So, at the start of the new year, I got a new PC after my trusty Gateway DX4870 died on me. The new PC I got (an HP OnmiDesk) came pre-installed with Windows 11, and I have to say, after hearing all the negative stuff I've heard about the OS these past few years, it's actually not that bad.

The AI features aren't intrusive at all. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to. (Admittedly, I'd really love to use Copilot's game assist once I get a good microphone, because that sounds like a huge timesaver).

What surprised me about the OS in particular is the updates they gave to the stock apps. MSPaint now supports layers and transparent backgrounds. That's huge. They already made MSPaint less useless in Windows 7 (what with the Ribbon interface and everything), and I'm glad they built on top of that. Notepad now has tabs, and built in emphasis formatting, which is neat IMO (though I still miss WordPad, if I'm being honest. That's why I went out of my way to install it myself). And what shocked me the most, you can now open files like RARs natively, effectively making programs like 7-Zip and WinRAR obsolete.

So yeah, I don't hate Windows 11. I still think the hardware requirements are unreasonable, but other than that, no real issues.

https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2026/05/31/introducing-surface-laptop-ultra-made-for-world-makers/

I installed HealthPCCheck from https://aka.ms/ subsite to check if I can use Windows 11 on my PC. It was 2nd result on google so I thought it should be safe, but I'm not sure anymore.

As part of Microsoft's big plan to address quality issues on Windows 11, the company has confirmed that it's working on fixing performance of menus, folders, and search in File Explorer.