Windows 11 review: An unnecessary replacement for Windows 10

At a glanceExpert’s Rating
ProsFresh new lookInitial installation is clean and purposefulSettings menu is even more usefulStore overhaul looks greatSnap View offers more organizational optionsWidgets offers info you may want to haveConsTaskbar, Start reworkings don’t benefit usersTeams Chat is unnecessary and potentially obtrusiveLocal “offline” accounts require Windows 11 ProInstalling another browser is nearly prohibitiveSeveral major features aren’t here yetThe TPM issueOur VerdictA decidedly mixed bag of improved features and unnecessary changes. Windows 11 will undoubtedly improve over time, but it’s a very polarizing upgrade that many users will want to forgo for now.

Windows 11 doesn’t convincingly answer the question every PC user should ask: Why do I need this upgrade? The new operating system repurposes some of Microsoft’s cancelled Windows 10X code, but lacks the unified vision that 10X promised.

In some ways, Windows 11 feels very much like a product of 2020. Last year, we often felt we had to do something, and for some very good reasons, but without a real sense of the way ahead. And so goes Windows 11. Aesthetically, Windows 11 sacrifices productivity for personality, but without cohesion. A new Start menu seems designed for enterprises. A hyperactive Widgets app pushes celebrity gossip. Teams Chat asks you to reorganize your social circles around Microsoft.

Yes, you’ll find things within Windows 11 worth applauding: the initial installation experience, a redesigned Settings menu, Tips, and some improved Windows apps. Under-the-hood performance improvements will collaborate with gaming enhancements like DirectStorage and AutoHDR…eventually. For now, however, most users will probably want to forgo the update from Windows 10.

Windows 11 is a choice, not a process

Windows 11 will be a free upgrade to Windows 10, which some compatible PCs will have access to on or around Oct. 5. (Microsoft says it will take until mid-2022 for the update to be made available to all eligible computers.) What’s important to remember is that with Windows 10, mid-cycle feature updates like moving from the Windows 10 May 2020 Update to the Windows 10 October 2020 Update usually occurs within a month or so of when Microsoft begins pushing the new feature update to PCs. You can delay the update, but not for very long.

With Windows 11, users have much more free will. On or around Oct. 5, you’ll be offered a choice to upgrade to Windows 11, or remain on Windows 10. If you choose to accept it, you can. But you can also decline the update, and remain on Windows 10 until 2025 or so, when support for Windows 10 expires. The decision to upgrade to Windows 11 is a real choice, and one you should consider carefully.

Here’s a Microsoft-provided example of how you’ll be asked to upgrade to Windows 11, as part of the Windows 10 Settings menu. Note that you can “stay on Windows 10 for now,” too.Mark Hachman / IDG

How long that choice will be available isn’t known. Even if you upgrade to Windows 11, you should have an option to “roll back” to Windows 10—a ten-day window, according to information that Microsoft has circulated to its customers.

And that all assumes that your PC will be able to receive Windows 11, too. Windows 11 arrives with some very strict hardware requirements for PCs that can run Windows 11, essentially requiring the latest Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology as well as a recently released computer processor. Microsoft has the best of intentions here. In order to provide a secure, managed PC, Microsoft’s Windows 11 code must sync up with specific PC hardware. But those hardware restrictions have also proven to be an enormous controversy in their own right.

We reviewed Windows 11 on three PCs, including the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (Ice Lake), running Windows 11 Pro, as well as the Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ tablet, also running Windows 11 Pro. A third device, the Surface Laptop 4, ran Windows 11 Home. We began our formal review process with Windows 11 Insider Build 22000.184 (21H2), part of the Windows Insider Beta Channel, with the intention of monitoring it up through the formal release date of October 5. (Microsoft moved the Dev Channel of Windows 11 to future builds of Windows 11, with code that will not be released as part of the October 5 launch.)

Windows 11 Pro versus Windows 11 Home

Windows 11 will ship in two different editions for home use. Windows 11 Pro and Windows 11 Home will each receive major feature updates just once per year, rather than twice. (Windows 11 Home in S Mode will also be available, though we haven’t tested it.) It appears that Windows 11 Pro will leave the functional differences between Windows 10 Home and Pro intact, offering features like BitLocker encryption, Hyper-V virtualization, Remote Desktop Connection, and Windows Sandbox.

Windows Sandbox (running Windows 11) and a Hyper-V virtual machine (running Windows 10), all running on top of Windows 11 Pro. If this isn’t of interest, consider using Windows 11 Home instead of Windows 11 Pro.Mark Hachman / IDG

Though we didn’t try out Windows 11’s Remote Desktop Connection, we confirmed that the Hyper-V virtualization capabilities worked, generally. Windows 11 was unable to find an Ubuntu ISO that Hyper-V downloaded, but it opened and installed a saved Windows 10 build just fine. Windows 11 also opens a copy of Windows 11 (rather than Windows 10) with Windows Sandbox, a nifty—though we suspect little-used—virtualized OS that you can use to surf the gray areas of the Web. In all, the reasons to upgrade (or not) to Windows 10 Pro seem to carry over into Windows 11 Pro.

There’s a significant new reason to consider Windows 11 Pro now, however. The Windows 11 Pro edition will be the only edition to allow local accounts, which Microsoft now calls “offline” accounts. Windows 11 Home requires you to initially sign in with a Microsoft account. We’ll talk about this a bit more in the next section. This potentially makes upgrading to Windows 11 a pricey hassle for people already using local accounts, however. If you own a Windows 10 Home PC, and you want nothing to do with a Microsoft account, it appears you’ll need to pay $99 to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, and then on to Windows 11 Pro.




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Windows 11’s installation experience

Both of our test PCs used an in-place upgrade to test Windows 11, which means that we didn’t get to fully experience the Windows 11 installation process, or the “out of the box experience (OOBE),” as Microsoft characterizes it. Instead, we installed the Windows 11 ISO via a virtual machine to see how that process plays out. 

While this is midway through the installation process, the excellent Windows 11 “Out of the Box Experience” is both welcoming and informative, introducing you to the key features of Windows 11 while you wait.Mark Hachman / IDG

In general, installing Windows 11 feels very similar to installing Windows 10, though with a rather lovely, streamlined installation process guiding you throughout. For example, Microsoft eliminated overt options to install Microsoft 365, Cortana, and Your Phone during the setup process—at least as part of the setup process we tried out, anyway. Microsoft has tried out “personalized” setup processes before, which means that yours may be slightly different.

The most significant change is the elimination of local or “offline” accounts within Windows 10 Home—a fact that we were told in July and appears still to be the case.  At present, Windows 11 Home PCs must be set up and administered with a Microsoft account, though local accounts can also be added later for additional users.

To enable local accounts as part of the initial setup, you’ll need to install Windows 11 Pro, either via an in-place upgrade from Windows 10 or a clean installation. During the setup process, you’ll be prompted for your Microsoft account information. Simply click the “sign-in options” link instead. The next page will offer you the option to sign in with an offline account.

We need to be clear: the “router trick” that Windows 10 allowed has vanished. Windows 11 Home doesn’t even offer you the option of proceeding without connecting to a network, and then doesn’t allow you to bypass the account login screen, either. Windows 11 Pro does.

Windows 11 Pro doesn’t advertise that you can log in with a local account, but the option is hidden within “Sign-in options,” just below where Microsoft passively encourages you to sign in with a Microsoft account. Windows 11 Home asks for your PC to be connected to the Internet, and then asks for a Microsoft account to administer the PC.Mark Hachman / IDG

(While Windows 11 tolerates local offline accounts, expect to see numerous little passive-aggressive nags here and there to “change to a Microsoft [or “online”] account.” Incidentally, you’re perfectly free to go online with an “offline” account. You simply won’t be able to access Microsoft services like OneDrive cloud storage, which is keyed to your Microsoft account.)




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The time in which Windows 11 will install depends on a few factors: whether you’re performing an upgrade or a clean installation, the speed of your PC, whether your PC has an SSD or a hard drive, the speed of your Internet connection, and so on. Installing Windows 11 onto a new virtual machine required about 25 minutes or so, including installation, reboots, and updates. As always, we’d recommend backing up key files and so on (either locally or in the cloud) before upgrading your operating system.

Microsoft smartly uses the installation process as an opportunity to familiarize you with some of the key new features in Windows 11 while the process completes. When it’s done, you’re dropped into Windows 11 proper.

If you’re still a little nervous, Windows 11 provides a second introductory app, called Get Started, which happens to be the only “Recommended” document in the Start menu after Windows 11 is installed. Get Started is surprisingly good, offering you another overview of what’s new—a pointer to OneDrive, for example, or a list of suggested apps in the Microsoft Store—but Microsoft doesn’t promote it at all, at least in the builds we tested. We’d recommend clicking through Get Started, and then opening up the Tips app if you need further instruction. All in all, there’s quite a bit of help within Windows 11 if you need it.

The Get Started app serves as an introduction as well as a guide to new features. Clicking the app listing here, for example, opens up the Microsoft Store app so that you can download an app like Netflix.Mark Hachman / IDG

(We haven’t yet seen the popup Windows 11 tips that Microsoft informed us of, but there’s a control in Settings > Accessibility > Narrator > Verbosity that may control it.)

During our in-person demonstration of the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Surface, Pete Kyriacou, said that the laptop’s camera now can distinguish you and log you in even with a hat, glasses, or even a surgical mask. Kyriacou calls this Windows Hello 2.0. As far as we know, Windows Hello 2.0 may be limited to that particular device. Still, Windows Hello was one of the standout features of Windows 10, and the very first way in which you interact with Windows each morning. Now, Microsoft may be readying its successor for Windows 11.

Finally, there’s an intriguing option that you can manage within Windows: Device Usage, which is controlled via the Settings app. In Windows 10, you had the option of telling Windows what you were going to use it for. This is now formally part of Windows 11, and you can select one or more of a number of use cases for your PC. These generally control what sort of suggested apps and tips you’ll see. In certain cases, such as gaming, you may be presented with special offers such as a month of Xbox Game Pass.

These Device Usage options are all off by default.Mark Hachman / IDG

Taskbar

Out of the box, you’re faced with the most significant UI change in Windows 11: the updated Start menu and Taskbar. Both feel like a step backward, robbing the user of some functionality as well as visual appeal. 

Let’s take the Taskbar, for example. Your first glimpse of Windows 11 is a row of attractive, minimalist icons centered at the bottom of your screen. In Windows 11, you can hide the Taskbar, but you can’t resize or move it elsewhere on the screen—a potentially significant issue on low-DPI screens found on cheaper laptops, where screen space is a priority. Want to use smaller icons? Windows 10 allows this; Windows 11 does not. Within Windows 10, you have the option to use labels instead of taskbar icons; Windows 11 eliminates this, forcing you to parse the new icons blindly. Other small annoyances include locking the clock to the Taskbar on only your primary display, leaving you to wonder why Microsoft thinks it necessary to leave a large swathe of your desktop untouched on your secondary monitors.

The Taskbar widens as more apps are opened within Windows 11, pushing to the Start button further and further to the left. Horizontal lines underneath the icons indicate how many windows are available to each app, but numeric badges are also used for email.Mark Hachman / IDG

A small but vocal portion of the Internet also has complained bitterly about Microsoft eliminating drag-and-drop functionality from the Windows 11 Taskbar. In Windows 10, you can drag a file onto an open File Explorer folder, for example, and it will simply drop in. Other apps work similarly. I don’t use this feature myself, but others swear by it.

Naturally, one of the most common tasks while using the Taskbar is to launch the Start menu, and here too Microsoft falls short. By default, the Windows 11 Taskbar’s icons are center-justified, expanding outwards as you open more apps and Windows adds more icons. But the Start menu icon now appears to the left of the icons.

In Windows 10, muscle memory tells you that the Start menu can always be launched by moving your cursor down to the lower left-hand corner. In Windows 11, it’s always…somewhere down to the left, and it’s distracting trying to find it. To be fair, you can configure Windows 11 to push the centered Taskbar apps to the left, placing the Start icon back in its familiar lower-left location. That is not the default however. (You can also still use Win + R or just the Win key to search for/launch apps, as I do.)

You can left-justify the Windows 11 Taskbar to push it more in line with the traditional Start menu.Mark Hachman / IDG

Finally, Microsoft has largely done away with its explicit tablet-mode UI shifts. If you own a Windows 11 tablet and detach the keyboard, the taskbar icons will simply automatically space themselves a bit further apart to make them easier to interact with. Windows 11 will also display a small keyboard icon in the taskbar to allow you to touch-type, too. 

The new Start menu

Instead of a lively, reconfigurable Start menu filled with colorful tiles, Windows 11 adopts the rather plain look of Windows 10X, the would-be Chromebook killer that Microsoft canned in May. 

Windows 11’s Start menu is simply a collection of rather simplistic icons, seemingly at random, with a list of “Recommended” (or, to be more accurate, “Most recent”) documents at the bottom. Within Start, two small buttons (“All apps” and “More”) open up to a list of alphabetically arranged apps and a longer list of documents in a separate screen. Microsoft also put a search box at the top of the Start menu, which simply opens up the Search app to the right of the Start icon on the taskbar. It all feels singularly uninspired, dull, and slightly depressing, like a store shelf of prepackaged sandwiches or 1970s architecture.

Windows 11’s Start menu represents a sharp break from Windows 10, doing away with Live Tiles and limiting the way in which you can group pinned apps. Recently accessed apps and documents appear below in the “Recommended” box. Note the small “All apps” button at the top…Mark Hachman / IDG

The Start menu also feels functionally worse than Windows 10. While the “pinned” apps at the top of the Start menu can at least be manually moved around, Windows 11 does not allow the pinned apps to be alphabetized, grouped, or even put into folders, as with Windows 10. (Apps can only be “moved to the top,” which is just sort of sad.) A miniscule pair of dots to the right side of the app drawer is supposed to visually indicate that you can scroll down to find more apps. Good luck figuring that out! Finally, the Start menu as a whole cannot be resized, and there’s no full-screen option.

…which leads you to the “All apps” overflow menu. Install an app, and it will land in this list first. Right now, this is the only area in Windows 11’s Start menu where you can create an app folder.Mark Hachman / IDG

Can you right-click on an app on the Taskbar and pin it to your Start menu? Nope. Installed apps drop into the “All apps” overflow menu within Start, and only from there can you then pin it to Start’s pinned apps. I was at least able to save an Office.com document as an app and save it directly to the pinned apps, but trying to pin Slack to the Start menu’s pinned apps required fishing it out of the “All apps” overflow menu. Pinning a webpage from Edge almost requires its own tutorial. And I spent far too long trying to find where Windows 11 had hidden our corporate VPN app—I finally found it, not as a standalone listing, but inside a folder in the overflow menu which had been alphabetized under the developer’s name. 

Confused? OK, now imagine actually using Windows 11. 

Notifications and Action Center

In Windows 10, the lower right-hand corner of your screen is known as the Action Center, and each little icon is clickable. Not so in Windows 11, which groups the icons into two clickable “buttons,” each of which can be seen when you hover over them with the mouse. (To the left of those icons is the taskbar’s overflow menu, which hides icons like OneDrive, Windows Security, and others behind a caret menu.) As you may have intuited from our discussion of the Taskbar, Notifications and the Action Center are only accessible from the primary or active display.

The Windows 11 Action Center. In Windows 10, the Action Center is kind of a mess; in Windows 11, it all looks neat and tidy. The small care menu to the right of the volume slider allows you to pick your preferred audio output.Mark Hachman / IDG

In Windows 10, the Action Center hides all sorts of useful little functions, including VPN options, screen snip, the ability to connect to other screens and devices, and so on. In Windows 11, this has been pared down considerably, to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggles, Airplane mode, a Battery saver mode, Focus assist, and an Accessibility menu. You still have the option to add functions like Nearby Sharing, the blue-light blocking Night Light, and more, but you’ll have to manually add them by clicking the tiny little “pencil” icon at the very bottom of the Action Center.

Notifications provide a summary column of alerts that Windows and other apps send: new email, upcoming meetings, and so on. Oddly, in Windows 11 part of this column has now been replaced by a non-functional calendar. Want to add an event to your personal calendar? In Windows 10, a small pane allows you to do this. In Windows 11, that pane is gone, and right-clicking or double-clicking a date does absolutely nothing to what is basically a bit better than wasted space.

If Microsoft could do something with the calendar below, we’d chalk this up as a win for Microsoft. As it is, it’s wasted space. Fortunately, the caret menu to the right of the date can minimize it.Mark Hachman / IDG

To be fair, in Windows 11 notifications seem to be organized far more usefully than within Windows 10. That may be because the calendar reduces the available screen space for notifications, forcing Microsoft to be economical.

Revamped Windows Settings menu

I don’t really like how Microsoft scatters buttons throughout the Windows shell to point users to overflow menus like the Start menu’s “More apps.” In the redesigned Settings menu, however, Microsoft uses these buttons, drop-down menus, and “breadcrumb” navigation (placing, for example, a clickable System>Sound>Properties at the top of the screen) so that you can navigate back and forth) to much better effect. 

That’s good, because Settings now oversees a ton of information. Yes, it can feel a trifle overwhelming in places as you dig down through layers of menus. A search box to the upper left helps here, with dynamically generated results as you type.

The front page of the Windows 11 Settings menu. There are some nice touches here: the desktop theme at the top of the page, and the status of OneDrive and Windows updates. Microsoft has had years to refine the Settings menu, and it shows.Mark Hachman / IDG

Settings also does away with the overarching Settings index page found in Windows 10, launching directly from within Settings > System, with direct shortcuts to Display, Sound, Notifications, and other pages. This does away with an additional click, though it’s a bit disconcerting to be dropped right into a Settings section. At the top, you’ll see the current theme or background you’ve set within Windows, too. If your Windows 11 desktop background is dark, you may see Windows 11 automatically enable Dark Mode.

Windows 11’s Settings menu hides little goodies like Game Mode, a toggle that allows Windows to turn off unnecessary tasks while playing a game—including Windows updates and restarts!—and smooths frame rates by default. (We didn’t test this latter function in Windows 11 yet, but it sometimes proved invaluable in Windows 10.) I also like the visual representation of Windows 11’s battery consumption, which sort of reproduces the Command Line command powercfg /batteryreport and its graphical report of your laptop’s power usage. This is also where the performance slider is hidden, by the way, to get more performance out of Windows 11.

This is a nerdy little screen within Settings. At the top, you can adjust what was formerly referred to as the Windows 10 power/performance slider. The bottom graphic of battery levels would be more interesting and informative if our test laptop had run on battery power. This would be a great place to put a “time to empty” estimate of your PC’s battery life, too.Mark Hachman / IDG

There’s still cruft. Do I really need to download offline maps and manage them? Has Windows Update’s Delivery Optimization ever worked? Why is Windows Security still its own separate menu, and not just part of Settings? And yes, the Control Panel still exists, too. There’s just far less reason to visit these days.

The Win+X “power menu” remains within Windows 11.Mark Hachman / IDG

Search, Cortana, and Timeline

Windows 10 launched with helpful assistant Cortana perched next to a dedicated search box designed to search both your PC and the web for whatever you were looking for. Over the past six years, Cortana has faded away, relegated to a semi-functional app that really doesn’t do all that much any more. Cortana isn’t even one of the pinned Windows 11 apps!

Instead, Microsoft has scattered search bars around Windows 11 seemingly willy-nilly There’s a Search icon on the taskbar, and a search box at the top of the Start menu, and another at the top of the new Widgets pane, which we’ll talk about later. Only the former two search your PC; the latter only searches the Web, using the Bing search engine by default. It doesn’t matter whether you use the Search app or the Start menu, or even the search box that appears when you hover your mouse over the Search icon on the taskbar, however. You’ll end up in the Search app regardless.

There are Search boxes all over Windows 11. Here’s one just above the Search icon on the Taskbar.Mark Hachman / IDG

To its credit, Search does a solid job of listing relevant apps, documents, web results, and more to match your search terms. Search also dynamically searches as you type, which speeds up the process. Nevertheless, it all still feels somewhat incoherent.

Next to the Search icon is Task View, which hasn’t changed much from Windows 10. Task View and the Alt + Tab functionality still overlap considerably. The Alt + Tab functionality shows all of the windows that you have open, including the option to include the most recent 3 or 5 tabs within Edge. Microsoft introduced Task View in Windows 10 as a way to shift between arrangements of various windowed apps on laptops and other single-screen devices. It’s still an excellent tool for working on the road, but you might not find it as useful when your PC has access to multiple physical monitors.

The Windows 11 Search box looks very similar to Windows 10’s Search function.Mark Hachman / IDG

What doesn’t come with Task View is the Timeline function, which tracked which documents and Web pages that you’d used as a way of picking up where you left off on multiple PCs. Timeline is somewhat preserved within the shared browser history within Microsoft Edge—if you use Edge—but the lack of Timeline has prompted howls of sorrow from some corners of PCWorld. 

Teams Chat

After the death of My People, Microsoft’s latest effort to connect you with your friends via your PC is Chat (sometimes referred to as Teams Chat), which lives in your Taskbar right next to the File Explorer folder icon. It’s slow, unnecessary, and the privacy implications are somewhat unsettling, too. We’re not sure you’ll want anything to do with it.

Windows 11 Teams Chat offers quick shortcuts to friends to either chat with them or initiate a video call…Mark Hachman / IDG

Chat expects you to manage your personal life via the personal Microsoft Teams experience Microsoft launched earlier this year, via a separate mobile app and now Windows 11. During setup, the app asks you to log in and connect your Microsoft account to any Outlook.com and Skype.com contacts, then provides you a Teams-like interface to hold chats, launch video calls, and so forth. Upon clicking the Chat icon a second time, a list of frequently-accessed contacts appears, with shortcuts to perform chats and make video calls.

The transition from the Chat icon to the fuller Teams experience required several seconds to complete, and that experience felt very simplistic and slow. I have concerns on several fronts. First, anyone who has your linked email and/or phone number can message you—there’s no global “do not disturb” feature, and you can’t simply delete your profile in Teams to make yourself non-discoverable. Yes, you can remove your email or phone number from your Microsoft account to hide yourself, but why should you? Why does managing your presence in Teams require downloading the mobile app? It also seems a bit arrogant to expect that Microsoft thinks we’ll drop our own established networks of messaging apps to migrate them all to Teams. It’s this last point that will likely doom Teams Chat, eventually.

Part of the problem, though, is that Teams would ask my father, who communicates with me via text, to join Teams. That seems unreasonable to ask of friends and family.Mark Hachman / IDG

Widgets

Widgets is one of the major new additions within Windows 11, a gargantuan drawer of news and information that slides out from the left-hand-side of the screen at the click of its Taskbar icon. Like many other things in Windows 11, the Widgets drawer isn’t resizeable.

I’m torn on the concept of Widgets. As a journalist and hungry news consumer, I love that I can pop out Widgets, see relevant Windows Start news and information, and review my Outlook calendar, see Windows tips, photos, and more. I also appreciated the Cortana-powered summary of your day that originally appeared in Windows 10. In a not-so-strange way, Widgets is simply the “Live” in Windows 10’s Live Tiles, relegated to its own corner of Windows. It’s as if someone at Microsoft said, “Let’s separate what makes Windows fun from what makes Windows practical, and assign them their own locations.”

Windows 11 Widgets: useful or a distraction? You decide.Mark Hachman / IDG

But from a user’s perspective, Widgets can be a distraction, too. Microsoft evidently took its News Bar concept and rejiggered it into a quasi-Facebook feed: an endless scroll of celebrity gossip, news, and more. If Microsoft still had its so.cl network, it would live here. Widgets can be “removed” from Windows 11, but I’m not entirely sure they deserve to be there in the first place.

Navigating File Explorer, Windows, and the new Snap View

Navigating File Explorer in Windows 11 feels like Microsoft ignored what users wanted in favor of what its engineers could add instead. Remember Windows Sets, the 2017 tabbed interface that incorporated File Explorer, Mail, Edge, and more? Users may not ultimately have wanted the Sets interface as a whole, but they’ve been asking for a tabbed File Explorer for years. Microsoft hasn’t given that to us, leaving File Explorer’s windowed organization largely unchanged.

Microsoft’s File Explorer and other Shell apps show off the rounded corners and Fluent Design principles that first emerged within Windows 10, evolving them to include “materials” like Mica. Microsoft also reworked some of the system icons, so the Pictures and Downloads folder, for example, feel fresh and modern.

Windows 11’s File Explorer unfortunately lacks the tabs feature that some hoped for.Mark Hachman / IDG

For me, that’s where Windows 11’s design improvements stop. Icons are one thing. But Windows 11 also adds a row of shortcut icons to File Explorer that, even after using the OS for weeks, simply don’t effectively communicate their purpose. I can certainly figure out that the “scissors” icon means “cut” and that the “garbage can” icon means “delete,” but I still have trouble recognizing which icon represents “rename,” “paste,” and “share,” without specifically thinking about which icon represents which function.

Right-clicking on a file places these UI shortcuts at the top of the menu, where at least I can hover over them. But the option to, say, rename a file only appears there in that row of icons. Or does it? No, you can also scroll down to “Show more options” and get a second, expanded, Windows 10-like column of menu options. It all feels like Windows 11 was simply tacked on to it all.

The new shortcut icons in File Explorer are disconcerting, as are the multiple layers of menus.Mark Hachman / IDG

The one place I feel that Microsoft got it right was in the expanded Snap View icons that appear when you hover your cursor over the “maximize window” shortcuts in the upper right-hand corners of window panes. Remember, Windows Snap allows you to drag a window into the sides or corner of the screen; they’ll then expand to fit that quadrant, allowing you to neatly organize up to four windows on your monitor. In Windows 11, you have more options: thin columns, wider columns, and so on. Snap is essentially a simplified version of the Fancy Zones app from Microsoft’s Power Tools, but it’s still a solid, useful addition to the Windows 11 user interface.