Win11 - Talk, Tweaks, Rants & Findings

StartAllBack: one thing that is nice about it, if you enable automatic accent color change in Win11 Settings, the start button, upon hovering over it, changes to the accent color. Just a nice, subtle change. Setting automatic accent color change is also good to for the (classic) context menus, to get away from the awful blue accent color that it defaults to.

That's another thing you don't really realize to the full extent in older versions of Windows, namely that Explorer as a window is a different beast than any other window (like Control Panel or WinVer, or what have you). Explorer is now by default set to the new (Win11) style with mica, but when you open another non-explorer window, it has a simple title bar with solid color (whatever your accent color, just darker). In Win7, for example, both title bars of explorer and other windows look the same, and so they always had been a bit conflated in my mind. It would have been nice if they extended the mica look of explorer to all non-explorer windows (for consistency and theming), but it is not to be.

Which leads me to the following: the mica shell for explorer. So, they gave it mica effect with super-subtle translucency (if you could even call that). But it is so subtle, it might as well not be there. You'd have to have the most contrasting wallpaper on to even notice. Same with the white/light themes. They go through all that trouble and then make the mica effect almost imperceptible. It is so imperceptible, if someone turned it off for you, you wouldn't notice. I keep looking for it, to be disappointed 95% of the time.

Check the light theme, explorer: caption buttons. You'll notice, windows have this thin, black line around them. They try to make it all soft, but then use a hard pixel line around windows. Look at the caption button for X/exit: it is plain red (ugly, of course) but then is encased in this hard pixel outline, that, being of a different nature, is more pixely than the button outline. So you get this weird thin, uneven line around the x button. How does a UI team even live with that? As you get older, the magical thinking drops off you and you just see things for how unmagically people made them. They could have done it more magically. UI bumps aren't good, it's like having a mansion with 100 acres and nice roads, but then you install speedbumps so not one ride is actually pleasant. Some people won't notice, I know. I wish I would not notice.

 

Build 22000.282 is what the build number will elevate to, the next cumulative update (this should really have been the final release state, but alas) : Releasing Windows 11 Build 22000.282 to Beta and Release Preview Channels

 

Glenn, once you get the image and test, I think the way to go is only remove Notepad modern app, and try to install Notepad2-mod pp/ssApp to see if that would fix it. The reason I mention it is because I still had to install the ppApp post-install as the context menu entry for "edit" or "Notepad" is a reg entry left in place for the modern Notepad, so we'd have to edit that, then, which isn't worth it. That is, given installing Notepad-mod pp/ssApp will work once modern Notepad is uninstalled. I think it should, but since I was capturing the install.wim and had the VHD mounted, I had to make a decision The way to read this is as follows: when you decide to uninstall Notepad modern app (an option given by MS), they don't revert the context menu entry of it to the classic Notepad.exe in either \Windows or \System32 folder. So it is broken whether you replace/rename Notepad.exe classic, or not.

I'm trying to let the OS grow on me a bit, plus I can't restore to Win7 right now because I'm uploading the 11 image But you do kind of get used to it after a while. There is a slight micro-delay when double-clicking "This PC"; the modern explorer just opens a tad slower than Win7's. I noticed this on 10, too, so that makes sense. But in combination with the fact that when you click any icon in Win11 (or hover over it) and it not giving hardly a visible selection square around it, you literally can't tell whether it's registering you're on the icon with your mouse cursor. Very odd, they really need to increase contrast because you can't make out whether it reads you're hovering or clicking an icon. Also, they need to give the drive status bars (how full drives appear in explorer) a Win11-overhaul. They still look completely square like Win8/10, the bars as well as the selection areas... but then the bars that appear as you hover over navpane items are rounded and subtle. This is MS, they never get UI consistency right, no matter what the version of the OS. Why can't they do this? Look at the wealth that company has, and they can't just fix the UI? It is odd. It must be a 'finish guy" thing. I've always worked as finish person in construction, and things have to be right and square and consistent. Maybe it's just my nature.

 

The weight of importance and the detail levels of the things that you notice are totally seperate to the cost to fix them. Of cause everybody wants it done well, feel impressive. But I understand why they don't "care" as many basic users don't even notice or care about even their wallpaper.

I am in lockdown now for 3 days, so that works out well for me to take time.

 

Well, it'd be interesting to see what your overall impression is of Win11, it might help me put some of the stuff I notice into perspective

Sorry the upping is so slow, halfway or so on part 5 out of 7, but later on (in a few hours) I'll set the upload to max so for sure it will finish for you to try tomorrow. EDIT: Oh no, part 5 just started all over again in FileZilla.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHel...one_else_having_problems_setting_the_default/

I have looked and looked but I can't get my default image viewer to change to irfanview (YET), just wanting that solved before I backup my PC as I need it to work to make my app updates

I love the look of 11 still, but it's not better than Win 10 at all. Worse at some things.


SetupS may need to add ppApps to Open With:

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jpg\OpenWithProgids]
"AppX2jm25qtmp2qxstv333wv5mne3k5bf4bm"=hex(0):
"AppX43hnxtbyyps62jhe9sqpdzxn1790zetc"=hex(0):
"AppXcesbfs704v2mjbts9dkr42s9vmrhxbkj"=hex(0):
"IrfanView.jpg"=""
"jpegfile"=""
"WindowsLive.PhotoGallery.jpg.16.4"=""

I manually added {"IrfanView.jpg"=""} to the above key as a string and it allows me to pick it in the Open With Menu, doesn't fix the initial problem yet as they are a specialty type (have more context menu and the Modern App takes away usual expected results).


-EDIT-

Fix found but I did it on my live PC, so need to do a VM and regshot the changes so I can do them manually without powershell.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...d/17b96a09-86f0-4362-a3aa-da6eb765fc5b?page=2

Added a SFX to fix the issue until I get time to fix it proper.

 

@Glenn, just a wild crazy thought, but maybe something similar for text files - Get-AppxPackage Microsoft._________ -AllUsers | Reset-AppxPackage - would shake loose MS's preventing Notepad2-mod from doing its replace thing? Otherwise, it looks like the uninstalling the modern app method works, (Thanks, T!), unless we can figure out how Process Explorer's hook works now.

 

There's some weirdness to using Win11 right now, for sure. Strange lags just typing in stuff in browsers, some strange responsiveness issues here and there. It's pretty usable, otherwise. It would seem that it needs quite a bit of bug fixing and improvement fixes. I'm thinking 2 months is a good time to give them to shore up whatever remains to be done. I may try it again at that point. Having options for really smoothly running OS's other than this right now, I don't see the point in using 11 right now. It just really adds nothing to the plate for me, and the UI changes are nice compared to Win10, but that is in great part just because Win10's UI was so bad UI, performance, usability, responsiveness, these are things that are vital to me so as long as I still have a chance to run an OS that checks all those boxes (Win7) there is truly no sense to using either 10 or 11, unless you're a gamer or have new hardware. So I think this concludes my deep dive. I'm glad I got to update the LivePE, it'll be good to have, and that I have an updated build base for Win10 and 11, so I'll archive that for later use. I feel relieved I did what I could, purveyed the landscape, and will now go back to my favorite OS

 

Starting a VM install to tinker (my actual PC is also running it now and configured), but this screen hangs around for AGES, on my real PC I rebooted it and it continued fine, but I am gonna wait out the VM to see if it continues on it's own.

-EDIT-

It took longer than I was willing to watch, but went through into windows eventually.

-EDIT-

LOL, the file associations in my VM work fine, how can I fix a non existent bug, must be related to my hardware configuration then, ah well, next time is my guess

 

I know, that screen is taking forfreakingever to get through... i saw there was an oobe update, maybe the issue is related to that. Next CU may fix it.

 

Yes, it could be the OOBE update, or something that may get fixed in the coming cumulative update. I think within a month or two, Win11 will run a lot better than right now.

I do wonder how it would run on today's ultra-fast hardware with NVMe drives and fast RAM. My PC is overclocked at 4.5ghz with 2133mhz RAM and it's pretty snappy, but some newer hardware configs are faster than that.

 

Glenn:

Code:

http://download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/update/software/updt/2021/10/windows10.0-kb5006746-x64_7de0eb046446a91264144613b6bba263541ad009.msu
http://download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/update/software/updt/2021/09/windows10.0-kb5006363-x64-ndp48_ca9dc54f0f42e71c847a75567493f123d123c923.msu

 

https://hothardware.com/news/microsoft-will-be-making-windows-11-much-faster-next-year
https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-promises-windows-11-will-be-faster-in-2022

As I had noted before, sluggish UI, sluggish explorer. Win10 LTSC 2021 is much more responsive (almost LTSB or Win8 level).

 

Here's a video that talks about things, besides speed, that annoy users about Win 11:



And here's one that talks about ways folks fix some of Win 11's shortcomings, including using StartAllBack:

 

Yeah, tried all that a month and more ago, but it doesn't fix anything (Have you used the Last11 release?) I used to feel foolish for being seduced by rounded corners and that this would cause me to overlook other issues. But no, going back in time again to a slow UI (Vista, anyone) is just getting a bit old, MS, I'm not playing that game anymore.

It is just bad with Microsoft. The recent LTSC 21h2 release, much anticipated, they literally pushed out with a 600+mb boot.wim instead of a 350/400mb one because *they forgot* to remove 200+mb of deleted files -- in an actual folder inside the boot.wim called "deleted files." This is the level we're talking about. Microsoft! Any modder -- AaaaNnnnYyyy modder takes more pride in their work than Microsoft. How do you release a 5 year feature frozen corporate OS and pack it with a 600mb boot.wim with leftovers in it? It is just unconscionable at this point. Like, "hey, what's coming out of the beta-ring today?" kind of level. Putting out unfinished products is literally their business model now. I mean that literally; their development cycles are in constant flux and they are merely making deadlines by putting out unfinished products, chronically. This is the reality now. "We'll fix Win11 in 2022." Why? Because we promised 2021 release but, of course, it was actually not anywhere near done. This has been going on with Win10 releases the entire time, which is why we have so many iterations with inconsistent theming and features -- literally not one of those Win10 releases could be considered finished by any reasonable standard. You just get snapshots now.

 

Yep, I'm sure your newest release will be much more professional. By the way, I've verified that it downloads and expands correctly, but I have not installed it.

 

Thanks, good to know. I do always check the iso hash after packing the rars (to make sure I don't waste an entire upload) but I don't download it again to make sure the rars are actually sound, so thank you.

In fact, their giant useless boot.wim actually inspired me in part to pair the LTSC image with the LivePE because it isn't that much bigger (but much more functional)!

 

I feel sick knowing that it's a week MAX to make an updated LastOS that is more refined than the snails pace they build the OS at. Yes they are coding it, but to be honest, they are losing features and slowing things down, not to mention stupid STUPID UI changes that make it next to unusable, unless you have a stick and poke it to make it do what you want. Who is in charge of the shit show that is Windows 11??? Years ago Linux took the lead, then Mac "borrowed" some of it's features and made it even better, then MS comes along and took an already working OS (Windows 7 with Aero) and actually remove features and made it worse. they kept removing more and more, making it less and less usable and damn ugly. Now I am no expert, but I know what it takes to make a good OS. it's not much, it's just choice, stability, security, speed and previous expectations being met or at least available.

I can't use Win 7 myself anymore as my kids use Steam and they need DX12, I can't use Win 11 as it's hidden all the function I used to have access too and no amount of tweaks and bypassing make it better than Win 10 in ANY way.

 

I did find out with (later iterations of?) StartAllBack (what a name) you can choose Win11, 10, or 7 explorer styles (11, ribbon, or 7). When choosing Win10 or 7 options, starting explorer is faster -- probably on par with Win10. So the redesigned 11 explorer style is what causes the annoying lag, as we figured.

 

https://www.windows11forums.com/threads/cant-associate-jpg-files.335/#post-1358

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\AppX43hnxtbyyps62jhe9sqpdzxn1790zetc]
"NoOpenWith"=-
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\AppX6eg8h5sxqq90pv53845wmnbewywdqq5h]
"NoOpenWith"=-
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\AppX9rkaq77s0jzh1tyccadx9ghba15r6t3h]
"NoOpenWith"=-
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\AppXk0g4vb8gvt7b93tg50ybcy892pge6jmt]
"NoOpenWith"=-
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\AppXvhc4p7vz4b485xfp46hhk3fq3grkdgjg]
"NoOpenWith"=-

I found this fix to the issue with not being able to change the open with option for photos in Windows 11, it for some reason defaults to open with "Print Picture", which does a horrible job of rendering a preview and is a nasty app. Anyway I may include this in the Last11 Tweaks as it is always nice to be able to use open with, Hell I may even remove a few more from the registry for other formats, Why they are removing open with abilities from the OS is beyond me.