista was perfectly defensible for old enthusiasts - it made you get new hardware, it looked cooler and modern, etc. But... 8 went nuts with the start screen/metro stuff, then 10/11 have just been weirdly redesigning the interface for no good reason, adding more and more cloud/etc, and they've just been throwing web technologies into everything which is one reason that Win11 on boot guzzles like 5 gigs of RAM when XP guzzled 100-150 megs. (
4) Software innovation basically ended for the Windows platform. Productivity software has laughably low hardware requirements and relatively few improvements from version to version. Less and less creativity in games - it's just new iterations of the same franchises. And in fact, some franchises went away for 10+ years and now are back (Age of Empires is one). Some are not back (hey EA, is Command & Conquer or, for that matter, SimCity perpetually doomed in your graveyard of mediocrity?). New problems are being solved using the operating system for the 2010s - Google Chrome, Chromium, and Electron.

Basically, the enshittification of the PC platform starting, really, from the day Google Chrome shipped and became the new platform for everything new.

Windows 11 will happen for me in one of two cases.

1. When software I use stops working in Windows 10, and that's normally not until several years after M$ stops supporting it becasue most software I use is either old or open source anyway. It's games that often push me to a new OS.

2. I do a full system rebuild, and that's at least a few years off yet. I prefer full OS installs over upgrades.

I can't count how many times that when I tell people I stay on an OS so long after support has officially ended, the first response I normally get "BUT WHAT ABOUT SECURITY!". I just shake my head and say, play smart and use 3rd party software if you're that concerned about it.

That being said, I am not looking forward to it. Call me a crotchety old man, but I hate the direction M$ went with Windows in just about every respect, especially with the data collection. I'm happy on Windows 10, I have it configured how I like it. Honestly, if it wasn't for my gaming and a few pieces of software I use on a very regular basis, I would have dropped Windows and went to Linux years ago. Maybe someday, just not today. 😀

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-07, 14:29:

3) Windows operating system development went sideways after 7. I still think Vista was perfectly defensible for old enthusiasts - it made you get new hardware, it looked cooler and modern, etc. But... 8 went nuts with the start screen/metro stuff, then 10/11 have just been weirdly redesigning the interface for no good reason, adding more and more cloud/etc, and they've just been throwing web technologies into everything which is one reason that Win11 on boot guzzles like 5 gigs of RAM when XP guzzled 100-150 megs. (

The day I installed Windows 8.1 is still stuck in my mind as that's the first time newer tech looked unappealing. Like, I knew Vista had issues and had experienced some of them when using PC's that weren't mine, but high-school me still looked at Vista as something to upgrade to once my own hardware was good enough to run it. Win 8 was just horrible. Not only the visual downgrade, but I had to fight that UI CONSTANTLY. Went back to 7 soon after and only got 10 after I upgraded to Ryzen and didn't want to risk running an unsupported OS on it.

I already have several machines running Linux (one of them being a Steamdeck) and once 10 stops getting security updates its going to be 100% penguin for me, apart from retro PCs.

Munx wrote on 2024-09-07, 15:27:

The day I installed Windows 8.1 is still stuck in my mind as that's the first time newer tech looked unappealing. Like, I knew Vista had issues and had experienced some of them when using PC's that weren't mine, but high-school me still looked at Vista as something to upgrade to once my own hardware was good enough to run it. Win 8 was just horrible. Not only the visual downgrade, but I had to fight that UI CONSTANTLY. Went back to 7 soon after and only got 10 after I upgraded to Ryzen and didn't want to risk running an unsupported OS on it.

The day I installed the last public pre-release build of Windows 8 on a secondary system and realized they were actually going to ship this idiocy is the first day that I stopped being a 'PC guy' since my dad had unilaterally decreed in Jan. 1995 that we were getting a DOS/Windows machine rather than another Mac to replace our super-aging Mac SE.

Kept all my machines on 7. When I started to get nervous that a somewhat moody Sandy Bridge Dell laptop would be out of warranty in late spring 2015, bought an Apple-refurbished MacBook Pro. And I've been both a Mac and Windows user since then, have only built one Windows desktop (after Win10 came out), my parents have now both switched to Mac (my mom actually switched before me, and I tried to stop her, whereas I pushed heavily for my dad going to Mac when his last Windows laptop got sad in 2022), etc.

And then came, of course, the other insult - Microsoft deeming my i7-7700 too old for Win11 when a one year newer $300 Celeron laptop is fine. And that insult is a big part of why there's a 27" iMac on my desk too. Big part of why my dad's on a Mac. You buy a Mac, you know you'll get new OSes for 5-7 years. You buy a Windows machine, you don't know when Microsoft is going to determine your potentially-expensive hardware "doesn't meet their performance and reliability expectations" and you're stuck on the old OS until its end of support date. It used to be - higher-end hardware guaranteed a longer lifecycle back when Windows upgrades were paid and Microsoft wanted that revenue; now they don't care.

It's funny, if you read Steven Sinofsky's book Hardcore Software, his view is basically "the Windows platform was in solid shape with 7, we could afford to experiment and evolve with 8, and if the experimenting was unsuccessful, that's okay." But I don't think he's factoring in the people who used to be passionate about Windows and PCs, the people who had bought their Win95 on Aug. 24, 1995 and who had preordered their retail Win7 upgrades, etc. The people who defended Vista for f***'s sake. Those people saw 8 and were disgusted and started losing their enthusiasm for the Windows platform. And here we are, a decade later, on a vintage computer forum.

If you're really sticking with Windows, make sure to disable automatic driver updates. Otherwise, installing the latest drivers offline won't matter because Windows Update will immediately replace them with whatever is in their catalog. It's supposed to check the version and release date, but it doesn't.

I still think that one of the reasons Windows 7 was considered "good" was because the hardware finally caught up to how bloated the OS had become. It isn't because 7 was actually lighter or faster than Vista (7 actually had higher system requirements, although you could argue that the Vista requirements were too low, just like the Windows 10 RAM and storage requirements).

On the subject of system requirements, I don't think Windows 11 increased the storage requirement enough. I installed it in a VM with an 80GB virtual disk, and I filled it almost instantly.

I've actually thought about Apple computers since the Windows 11 "unsupported CPU" nonsense. Nobody can give me a compelling reason to stay on Windows. It's just the "only stupid people buy Apple products" attitude problem. My actual concern with Apple is the lack of software (same as Linux), the soldered RAM and proprietary storage (where if there is an "SSD," it's just the raw NAND on a card because the controller is in the SoC), and the usual corporate data collection bullshit. I even thought about getting an iPhone, but they cost too much for me. Google and Microsoft both get in my way with their demands to use their own brand of LLM (my phone put a Gemini button on the screen yesterday, which was always on top and obstructing my view) and the bloatware that I didn't ask for.

lti wrote on 2024-09-07, 18:24:

I've actually thought about Apple computers since the Windows 11 "unsupported CPU" nonsense. Nobody can give me a compelling reason to stay on Windows. It's just the "only stupid people buy Apple products" attitude problem. My actual concern with Apple is the lack of software (same as Linux), the soldered RAM and proprietary storage (where if there is an "SSD," it's just the raw NAND on a card because the controller is in the SoC), and the usual corporate data collection bullshit.

Soldered RAM is coming to Windows too even more than it already has - the new Lunar Lake chips integrate the RAM with the SoC.

The software gap isn't what it was twenty years ago. The big name productivity stuff all has Mac versions. All the new stuff written in the past decade and a bit is Electron anyways, and... well, Electron runs fine on Mac and all those guys offer Mac versions. (Although I would note - the only surviving Intel apps on my M1 Max machine are Electron). The OS of the 2010s, Google Chrome, ruins Intel/ARM Macs just as much as it ruins Windows machines. And if anything, the Mac continues to have an array of Mac-only software written using Apple's proper frameworks and APIs and lovingly maintained by passionate developers.

My view as someone who's been using both for 9 years now - Windows on good hardware is mildly more reliable. macOS is more conservative - many things have perhaps been redesigned once in 20 years, whereas Microsoft just loves changing their control panel interfaces. macOS has a singularity of purpose that Windows 8+ doesn't have - this doesn't try to be a tablet OS, a phone OS, etc, it's a keyboard/mouse productivity OS. And I love, love, love my retina displays.

The laptops, especially, are very nice.

lti wrote on 2024-09-07, 18:24:

I even thought about getting an iPhone, but they cost too much for me.

I expect others will disagree, but to me, the iPhone has been a transformational (and extremely addictive) product. The only general purpose computer I've ever used with a certain level of reliability and simplicity. A friend of mine was a huge iPAQ guy, worked for HP/Compaq on that product line for a number of years, then he went to one BlackBerry, then he reluctantly got his first iPhone (despite all the usual reasons, the walled garden, etc) because some software only existed for iPhone... and within a month or so, he was absolutely hooked about how this was the best thing he'd ever used.

At least I know it's not just me unhappy with the way window$ is going

I think that I may become even more entrenched with older computers. Hence my desire to fix the capacitor plague board (another thread.)
That board used to run like a 2006 or 2007 version of PC linux. It was my internet computer for a long time - until it got to where I really couldn't get on the web with it anyore.

I really wouldn't worry too much about the upgrade. One thing the Internet has in common with that one crazy relative is that, good god, do they love to complain and blow everything out of proportion. And reading too much into the Windows 11 complaints, you might think it's a damn near unusable dumpster fire of an OS that springs an ad whenever the cursor moves by more than a handful of pixels. I happen to use both (Windows 11 and macOS 14) at work, and whilst neither is perfect, they both generally get out of the way and let me use the computer. If I were to give one system a score of 80%, I'd give the other an 86%. I won't tell you which one scores more points since I'd rather not start a nerd fan war. Point is, I think they're both roughly similar from a usability standpoint. Neither of them has me wishing I were back in the '90s using Windows 98 on a convertible Compaq Deskpro or Mac OS 8.6 on a tangerine iMac. At least, not for work. Both machines would be great for firing up some games of the era, but I'd like my OS to survive an 8 hour work day.  

Right, so I have two tips for you:

-Since you have a relatively modern Ryzen CPU, wait for the 24H2 build, which should be available next month. Changes have been made deep in the kernel, at least according to several sources on (sigh) The Internet. Improvements have been made to the scheduler, and the OS in general is said to feel faster than 23H2 and prior builds--particularly with Zen 3-5 CPUs. Apparently, AMD CPUs have been underperforming in Windows 11 for quite some time now. It's just that, the CPUs rock so damn hard that no one's even noticed until just a few weeks ago, when Zen 5 launched and saw much greater performance improvements under Linux! The 24H2 build is expected to close that gap. I've been using a pre-release version of 24H2 on one of my non-essential PCs (an Intel based HTPC) and yeah, it's fine.

-Use Winaero Tweaker to bring back the old school context menus and disable automatic driver updates, once your drivers of choice are installed. The new icon-driven context menus took me forever to get accustomed to. But then one day I thought, hey, maybe Winaero Tweaker can fix this! And indeed it did! It truly is a fantastic piece of software. You may even find yourself casually perusing its list of options just to see what else it can pull off.

You've already done this, but for anyone else concerned about October 2025, use Rufas to build your Windows installation media, even if your hardware officially supports Windows 11. This will let you skirt around the Microsoft account requirement, disable some of the telemetry, etc. It's how I installed Windows 11 on my home machines. And though I personally wouldn't consider the use of a Microsoft account to be a deal breaker, a local account is definitely preferable. Unfortunately, Microsoft keeps making this harder to accomplish out of the box. Fortunately, Rufas keeps finding ways around it.  

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2024-09-08, 00:03:

-Since you have a relatively modern Ryzen CPU, wait for the 24H2 build, which should be available next month. Changes have been made deep in the kernel, at least according to several sources on (sigh) The Internet. Improvements have been made to the scheduler, and the OS in general is said to feel faster than 23H2 and prior builds--particularly with Zen 3-5 CPUs. Apparently, AMD CPUs have been underperforming in Windows 11 for quite some time now. It's just that, the CPUs rock so damn hard that no one's even noticed until just a few weeks ago, when Zen 5 launched and saw much greater performance improvements under Linux! The 24H2 build is expected to close that gap. I've been using a pre-release version of 24H2 on one of my non-essential PCs (an Intel based HTPC) and yeah, it's fine.

Isn't 24H2 effectively "RTM" right now, even if they reserve the right to do a cumulative update or two more before officially pushing it for general consumption?