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The official EOL for Windows 10 was 2024-10-14. After this date Windows 10 will continue to work, however, according to Microsoft updates have ceased. I have only one Windows machine, and it runs Windows 10 Pro. The hardware is not compatible with W11 and it would not be worth updating. I investigated the possibility of purchasing a mini PIC without an OS and transferring the W10 licence to the machine. I confined my search to local suppliers, and I was not able to come up with a configuration that matched the price of pre-installed bundles.
It seems that the cost per licence for pre-installed bundles must be so low that it is less than the per-unit cost savings of mass production of generic units. I chose an MSI cube that came bundled with Windows 11 Pro, a 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory. I would have preferred 32GB, but the cost of this unit was $999 AUD. I decided to pay the order with Paypal to facilitate delivery. I then recalled that this particular supplier charge a 1% surcharge for using Paypal. I knew there was a reason that I used bank transfer for my last interaction with them, but I had forgotten what it was .. Oh well it was only an additional $9.98 (they rounded down!) ... But there is the psychology of $999 being less than $1,000 ... Yeah I know it's BS ... We still see products advertised at $99, $999, etc. ... Because the BS actually works! Even though we should know better, our big primate brains see three figures and think ... Oh! That's less than four figures ... Then we go back to sleep and dream of climbing a tree and estimating how many berries we picked.
Since it was already installed, I found configuration of the new system relatively easy. It's been a while since I did it, but I seem to recall that the previous W10 installation process tried its damnedest to persuade me to use a Microsoft account, when I setup a new user account. This system accepted that I wanted to add a local user account and took me to a simple setup screen... But that may have been because it had been pre-installed with a local account, whereas my previous attempt with W10 had been a new install from an ISO image, downloaded from MS.
The W11 system had been installed with one account called "user". It had admin privileges, no password and was setup to auto-login. According to the upload history it had been updated with cumulative updates on 2024-09-13. I used that pre-installed admin account to create a new admin account with a password, and made sure that auto-login was disabled. I checked that the new admin account worked and removed the pre-installed admin account.
Networking was straight forward. The W11 networking panel seemed to be the same as the W10 panel and it took a couple minutes to set it up and get connected to the Internet. After I established a connection, I remembered that I wanted to change the hostname. I can't recall the details, but with W10, I found it difficult to change the hostname at that stage. It was all very simple with W11 ... It was easy to change the hostname at any time ... The change seemed to take effect immediately. It may not even have been necessary to reboot, However I did reboot ... As I usually do when making a change to a core network property.
I opened Edge and started entering a query ... I typed the first two letters "do" and Edge prompted me with "download Chrome" ... It's been at least five years since I entered that query into Edge. So it is unlikely that Bing had worked this out from my personal data. It led me to the conclusion that this particular query might be one of the most common entered into Edge on a new Windows machine. Who would have thought? I am pleased that there has been no attempt to suppress the algorithm in Bing ... In addition to this, when I opened Chrome and clicked on "make Chrome the default", control was transferred to a configuration screen which allowed me to do that. I must admit that there were a very large number of mime extensions, each of which had to be changed individually ... If I were cynical, I might comment that it would be far easier to have one button to make Chrome the default for all MIME types ... Also on a couple of occasions Edge has since asked me if I wish to make it the default browser. My overall experience seemed smoother than it had been when I setup W10 for the first time.
I then created a standard (non-admin) user for myself ... I intended to use the admin account only to install software and make changes to the system. I logged on with my Standard user account and set it up with software that I wanted and started connecting my accounts in Chrome.
There was an observation that I made regarding my old Windows machine. I had started it up in order to copy data to the new machine. After I connected the new W11 machine to the network and the Internet, a message had popped up on the W10 machine. I didn't make a note of the exact text ... But it was something along the lines of a new machine being detected and I could click "here" to learn more about connecting with new machines ... There had been no such message for the several new Linux machines which had been added to the same subnet this year.
Many of the setup panels worked in a similar way to the W10 setup. For the past few years I have taken to using the Search box to find items rather than trying to navigate the labyrinthine menu system. I also usually setup my account to be a Standard user account and to have only one Administrator account and a backup Administrator account in case of a SNAFU that nerfs the primary admin account. I only every use the Administrator account for setup and installing new software, and modifying the system environment. There were some things which I found difficult, either because it had been a long time since I did it or because of changes to the navigation in panels in the Windows system. Below are some of the things for which I had to use Google to search for solutions:
Enable NFS Support. =================== Enter "feature" into "Search" Choose "Turn Windows Features on and off" (Requires Admin account password) Check "Services for NFS" Expand the box under that check box Check "Administrative tools" Check "Client for NFS" Edit Environment variables for individual user. =============================================== :: I couldn't find the correct search term for this one ... Login as the user Enter "edit ENV" into "Search" Choose "Edit the environment variables for your account" Enable automatic screen lock. ============================= Open Administrator CMD prompt Enter "secpol.msc" Click "Local Policies" Click "Security Options" Click "Interactive Login: Machine inactivity limit" Enter a value in seconds and click "Apply" Change workgroup ================ :: Open an Administrator command prompt wmic computersystem where name="%computername%" call joindomainorworkgroup name="fubar" :: Reboot the machine Get OS Version from CMD prompt ============================== systeminfo | findstr -B -C:"OS Version" Install openSSH Server ====================== :: Run this command in an Administrator power shell Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server :: After completion check service names: Get-Service -Name *ssh* :: Set the names that were listed to auto start: Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic' Set-Service -Name 'ssh-agent' -StartupType 'Automatic' :: Reboot the machine to make the changes take effect. Set format of the display clock on lock screen to 24 hour ========================================================= Enter "Region" into "Search" Click "Regional Format" Click on "Change formats" Modify "Short time" and "Long time" Obtain information about CPU ============================ Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Processor | Format-List * Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Processor | Format-List * Turn off fast startup ===================== Control Panel->Power Options->Change what the power buttons do Select "Change settings that are currently unavailable" Uncheck the box "Turn on fast startup (recommended)"
The system seemed to boot and download updates quite rapidly. However considering the specs for this new hardware, I would have been disappointed if it had been slow. One annoying feature of W11 is the amount of effort that Microsoft have put into persuading users to use a Microsoft account and to use their new assistant, Co-pilot. The new updates would nag me to switch to a Microsoft account and to enable various Microsoft recommended settings. It also seems that "Edge" (and Co-pilot) have been thoroughly baked in to the "help" system. Overall it seemed that W11 was an enhanced slightly fancier version of W10. This may be a constant feature of updates, and the annoyance would increase if I were a regular Windows user. I was about to close this file and complete setting up my new W11 machine when I made a discovery whilst attempting to alter the colours on my Windows Console ... I then realised that the command prompt was not running in Windows Console. I had not noticed this because up till then I had been using the "Administrator CMD prompt" on the new machine, because I was performing setup and configuration tasks, and the Administrator prompt still runs in the (legacy) Windows console. Microsoft have a (relatively) new terminal emulator called "Windows Terminal". It had been released in 2019 but had flown under my radar. It may have been used mainly by developers and testers. Windows Terminal had been made the default terminal for Windows 11 in 2022. It would have been possible to install it in W10 when it was first released. As it stands, in W11, it has been shipped with options to work with CMD, Powershell, WSL and Azure cloud shell. It may eventually become the default for all Windows systems and the legacy Windows console will be deprecated.
I had experimented with WSL in the past, but decided that alternatives such as MinGW and Cygwin were superior. WSL can be enabled in W11 by using the panel to turn "Windows Features on and off". I almost always setup my Windows desktop to launch Cygwin in mintty and over-ride the path in .bashrc so that all the Cygwin system paths appear first and followed by c:/WINDOWS/system32 so that I can use a few strategic Windows commands from the Cygwin prompt. So for this new machine, I decided to try the reverse approach and add the path c:\Cygwin64\bin to the end of the shell PATH for my account and see how Windows Terminal behaved. All of the Unix executables that I tested worked in the CMD shell along with pipes and redirection. This only applied to the executables with a .exe suffix. Shell builtins such as "alias", "cd", "type" ... or scripts such as "7z", "zgrep", "zless", etc., and other system scripts (usually containing with the /bin/sh shebang) would not work. If you wanted those you would have to use BASH. It would be possible to setup Windows Terminal to BASH as with WSL ... But why bother, when mintty/Cygwin is (IMHO) a superior combination? Still, adding the Cygwin "bin" folder to my path, as I had done, gave me access to most of the Cygwin Unix commands and they worked straight out of the box. This included processes that required a functioning termcap, such as "less", "cal" "man", etc. You would not want to go overboard on using Unix commands in such a system, especially those that returned filenames that would cause CMD to choke. However there are a few handy Windows commands such as "net", "dir" "reg", "ipconfig" or "schtasks" that could be combined with Unix commands such as "awk", "cut", "sed", "grep", or "less", and would be more convenient than using a dedicated sub-system such as WSL which would be using the WSL BASH.
I also discovered that Windows 11 Pro ships with SSH enabled by default. It seemed to be a regular SSH client that stores its keys in %userprofile%\.ssh. The SFTP command line did not include command completion for pathnames, but it might be possible to enable that with some tweaking. It is possible to use this SSH client in Cygwin, however (IMHO) better results can be obtained by installing the Cygwin openSSH package and running it in mintty. There is also an openSSH package that can be obtained for W11 (possibly related to the one that comes with Cygwin), and it has been announced that it will ship as on optional feature in Server 2025 and W11 24H2, both of which are available now now for testing by developers. It has also been announced that these new versions of Windows Server and Pro will include a "sudo" command.