Should You Test Windows 11 Yet? (Premium)

I was running Windows 11 on all of my daily-use PCs before Microsoft even released the first official preview, and I’ve continued to expand its use since. But of course, I’m going to do this. Windows isn’t just a career for me, it’s an obsession of sorts. The question here is whether you should be testing Windows 11 right now.

There are two ways to answer that, and the first is as obvious as it is snarky: If you have to ask, no, you shouldn’t be testing Windows 11 yet. You should wait until a more polished and feature-complete build appears, perhaps in the Windows Insider Program’s Beta channel. That release will allegedly occur later this month, so you shouldn’t have too long of a wait.

But the second, more nuanced, answer goes like this: It depends. And on a variety of factors.

The first is your ability to cope with instability. Looking back over my weeks of experience with Windows 11, I can identify exactly one major instability issue, and it’s been a killer for me: File Explorer hangs repeatedly, forcing me to bring up Task Manager and restart the explorer.exe process.

Doing so solves the problem, instantly. But it also closes all of my File Explorer windows. And that’s when this problem flares up the most, when I have multiple File Explorer windows open. This past week, for example, I’ve been finalizing the Windows 10 Field Guide so that I can move on to the Windows 11 Field Guide, and this requires me to have multiple File Explorer windows open: One for the manuscript folder, one for the current chapter’s images folder, and one for the NAS-based public folder to which screenshots from a second PC are deposited. There’s something about this combination of folders being open that triggers a File Explorer hang every 20-30 minutes. It was an infuriating weekend. (But I did finish the last major Windows 10 Field Guide content update, so there’s that.)

The second factor is your ability to cope with inconsistency, and in this case, I’m referring to the experience across different PCs. Here, too, I’ll point to the File Explorer example, because this problem has cropped up on every portable PC with which I’ve used Windows 11, including an ARM-based HP Elite Folio and an Intel Evo-based HP EliteBook 14. But I have never once experienced this problem on my current desktop PC, an HP Z2 SFF workstation. And I have no idea why.

The third factor is the most subjective of issues, whether you find the Windows 11 user interface to be attractive. This seems to be a contentious issue in the Windows enthusiast community, with some outright in love with the new UI and others anxious for the inevitable third-party utilities that will put everything back where it was in Windows 10. Those utilities are already appearing, as are the Registry-based settings that enable them to work. But I would simply ask that the Windows 11 deniers to give it a chance, and that you shouldn’t let your initial reaction to the ...

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