Re: My Windows 11 tribulations or how I spent my summer

[Harry Binswanger <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kari and Carl,
I never had any serious problem moving to Win11. I also use Dropbox, but
it no longer offers me the opportunity to go to dropbox.com by just
clicking on the "world" icon. Oh, well. I also have the
feature, formerly called "packrat," that saves every
single version of a file. So when I'm working on foo.xpl, I can go
back to what I had last November or 3 years ago, before I made the
changes that screwed things up. 

Carl,
WinRun looks like the answer to my prayers: an equivalent of the Xywrite
command line that operates Win stuff! Maybe I'm too hopeful, there, but
I've installed it and used it once, and it looks wonderful.

Friends of the Mac persuasion are urging me to make the shift and I am
pretty sure that Lisa and others use vDosPlus on the Mac. The other
necessary program is Eudora (now being updated as Aurora--in beta test
stage), and I think that will run on Mac as well.

Regards,
Harry

At 09:42 AM 8/11/2025, you wrote:
> 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