A bit like on the first day of holiday, us techs at Q2Q very much prefer to dip our toe in the water before taking the plunge with anything new in the IT world, and wherever possible, we believe in testing how things interact with other systems before putting them live in a working environment. This is no less true when it comes to big steps forward in Windows OS, and the move to Windows 11 is definitely one of those! A few of us installed the latest offering from Microsoft on our laptops some time ago now, to see how things went, and, like a lot of others, we found enough issues to convince us our clients should wait for the time being before pushing the upgrade button.
Most current machines in office/work environments have 8GB of memory (RAM), some that are a little older may only have 4GB. We found that to work well, with multiple applications running such as Outlook, Word and Chrome etc, 16GB was needed, something even our laptops did not have at the time! This fixed, and with extra RAM chips fitted, the experience was vastly improved. We would recommend 16GB as minimum and would advise looking to upgrade your machines before making the move to 11. Please let us know if you need any guidance or assistance with this.
In the new OS, the taskbar, the handy strip where we keep shortcuts all our most used apps and locations, has been modernised, and, whilst it does indeed look slick, some of the functionality most of us are used to has been removed. You can no longer move the taskbar to a different location, and the ability to show the time and date on all monitors has been removed. You can no longer drag and drop items onto the taskbar either. Another issue we found was with the inconsistency within menus and other user interface (UI) elements of the OS. Whilst the sleek “settings” menus deliver a much needed refresh to the look and feel of this new offering, you are often then plunged back to dated screens such as “control panel”, which while familiar in feel, jar’s with the more modern looks elsewhere. Finally, and possibly most importantly, there are still compatibility issues with drivers for things like printers, and a number of “bugs” that can cause crashing and freezing under certain circumstances. Whilst most of the updates so far have been Microsoft are in the process of releasing an update – Windows 11 22H2. Initially to a preview audience this will then be stage released to the entire community and hopefully iron out a lot of the bugs and “unintended features”!
We at Q2Q will be reviewing and testing this update and will advise and assist all of our clients to transition to Windows 11 when it is right for them. As always, if you have any questions or just want to chat about anything new in the world of tech, just give us a call or drop us an email!
