Experts(?)

Let me just say this... There are far too many people who think and some who have convinced other people to think, that they are experts. Most of these are the most clueless morons on the planet. I'm not going to go into details but you can find most of these "special" individuals writing articles in various newspapers. Enough said? Enough said.

Windows 11

 I've used Windows 11 for over half a year, and have had numerous issues, some user related but some because of the OS itself. So my final thoughts so far, and these are opinions and yours will probably be different, what I like or don't like will most likely be different from your likes or dislikes.:

Pros: The initial look is clean, and finding most stuff in settings is fairly straight forward. Upgrading from 10 to 11 is easy, as is downgrading in case you change your mind. The program list and the start menu is separate.

Cons: Yeah, not many pros. This feels like another ME, VISTA, 8.0, in other words a transitional version. We'd like to have features X,Y,Z but we'll give you A,B,C because we have some kinks to work out.

Having the start button in the centre of the task bar doesn't bother me as much as the start menu itself. I hate that they have that huge "recommends and new apps" section under the actual menu. I get why it's there but I feel it should have been on its own page.

I hate not being able to group my start menu items, although I hear that they will allow icons to be grouped within icons at some later date. Yeah, not the same thing, it's just trying to make up for a menu that cannot be resized or has lost half the real estate to recommends ....

There are so many settings that cannot be accessed through settings, oh but wait! You can get to them through Control panel! Okay, and this is an improvement how? Oh wait! We renamed Administrative tools to Windows tools. You notice this is all under Cons, right?

One note and cloud storage, Okay so cloud is now One Drive™. This is an issue with 10 and 11 now, I don't need it shoved down my throat so quit trying to force me to use it. (See previous article for how I backup my data) I told you this blog would have many rants on it right?

I've been told by Windows 11 fan boys and girls that if I don't like it, don't use it and that's exactly what I've done. I did a full reinstall of Windows 10 pro, bought a key for it (the 10 key is about half the price of an 11 key) updated (This is not an upgrade) my version to 11, still had issues with it and now I am back on Windows 10 pro.

Thank God, my other computer is "too old" for Windows 11, which I will continue to use until end of support, at which time I may upgrade it, recycle it, or install Linux on which will be perfectly fine for what I use it for.

Some of you will love using Windows 11 but for me it's a hard pass for now.

Backup or lose it!

Have you ever had a Hard drive or even worse, a computer completely die with no hope of restoring your data? Hopefully, in the later case, you were able to remove the HDD and restore whatever was on it but if your drive no longer worked, whatever was on it, without resorting to a data recovery company, was probably lost forever.

So, what should you do? You could subscribe to a cloud server, pay their fee and hope they never lose your data or have a breach, exposing you to whoever compromised their systems, or you can perform your own backups on a regular basis. In addition, if your system ever requires a full wipe of whatever is on it, you will already have the tools in place to back up your data before cleaning your storage drive.

Requirements:

Knowledge of where your data exists. 

Somewhere to store your data, other than a drive on your computer.

A little time and patience.

How to proceed:

If you've never created a separate folder for your data, then everything you have will be stored under "/user/(your user name)". Documents, pictures, videos, favorites( if you use Edge) will all be there. Programs won't be but if you have to restore your operating system, you might want to reconsider just reinstalling those programs after the purge. You may not want to save all those folders but at least you can access the folders you want.

You want to save those folders and their contents to an external drive, be it HDD, SATA SSD, NVMe SSD or even something as simple as a USB stick, depending on the amount of data you have. If you have two drives, even better and if one can be stored in a different building, then you are good to go. Remember - Fire, floods or any other disaster can be your enemy too.

If you do have more than one external drive, you might want to copy everything into a temp folder on your main drive, which saves you from having to copy each folder as you come to it, for each drive.

As I don't use HDDs for anything in my computer any more, which may or may not be an option for you, I use older, NVMe drives that I have replaced due to size and speed, placed in an external holder which allows file transfers much faster than transferring to a USB drive. While my USB drives are large enough, they are also very slow, taking up to a half an hour or more to transfer data. The repurposed SSDs take less than a minute for each backup (Yeah, I don't have much data, just pictures and stuff, but it's all stuff I don't want to lose).

This information is for you to use as you see fit, maybe you use the backup provided by windows, or employ a third party, the important thing to remember, is that to keep from losing it, you should have some backup system in place that you can access when needed to rebuild the data on your machine.

 Wow, A new post? It's been a while but it's time to get posting again. It keeps me from ranting... okay, maybe not. I'm going to try and post in the font I am using now as eyes get older, they don't see so good so I'll keep things large. I just wanted to start a post, to show that this isn't dead. Keep smiling!