I’ve always Really disliked the Windows 10 setup process, whether installing fresh or more often upgrading. After the 1st restart it always seems hard to tell if setup is proceeding normally, or if it’s stalled, which has happened to me all too frequently – too often for me to feel confident enough to just walk away and let it do its thing. [I added a hard disk activity light to my new case because I rely on it so much to hint whether things like Windows setup have died or are still working.] An admittedly subjective observation, Win11’s setup seems much improved… yes, there are still times when all you see is a black screen with the maddening ring of rotating dots, but it seems like those times are fewer and don’t last as long. Installing Win11 fresh, rather than upgrading an already installed copy of Windows, also seems to noticeably improve Win11’s performance. Installed fresh on a conventional hard drive, it seems much more responsive, snappier, than a copy that was upgraded from Win10 *on a Very Fast NVMe drive* [both copies only have 7-zip & Macrium Reflect Free installed].
The backstory [or why I was silly enough to install a fresh copy of Win11] … sometimes you win – sometimes you lose – and upgrading my wife’s PC, it was half & half as far as Windows was concerned. I like to have 2 copies of Windows on our PCs – one’s left pretty bare, without much software, and eliminates about 90% of the reasons to ever use a bootable USB stick/drive, while also being faster, e.g., creating/restoring an image backup. I switched the SSD with the main copy of Win10 from MBR to GPT, made it UEFI bootable [it had been booting using Legacy mode or CSM], and migrated Win10 from Intel to AMD hardware. And everything went surprisingly well. Then I turned my attention to that 2nd, bare copy of Win10, and it wouldn’t work. I tried a few things, but it was soon apparent I’d spend far more time fixing it [assuming I was successful] than it would take to simply reinstall Windows. And if I was going to install Windows, which I dislike, might as well install Win11, & not have to upgrade that copy of Win10 in the near future.
On a side note, purely FWIW, the retail market is a bit strange right now, with companies facing all sorts of shortages, making this holiday’s seasonal sales harder to predict. Next year’s prices are also uncertain – a while back the experts at that sort of thing predicted RAM price increases that so far haven’t seemed to happen, so predictions of increasing prices because of the chip shortage may not come true either. When it comes to PC hardware, CPUs used to be somewhat frequently on sale at several competing outlets – now those reduced prices are rare, but the size of the discount may be 2x or 3x what we’ve seen in the past, e.g., I’ve Never seen a CPU for around $60 off, and this fall I’ve seen it 4 times. Older generations were available at a discount, but no longer – I felt I had to hurry and buy a motherboard supporting the Ryzen 2700 I was going to use for my wife’s PC, because that previous generation chipset was being closed out. Older generation CPUs are already rare, with many going for scalper’s prices. On the bright side RAM & hard drive prices have held steady, though SSDs are generally up a bit, and I’m seeing a few good sales on power supplies [up to 50% - 60% off]. Intel’s new CPUs will be out shortly, but *decent* sale prices on the old models may never happen – the new motherboards are going to be Expensive, and they’ll need [the still unfinished] Win11 to perform up to specs.
