As the end of Win10 gets closer, I finally bit the bullet and got a new Win11 PC. Part of the fact was that I seem to be the IT guy for our community, which is great. And I was running into a lot of people with new Win11 machines with a number of really weird problems caused by Win11. So I was hesitant to switch.
So how to move my old system over (lots of programs and files and settings and ...)
After reading some reviews looked like EaseUS TODO PCtran was the way to move it all over. And as my system has been upgraded and moved starting from WinXP (maybe before), there were maybe lots of extra partitions, and other garbage. I removed a lot of programs I didn't need, now if I could ever figure out which of the Win C++ Redistributables I need of the 30 that have been installed over the years.
So PCtran did a good job moving stuff over, though I never keep all my files in the /user space, and those had to be moved over by hand.
Good news is it is all up and running, and here I am working with it.
One thing you NEED to do is disable OneDrive. Yeah you get a free 5 GB account, (well if I had it all in Documents I would need 160 GB). Plus trying to sync up all the time really slows down your PC. I can see why Microsoft wants to hook you on a subscription service, but no thanks. OneDrive really makes Win11 a dog.
In the past I had used PCmover (Laplink) and it probably works fine. Its licensing seems to make more sense (no subscription). That would handle all my family moves and those for friends too. But PCtran want to sell a monthly subscription, but that make little sense to me. In many simple cases though RescueZilla to clone (then upgrade to Win 11) and Gparted to expand drive space.
As for other options include Clonezilla, which does it all, though has the features typical of command line Linux. Thankfully someone built a version with a GUI-- RescueZilla, which I successfully used for a couple ports (one whose PC power supply died). I cloned their drive to an SSD and plugged it into an old PC (really old 10 year old i3-6100) so they could limp along until they could get a replacement PC. It turns out their system was already Win11, they were not sure, and when I plugged it into a "non Win-11 compatable" PC, guess what it booted up. I am sure any update will barf, but an interesting work around.
RescueZilla easily clones disk drives, and once you get it booted up, you can also use it to expand partitions using GParted. And the price is right. The only "hard" thing is using Balena to build a bootable USB and install the .iso file. Not really that hard. My hats off to those open source guys building on a USB bootable Linux.
Even better news is all the BASICtools and MakeItC run fine, even install fine (better than before)
Getting use to Win11
- Hmmm, Win 11 does not like USB 2.0 hubs -- hey MS get your act together
- Start button. start search in the middle (couldn't figure out how to power down without a quick Google) same place, just in the middle
- History of access clicking in search box -- seems useful
- What's happening page in lower left -- may start to use it
- moving things to the Task bar has duplicate entries when you use one of them -- that seems wrong -- why not just show the count, I can still right click for more
- Dump OneDrive -- use Google Drive, Git for share workspace, or is DropBox still around?
- Until I get use to the central search start, I will be using the Windows - R keys.
- Frankly not all that different than Win11 -- short learning curve, but seems to be trying to be iOS like.
- Daily diary page -- neat, but needed??? Actually I miss the old what's new on the web from Yahoo maybe eons ago.
- Sadly had to give up PCPaint which I use for quick picture hacks, Paint is close enough so I'll live.
- Don't know if I will ever use the tiling option (take mouse to the top of the screen). but then again I have to big monitors in front of me here at the desk.
- Yikes after years of removing "apps" in setting it is back to "programs" which it should have been all along. Had to find it.
- One reason why I switched was to get support for running Android apps, too bad they cut off support 2 days before I installed, back to BlueWhatever
- Had to SHIFT-restart and then boot without driver signing, which allowed my DSlab logic analyzer to run, as a side effect my old but reliable HL-5250 driver configured -- yeah
- We have rotating snake rather than dots on startup -- marketing must have switched that as people got tired of seeing it take forever on older hardware