Win11 ain’t so bad after all

I’ve had a 2020 Surface Laptop Go for a couple of years now that I bought for two reasons. The first was to run old VMs that required an Intel processor. The other was for some light computing when friends need me to do something on the computer for them while out and about.

The laptop came with Win10. I upgraded it to 11 once that was available. The immediate downside I saw was the fingerprint reader no longer worked. I use the laptop rarely enough that I never tried to troubleshoot it.

This past week I needed to do some work in Photoshop Elements. My main desktop (running Win10) has had issues with Elements since I reformatted it a couple of years ago. It’s likely an issue with the display driver. The result being that I’m not able to see previews automatically and creating text or working with selections also don’t show in real time.

So for the first time since I bought the laptop I’ve used it extensively. Even though it’s underpowered compared to my desktop, it handled everything nicely. I also took the time to do some customizations to the settings that I never bothered to do before. Preferences like setting the taskbar not to always combine icons and to show text had eluded me in WIn7. They bury those settings deeper in the menu compared to earlier Windows versions.

I enjoyed using tabs in File Explorer, too. It’s very likely I’ll make more use of this laptop going forward.