Microsoft Auto-updating Eligible Windows 11 PCs to Version 23H2

[Dr. Dro]

For what it's worth, I'd not mind bringing back some of the simplicity of Windows 2000, lol

But ultimately, I just got used to the changes and it's like "it works fine, not much to complain about."


I don't doubt the Copilot stuff could be a big reason for Microsoft to force push this update, but if they wanted to increase the telemetry, they could do it without you noticing. No need to roll out a fancy feature update for that.

Windows 7 didn't have telemetry like Windows 10 does (arguably had little to zero telemetry aside from the crash report system), and Microsoft simply rolled out a normal-looking update adding telemetry and boom! Telemetry added.

I'm of the firm belief that the Windows user experience peaked with Vista. Shame it was so poorly received as an OS, but its UX cannot be faulted. I like Windows 2000, too.

 

[Craptacular]

I'm of the firm belief that the Windows user experience peaked with Vista. Shame it was so poorly received as an OS, but its UX cannot be faulted. I like Windows 2000, too.

Personally, I think Windows 7 was better in terms of user experience. I think Windows 7 was the peak.

 

[lexluthermiester]

windows 10 by far is the best windows yet

WHAT? Windows 7 is the best version of Windows ever... Seriously with that?

 

[Scrizz]

I haven't disabled anything and I'm still on 22H2.

spoke too soon

 

[ThrashZone]

I haven't disabled anything and I'm still on 22H2.
View attachment 335805

spoke too soon
View attachment 335807

Hi,
I usually just mount what ever new build there is f the update system.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Personally, I think Windows 7 was better in terms of user experience. I think Windows 7 was the peak.

Windows 7 sadly had several regressions compared to Vista, some aesthetic, some in functionality. 7's got that Peek feature that's super useful, but Vista's still got Quick Launch shortcuts, the set of Windows applications were more feature-complete (for example, Vista's WMP 11 was way, way better than 7's 12, it hasn't been updated since and BS like Groove Music and the Videos app don't even come close - sure just install VLC or MPC-HC, but we're talking default features here - same would go for the Photos app on newer versions of Windows vs. the classic photo viewer, amongst others), it had several aesthetic features that were gone from 7 like the Flip3D task switcher and DreamScene (basically Wallpaper Engine 10 years before it was ever cool) amongst some other things... I think Vista still wins overall.

What kills Vista is UAC. It's just so bad to have it on maximum security all the time.

 

[Wirko]

Microsoft is not selling LTSC keys just like that

Doubly true for IOT Enterprise LTSC. Even the activation guide is not available to everyone. Does this thing even activate through a procedure similar to desktop and server Windows?

Conclusion: @dgianstefani bought a used ATM to make himself eligible for an IoT licence. Old ATMs can be found for $500 on Ebay.

 

[Frank_100]

I'll give it a shot.
Maybe Microsoft fixed the bugs in Windows defender and desktop files.

I can always clonezilla back to 10.

 

[tpa-pr]

Windows 11 is fine compared to 10. Same as 10 was compared to 7, 7 compared to XP and so on.

It does have some odd quirks here and there, some of which seem to be staying, but otherwise it's usable. I'd recommend anyone still on 10 look at upgrading or if you're really resistant to the idea, maybe start looking into Linux. You only have until next year until 10 is no longer supported!

 

[Broken Processor]

Windows 10 was better but 7 was the best of the bunch but 11 has never been stable for me I'm always getting corrupt files and the registry sucks. I've used many different machines on 11 and not one of them has been long term stable. At least 10 is stable honestly if 12 is worse than 11 I'm going Linux for my gaming needs and just forget about games that don't have anti cheat working I use Linux for everything else anyway.

 

[Wirko]

I'll give it a shot.
Maybe Microsoft fixed the bugs in Windows defender and desktop files.

I can always clonezilla back to 10.

I also miss file search history more than I miss copilot. Apparently one can get it back by uninstalling two security (!) updates from March/April 2023 (!), which are too old to be present in my 23H2 anyway.

 

[DaemonForce]

I was one of the few people that couldn't deal with Win7 and its absolute garbage UX. Vista was a slightly better equal but when I jumped ship to Server 2012 R2, that was every problem solved. Then I needed a new GPU (RX 580) and by the time I could get my hands on it, the support mechanism was discontinued less than 2 months before I got it. Scammed.

Windows 10 was a very bumpy transition but I'm okay with having a pair of Windows Server 2016 boxes do all the heavy lifting while I manage everything from Win10. The problem with Win11 is that it's an insufferable UX that doesn't work. It is a multiple chain of failure in one system and I'm going to nuke my tablet today to get away from it entirely. Meanwhile, my desktop is holding up somewhat okay but it's just time for it to see a fresh install at this point. I tend to nuke automatic updates since I absolutely DON'T want my developer system to update.

Automated disrespect is unwelcome.

 

[Lianna]

[...] but Vista's still got Quick Launch shortcuts [...]

I used Quick Launch in 7 and 8.1 and now use it on 10. It just has to be enabled manually (new toolbar) by pointing to the old folder; no additional software required. It was probably left as is because a lot of old installers want to put shortcuts there, so it works fine.

While in 11 the task bar lacks the option for a new toolbar (so the functionality is gone), the folder is still there; so at least shortcut to Quick Launch can be added to Start Menu, if you hunt for anything that was added there.

 

[windwhirl]

I also miss file search history more than I miss copilot. Apparently one can get it back by uninstalling two security (!) updates from March/April 2023 (!), which are too old to be present in my 23H2 anyway.

I miss Windows XP style file search. Worked far faster than whatever shitshow we have now.

 

[arnold_al_qadr]

Laughs in Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC with support till 2032.

View attachment 335741

Win 10 LTSC, best windows version ever..

 

[Random_User]

So now every user is going to be a deliberate participant of MS AI training program. At everyone's expence.

Windows 10 was better but 7 was the best of the bunch but 11 has never been stable for me I'm always getting corrupt files and the registry sucks. I've used many different machines on 11 and not one of them has been long term stable. At least 10 is stable honestly if 12 is worse than 11 I'm going Linux for my gaming needs and just forget about games that don't have anti cheat working I use Linux for everything else anyway.

So far, W10 also likes to make files, programs and documents to disappear in unknown direction. Breaks stuff etc. That's excluding the Windows broken updates, that can't be skipped at all. The UI is bad and sluggish. The things that used to be lightning fast in W7, in W10 take ages. Great, that my HW is incompatible with W11. But they might intentionally lock W10, when the support time would run up. There's no guarantee in anything nowadays.

I miss Windows XP style file search. Worked far faster than whatever shitshow we have now.

The fastest and most human and production oriented UI and explorer. The work with big mass of files was much comfortable in XP, IMHO. After that Vista/7 took couple years to get used to. Despite looking astonishingly good, it still was more cumbersome and not that intuitives, as simple but fast and reliable XP interface.
But feature wise, and with some compromises, W7 was still much superior that any other OS µ$ ever made. They've probably learn their mistake, and never ever will be that "generous" again, and not let that much freedom and comfort in their OSes advertising platforms that happent to come in the future..

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Move a few settings around and 10 is 11 of course throw in a little imac skirt for the rest of the ensemble lol

 

[DudeBeFishing]

Hi,
Dang thought everyone was already on 23h2 lol
All 10 and 11 builds suck so not sure why it matters which build you use

MS auto installing is another thing altogether though

View attachment 335738

I remember the auto installing of Windows 10 through Windows updates. You'd click the the X button on the 10 installer, thinking you closed it, then 10 gets installed in the background.

You still can't opt out of Windows updates without a workaround. Group Policy is ignored. The built in malware, I mean anti-virus, constantly scans whether you want it to or not. You have disable each part of it in a specific order, or it ends up auto enabling.

I don't get how people think 10 is good. It must be the people who unironically claim the human eye can't see more than 30 fps. There's stupid high input lag if I don't check in 'disable full screen optimization' on every game, regardless of DirectX version. Same games run fine on Windows 7, some even run better on Linux with Proton, but on 10 they stutter like a drunk hamster getting electrocuted. Mainly an issue with DX9 games. Then there's Minecraft, that runs like garbage since Microsoft took over.

I've had 10 delete my user profile after failing to update. I've had it brick itself due to updates. The first thing 10 did when trying it on my home PC was bluescreen, and that was the less bloated, but still filled with garbage, LTSC. I put consumer version (don't know if home or pro) on my grandfather's PC, and the next day it has stupid apps instilled like Facebook and Youtube. My grandfather just clicks the little orange Firefox logo, and he doesn't have admin rights. That crap installed itself on it's own.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I used Quick Launch in 7 and 8.1 and now use it on 10. It just has to be enabled manually (new toolbar) by pointing to the old folder; no additional software required. It was probably left as is because a lot of old installers want to put shortcuts there, so it works fine.

While in 11 the task bar lacks the option for a new toolbar (so the functionality is gone), the folder is still there; so at least shortcut to Quick Launch can be added to Start Menu, if you hunt for anything that was added there.

I mean in all fairness, you can just pin things on the taskbar now. But yeah the QL folder we have is basically a legacy fallback by now. Perhaps the critical point is, for all the things Windows changed and replaced, few were for the better in the long run. Most changes to Windows' user experience have been done aimlessly and solely for the sake of change.

 

[Tomorrow]

I remember when people hated on Windows 10 because it wasnt Windows 7. I love 11. Not sure what peoples issue is with it outside of the telemetry but 10 does that anyway.

Same here. I feel like the UI is more consistent in 11 vs 10.

I've taken to Win11's nicer UI and tabs in file explorer so much I'd never downgrade back to garbage Win10.

This. Tabs in explorer is must for my productivity. On 10 i had to use 3rd party programs (some of them shady) for that and those were always janky.

Some of the UX decisions are just DUMB. I have to use it at work and I already had to fix a bunch of weird stupid things, starting with the unusable context menu.

Every windows version comes with some ux changes that can be more or less annoying depending on your tastes but I don't remember any of them cutting or changing so many basic functionalities with only major downsides like windows 11 does.

Aside from the often lamented context menu - what other UX changes are you talking about?
Because to me the only one that annoys me is the automatic hiding of system tray icons. Also one thing i already hated on Win10 was the "open with" dialog that behaves inconstantly with other UI. It's not a window and it disappears into the ether as soon as you click somewhere else outside of it. It looks like a leftover from Win8 actually.

I would be perfectly happy with the color and style change if my options were still there and it would make complete sense if that was the case, but they aren't as you just discovered. There's not even an option to configure the awfull thing, a reality shared by most of these stupid change, only register hacks, WHHYYYY!?!?!?!?!?!?

There was never an option to configure the context menu in earlier versions of windows either. There you also had to use registry or 3rd party programs.

The problem with Win11 is that it's an insufferable UX that doesn't work.

Aside from the context menu - what do you mean? I find Win11 UI to be more pleasant than Win10. Much less the abomination that was Win8.

I've had 10 delete my user profile after failing to update. I've had it brick itself due to updates. The first thing 10 did when trying it on my home PC was bluescreen, and that was the less bloated, but still filled with garbage, LTSC. I put consumer version (don't know if home or pro) on my grandfather's PC, and the next day it has stupid apps instilled like Facebook and Youtube. My grandfather just clicks the little orange Firefox logo, and he doesn't have admin rights. That crap installed itself on it's own.

That's small potatoes. For a computer i manage for one of my friends the update screwed up the partition tables so bad that the PC would not even get past POST with the drive attached. That's how bad it was. All efforts to repair it were in vain. I even did a byte for byte copy of the drive on to a clean SSD and with that attached to the same computer it too refused to move past POST. Proving it was a software - not a hardware problem.

 

[chrcoluk]

Is this the same forced upgrade they did to force people on to 10?

I guess they not happy that the market has rejected 11, and instead of changing 11 to be like 10 on the UI they are going the other route.

I remember when people hated on Windows 10 because it wasnt Windows 7. I love 11. Not sure what peoples issue is with it outside of the telemetry but 10 does that anyway.

If you not sure what the issue is I guess you dont have much attention to detail.

Windows 8 Microsoft did wholesale changes to the UI and tried to mobilise the OS.
8.1 They realised they messed up and did slight back tracking.
10 They realised simple adding a start menu button without a start menu didnt fool people, and also reversed many other changes introduced in 8 (such as the plan to abandon win32 software support, the removal of recent files tab, the alignment of text in title bar, and more were reversed in 10 to make it more like a desktop again).
11 They have gone back to pushing towards a mobile UI, extra padding, centralised UI, removal of start menu, bigger UI elements, removal of less used UI features (dumbing down, already having to partially backtrack), also done the old hardware obsolescence as well to help their hardware partners.

Honestly dont know how you dont notice the changes in 11.

The issues with 7 to 10, is all the extra telemetry in 10 and how it handled updates (notably it forced them). Later builds of 10 have significantly made it less annoying because "again" Microsoft eventually realised they had to do some backtracking. Its not just a case of I refuse to move because its "different", different/newer doesnt always mean better.

Windows 7 sadly had several regressions compared to Vista, some aesthetic, some in functionality. 7's got that Peek feature that's super useful, but Vista's still got Quick Launch shortcuts, the set of Windows applications were more feature-complete (for example, Vista's WMP 11 was way, way better than 7's 12, it hasn't been updated since and BS like Groove Music and the Videos app don't even come close - sure just install VLC or MPC-HC, but we're talking default features here - same would go for the Photos app on newer versions of Windows vs. the classic photo viewer, amongst others), it had several aesthetic features that were gone from 7 like the Flip3D task switcher and DreamScene (basically Wallpaper Engine 10 years before it was ever cool) amongst some other things... I think Vista still wins overall.

What kills Vista is UAC. It's just so bad to have it on maximum security all the time.

Quick launch still exista in 10, they just turned it off by default. However it is now finalyl gone in 11, as it was relying on internet explorer code which they finally gutted out in 11.

See in the red square.

 

[Tomorrow]

Is this the same forced upgrade they did to force people on to 10?

No. This is about upgrading Win11 22H2 users to 23H2. If you have disabled TPM in Win10 then they can't upgrade you.

Windows 8 Microsoft did wholesale changes to the UI and tried to mobilise the OS.

It was an abomination.

8.1 They realised they messed up and did slight back tracking.

Too little, too late.

10 They realised simple adding a start menu button without a start menu didnt fool people, and also reversed many other changes introduced in 8 (such as the plan to abandon win32 software support, the removal of recent files tab, the alignment of text in title bar, and more were reversed in 10 to make it more like a desktop again).

Win10 was a buggy mess at the start. It took years for it to stabilize. It came out in 2015. I moved to it in 2019 due to my new hardware not supporting Win7 properly.

11 They have gone back to pushing towards a mobile UI, extra padding, centralised UI, removal of start menu, bigger UI elements, removal of less used UI features (dumbing down, already having to partially backtrack), also done the old hardware obsolescence as well to help their hardware partners.

If by centralized UI you mean the taskbar than this can easily be changed back from the settings to the left side. Start menu is still there. Just redesigned as usual in every new version of windows. I would not say the UI elements are bigger in Win11 compared to Win10. There is no "mobile UI" as you call it.

 

[Wirko]

This. Tabs in explorer is must for my productivity.

I agree - but in return, you have to give up the ribbon (just when it became good...) and the quick access toolbar. No, you don't really have to, because Microsoft forgot to close the last loophole. The QAT actually remains customisable, hah. But you can't have a file manager that combines the best of 10's and 11's file manager, and throws out the worst.

Also, 28 years later, there is still no option to have a dual-pane file explorer. You have to look for one of the Norton Commander-inspired alternative. I, for one, found xplorer². But Windows Explorer is impossible to really replace. It's integrated into nearly all aplications, therefore it should be really really good and really greatly configurable. However, configurable and space-efficient UI is what Microsoft hates most.

Eh, this has unsurprisingly become yet another Windows 11 Annoyances thread, and I'm a bit guilty for contributing to it. Should we continue in the main Windows 11 Annoyances thread?

 

[Dr. Dro]

Like the video I shared brings up, the problem with Windows is the way Microsoft has been developing it. It sees a threat, develops a response, which obviously leads to a fail (as they're trying to adapt an entire industry in a single cycle), and it then results in the undoing phase. This is literally how you can describe the development of Windows since Vista.

Mac OS X Tiger (threat) > Windows Vista (response) > High system requirements well beyond PCs of their time (fail) > Windows 7 (undoing)
iPad (threat) > Windows 8 (response) > No one cares for its full screen, tablety UI in real PCs that 99% of people were using (fail) > Windows 10 (undoing)

They'll try to force people into the failed stage to retain market share, but that's their primary challenge to overcome. It's really not too hard to figure it out. The changes done to Windows are because Microsoft feels like it cannot have Windows, considered to be the face of the company, look and feel stale, or they'll lose market share. And it's losing market share regardless because... Windows' own usefulness is reduced by this aimless development model, where change is done for the sake of change with zero regard for the users' actual demands and needs.

 

[R-T-B]

Laughs in Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC with support till 2032.

View attachment 335741

You'd best hope your gpu drivers keep a similar policy...