[Anonymouse]

Okay, I got tired of Chrome saying it's not going to be updated, plus the Win 8.1 laptop is showing its age. So I decided to get a new one, PC Specialist again. It duly arrived, I started installing stuff on it - and on day one it died on me. The offending software was Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 - yeah, yeah, I'm old-fashioned, but I tried APE 15 and I didn't like it at all. Might try GIMP.
I emailed PC Specialist; they gave me advice. Took it, but it didn't work. Next bit of advice - sounded good, but I needed to find and delete the current partitions to reinstall Windows, and nothing was showing at all.
Finally on further advice I altered something in the BIOS, and it worked - the partitions showed and were deleted. I reinstalled and everything seems fine so far.
This time, though, once the laptop was up and running I created restore points, so I have a baseline if things go wrong again. I learn from my mistakes.
Which must mean I'm utterly wise by now...
There's a fundamental truth I'd forgotten, but in self-defence it's been years since it was an issue. In my 40+ years of IT I've noticed that computers are getting more and more reliable, compared to the dinosaurs of the '80s. But the unfortunate corollary of this is: as the tech becomes less and less likely to fail, when it does fail...it fails badly.
Anyway, this is all beside the point. Windows 11 is not a great improvement on 8.1:
There's too much emphasis on security. Admittedly there used to be barely any, which is one reason viruses et al are so prevalent. But I think they're overdoing it.
Doing away with the context menu (unless you remember to hold down Shift as you right-click) was a very bad idea. It makes numerous operations too fiddly.
Sticky Keys, which I detest, will NOT stay dead.
If you create a folder template and tell Windows to apply it to subfolders, it doesn't always do it.
It's not as fast as it should be IMO, running on more modern hardware as it is.
There's way too much bloatware; some you can uninstall, some you can't.
Without a third-party app to force redirection to your chosen search engine (whisper it: 'Google'), it defaults to Edge and Bing whether you want it to or not.
But my worst gripe is with creating themes. It used to be a matter of setting the background image, clicking to Personalise and saving the theme, and that was that. Now you need several clicks to save it, as the Save dialog only comes up in one place. It's so fiddly I've cut down my theme use to a couple of dozen favourites...I can't face doing it 200+ times.

Okay. Rant over. I do like the backlit keyboard.