Kari, > I have spent the whole summer installing and configuring this rig > from scratch. Many thanks for sharing your thoughts about the experience, and for the useful/informative links. I crossed the Windows 11 Rubicon back in February. My 10-year-old HP desktop still had plenty of life left, but the looming end-of-support for Win 10 led me to act sooner rather than later. With the idea of trying to "future-proof" my new machine, I dropped some cash on a Dell XPS desktop with a 14th Gen Intel CoreT i9-14900K processor, 64 GB of RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce RTXT 4060 Ti/8 GB graphics, running Win 11 Pro. Hardware speed is indeed a good thing. As for setup, all of my essential data files and many essential programs are saved to Dropbox. Restoring these files is simply a matter of installing Dropbox on the new machine and waiting while the files are synced. To aid this process, I use portable versions of Windows software when available. Of course, many programs have to be reinstalled manually, which is a pain but also an opportunity. I restore the known essentials, then wait to see if and when I need anything else. This way, the new machine is not cluttered with programs that I no longer use. Dropbox may not be the most secure method of cloud storage, but the ability to restore earlier versions of saved files has been a lifesaver for me. I also have 2 TB of storage on Internxt, which is end-to-end encrypted and more secure, but the software unfortunately does not work nearly as well as Dropbox. For rolling full and incremental backups, I still use ShadowProtect. With regard to the Start Menu, I like the Tray CL concept very much, but around eight years ago I started developing my own utility, which I call WinRun. It's been through two major revisions and is now quite stable and, I think, versatile. The ReadMe gives a good idea of the concept and capabilities: <https://ammaze.net/xywwweb/dls/WinRun.pdf>. Download: <https://ammaze.net/xywwweb/dls/WinRun-3.0.8.zip> -- Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxxxx