eric bubna

Windows 11 First thoughts

Eric Bubna -

Wiped my desktop and installed the latest Windows 11 Preview, build 22458.  

Current specs on this machine:
I7-8700k
Asus TUF z370 Pro Gaming mobo
32gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4
1tb Samsung 970 Evo Plus
4tb storage hdd
Geforce RTX 3080 FE

Install was fast, I disconnected the storage drive before booting so the installer wouldn't get confused about partitions and I also disconnected the ethernet so I could create a local account easily.

Looks pretty good, dark mode with one of the built in backgrounds.  Device manager showed driver issues for 'PCI Memory Controller' and 'SM Bus Controller' but I'm assuming I'll be able to find appropriate chipset drivers from Asus.

Other than a few relatively minor annoyances things are running pretty smoothly, it had been a couple years since I did a wipe and reinstall so got a little snappiness back on that end.  Haven't installed any larger games yet so haven't seen any performance hit there.
I'm trying to keep things a little better organized so I went and grabbed the new rdcman from sysinternals and moba xterm for my ssh sessions.  I'm a longtime putty user who has tried moba out a little but it looks really good for grouping and organization which should help me out.

Main concerns so far are all taskbar related!
Microsoft removed a couple functions, namely the ability to right click and open the task manager, show all icons in system tray, and puzzling enough the ability to drag the taskbar to other locations on the screen or to a second monitor.
I use the task manager shortcut frequently for work, its easy to get users to make a couple clicks and kill a program or show me what is using resources on their system.
I also usually want new programs to open on my left screen but keep browser / slack / clock on the right so I'm pretty annoyed.  I thought I found a way to show all tray icons but it looks like that has been removed.  Bummer.  
The new windows terminal seems to be gpu powered and takes a few seconds to open, I also had to fool around with getting chocolatey installed so I could install a helper program called gsudo to let me shift to an administrator powershell command line but now its all good.

I'll update with more thoughts and changes as I notice them.