The Little Improvements in Windows 11 That No One is Talking About (Premium)

In writing the Windows 11 Field Guide, I came across something unexpected: Microsoft has fixed some of the most troubling issues with Windows 10. And not only did it never tell anyone, but no one seems to have even noticed.

I think I can explain why.

In Microsoft’s case, highlighting these specific positive changes it made in Windows 11 would only draw attention to the fact that Windows 10 was (and still is) serving up users a regular heaping portion of crap.

And in the case of reviewers, analysts, and users, Windows 11 presents enough issues---the arbitrary hardware requirements and the insane Microsoft account/Internet requirements chief among them---that its critics simply have bigger fish to fry. It’s hard to notice or even care about the small things when there are bigger and more obvious issues.

But writing these books, as I do, forces me to examine every nook and cranny in Windows. And writing a mostly new book, like the Windows 11 Field Guide, requires me to look at what I wrote before and ensure that the new book covers everything important. It’s not a true superset: yes, there is new information and content in the new book, as you might expect, lots of it. But I’m also trying to cull content that is less important or necessary. And, of course, some content is no longer relevant: there are features in Windows 10 that are no longer available in Windows 11. Like live tiles in the Start menu.

While I’m trying to write most of the new book from scratch, there is obviously content from the Windows 10 Field Guide that needs to come forward and be adapted for the new system. There are various reasons for this, but for the topic at hand, it’s simple enough: it would be tedious and error-prone to start over with this content, and I want to get it right.

The content in question is a section in the Personalize chapter from the previous book. There’s no Personalize chapter in the new book. Instead, I’ve split that content into various other chapters. You can learn about customizing the Desktop in the Desktop chapter now, for example. And there are new chapters like customizing privacy settings (which is also a complex and tedious thing to rewrite).

The new chapter in question was called Eliminate the Biggest Windows 11 Annoyances. And I write was there because there’s no need for it anymore. In the Windows 10 Field Guide, this was how I opened the Personalize chapter because the settings changes I suggest there are so important: Microsoft, as noted, bogs down Windows 10 with an astonishing amount of crap and other interruptions, and I don’t want readers to miss out on disabling it all.

Naturally, I assume all or most of the content from that section would apply to Windows 11. And so I added that chapter to the table of contents, leaving it blank until I got to it. Which I did, yesterday. And imagine my surprise: most of that crap is not present in Windows 11 at all. And the few things that are, aren...