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G'day Fellow Members!

Since you must know by now that Windows 11 version dev: OS BUILD: 21996.1 has been leaked online and tons of reviews already floating around so i'll give my personal review on it

I do a ton of testing on my vmware when it comes to different OS's such as Linux/Mac/Windows even older to compare them to the newer versions (more reviews on those later)

Some of you may just see it as a polished version of windows 10

Some little differences are Widgets (need microsoft account to see) and polished User Interface, no more tiles like windows 8

To give you an example of what the widget looks like just have to look at windows 10's new version of 21H1 to get an idea top stories weather etc.

What i do like about the version

1) When installing it gives you the option for an "offline account" so that's a plus
2) Got rid of the tiles look that came from windows 8 and integrated windows 10
3) Has Light/Dark Options available
4) Few other minor details but not much under the hood has changed it's still a windows 10 OS just polished a little better

Of course i don't mind the tiles look, as this is still a dev version, would be nice to have that option back as it was pretty good for sorting out applications and that for easy quick access

Remember folks this is still a dev so no way to know what microsoft will add to the final version once they start rolling it out

For now windows 10 will be supported to 2025
Windows 10 Home and Pro: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecy ... me-and-pro

Screenshots taken on my vmware

Good to see this review.

having been through the betas and dev editions I bit the bullet and downloaded and installed the full released version from MS. Went well , activated all good but a few things were not rite. Right click menu was borked, some file associations weird. played for a day in registry and came close to fixing it. bit the bullet and re download a new image using MS creation tool. Another clean install and wow , everything working as expected.
Applied a few fixed to stop video driver crashing when coming out of sleep (an amd thing) and updated chipset drivers.
All working amazingly fast and the kicker was it came with drivers for my 8 Yo raid card which the last 2 versions of windows didn't.
AMD 3600 system on a b550 board

My experience with Windows 11 was mixed. Getting onto my PC was the first hurdle. Its windows 10 pro encrypted which caused the system to go dark and non responsive during install. It lost its ability to find any drive... and to top it off during the first reboot sequence HP had scheduled a BIOS upgrade. At first I thought the BIOS upgrade had failed and "bricked" the system but after playing around I found it was indeed Windows 11 install not dealing with the encryption properly.
Once I got it sorted and into Windows 11 I found little to rave about. Nothing wrong with it, just nothing that 'functionality wise' was any improvement over Windows 10. In fact I thought some of its file or windows explorer functions were less intuitive and a bit clunky.
Since then I have actually upgraded my physical PC, which came with Windows 10 and have decided to stick with that for as long as possible or safe to do so. Or at least until a Windows 11 is a bit more polished. Kinda like I did when moving from windows 7 to 10.