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I'm preparing a (second hand) Dell notebook for my mother, because her (otherwise adequate) machine is not "eligible" to run Windows 11

The process from a fresh Windows 10 installation to even get to the Windows 11 installer is a nightmare.

Despite Microsoft (and Dell's unhelpful bloatware) constantly pointing to "Windows Update", it has no option to initiate the upgrade. I had to really dig to find a manual installer.

I think we've reached the point where installing Linux has become easier.

Not to speak of the extremely slow software updates of Windows, as my guess was "I probably need all the other updates before the option shows up".

The "22H2" update took at least two hours to complete, where in the first hour the only thing I saw was a screen saying "Getting Windows ready. Don't turn off your computer." What does that even mean?

The laptop's spinning fan was the only hint that something was happening at all. Only much later did a progress counter appear. Bizarre.

@sj_zero I'm very tempted but she's very stubborn unfortunately.

I might make it a dual boot system if she starts to complain about Windows 11 being annoying, or breaking randomly.

Really looking forward to disabling all the ads and A"I" in Windows 11, with settings for it in about a dozen places.

Ads seem to be everywhere, even on the lock screen and in the file explorer.

While I was looking for a guide to disabling it all I came across several articles saying that all the ads are slowing down the OS. How do people just accept this?

@loadhigh if you really have to use win11 and can start from scratch, here's a tip:

download the full iso from Microsoft's website, and write it to a flash USB using Rufus. it'll bypass the lighter of the "mandatory" checks used to see if win11 is "supported"

then, install the Education version, not the home pro or others. this gets rid of a lot of the spying, ads, genAI, etc. put in an EU country as location during setup (you can still localize measurements and timezone). some combination of that also allows you to use a local account instead of a Microsoft online sign-in.

https://massgrave.dev/ to fake "activate" it and you're good to go

@Mycroft That is a very interesting route. I'd really like to keep any new LLM additions in Windows 11 away from her, so thanks for sharing :)

Because of Google Search's AI nonsense, which has only recently been enabled in Europe, and her thinking it was a summary of real information from the resulting websites, instead of statistically likely jumble of words based on her search query.

Edit: very surprised about Rufus' options for disabling unwanted stuff. Really nice.

@loadhigh For the exact same reason everyone on bluesky is busy saying they just can't move to mastodon no matter what.

They're idiots who prefer not to think.

@loadhigh I think it's because they have no other real option.

@Talon1024 You're probably right, I just like to think back to the 90s where OS manufacturers still had to compete for their user's interest and convince them, or they might not buy / upgrade.

Maybe the slow adoption rate of W11 is a sign that this still exists?

But it's difficult to break out of your habit, even if you happen to know an alternative is available (Linux or Mac, if you have the money)

@Talon1024
Regarding the Windows 11 adoption, Windows 10 is EOL now (unless you pay) and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before a serious vulnerability surfaces, one that Microsoft will refuse to fix, that will push the last meaningful group over to W11.