Part of the ongoing updating of things at work has been shifting to Windows 11 as a desktop OS, and now that the rest of the organisation is done, it was time to attend to my own laptop.

For the last 8-9 years I’ve had a Lenovo T470s, and it’s been nothing less than superb: one new keyboard thanks to me spilling tea on it, a tiny bit of screen delamination, and other than that it’s played a key part in keeping the infrastructure going. It’s been dropped onto concrete, balanced in precarious places in server rooms, carried around exhibitions, bounced about the boot of my car. It’s run Windows 10 all that time, with the occasional boot into Ubuntu.

It’s been replaced by a T14, and Windows 11. As a team we pushed for Lenovo: despite the claims that build quality isn’t what it was, it’s clearly better than the other tier 1 supplier (Dell) under consideration, and a world away from the no-name we were asked to look at.

I wasn’t looking forward to the change: The start button is in the wrong place, cut and paste have been moved, show desktop is in the wrong place too. All survivable, but years of muscle-memory is hard to change: despite the proper programmers mocking me for not using CTRl-C CTRL-V, there’s situations when the GUI and mouse work. The times when I’d had to support a Win11 machine a user was using had irritated me.

One thing I just had to do was remove the AI components and just generally remove some of the tat, and I found this did the task without too much bother.

A week in, and my deep hatred of 11 is subsiding: it works well enough once you turn off the tat. One nice thing: the new “terminal” shell accepts some bash commands, so all that problem of typing ls in a cmd shell is gone 🙂