Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want - here's what we actually need
- Reference: 1755342128
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/08/16/microsoft_windows_features_help_productivity/
- Source link:
In recent years, we've seen Redmond push for useless local AI features, in a bid to sell everyone [1]Copilot+ PCs that they don't need. The house Bill Gates built has turned Windows into a piece of spyware, insisting that you [2]sign in with a Microsoft account so it can gather more data about you, and cajoling you to run Recall, which takes [3]snapshots of your sensitive personal information . But the company hasn't done much to improve user productivity.
In an [4]interview with the Windows IT Pro channel on YouTube, Microsoft's OS overlord, Pavan Davuluri, assured users that the beatings would continue until morale improves.
[5]
"I think what human interfaces look like today and what they will look like five years from now is one big area of thrust for us that Windows continues to evolve," Microsoft's corporate VP of Windows + Devices said. "The operating system is increasingly agentic and multimodal and voice and vision and touch, just like we use mouse and keyboard . . . I think that is an area of tremendous investment and change for us."
[6]
[7]
So get ready to do away with that old mouse and keyboard and start yelling at your computer. I'm sure you'll get your work done faster and more accurately by dictating than by typing. We should also push the touch interface over a traditional, windowed GUI since it [8]worked so well in Windows 8 .
The big question Microsoft never addresses is "who asked for this?" Who was begging for local image generation in Microsoft Paint when a million websites, including Bing, offer it in the cloud? Who demanded that AI and tabs be built into [9]Notepad , a program that people loved for its simplicity? And just who is the constituency that wanted supermarket tabloid-style headlines pumped into a taskbar widget?
[10]
We didn't ask for any of that, but here are ten things we are asking for:
1. Multiple clipboards
If you were to go back in time to the DOS era and tell people staring at their blue WordPerfect 5.1 screens that they could move text, images, videos, or even files between applications with a couple of keystrokes, they'd be blown away. Copy and paste is a modern miracle, because the clipboard takes so many kinds of data and allows you to put it anywhere you want.
Windows 11 has a clipboard history feature you can activate by hitting Windows key + V, but what it really needs is a second and third clipboard. You should be able to hit a different keyboard combo to copy to the second clipboard and to paste from it. This way, you can copy both text and an image separately and keep them at the top of your clip list at the same time.
I have looked around and I have never seen a third-party clipboard manager that allows you to maintain two or more separate clipboards. However, there are ways to [11]write a script that creates a second clipboard using AutoHotkey scripting language. This feature should be built into the OS.
2. Two or three clocks in the Taskbar
Since I've been working at The Register , I've really needed to see the time in UTC, which is our official CMS time zone. However, I still want to see my local time as well.
Windows provides a way to set up multiple clocks, but not in the system tray where they belong. You can set up additional clocks that are only visible when you click or hover on the one on the right side of your taskbar.
[12]
Multiple clocks in Windows appear only when you hover - Click to enlarge
But I don't want to hover or click to see the UTC clock. I want it right on the taskbar where I can see it. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't have this capability.
The best you can do right now is get the hover ability by first right clicking on the system clock and selecting "Adjust date and time."
[13]
Select Adjust date and time - Click to enlarge
Then click "Additional clocks" on the Settings menu, which appears.
[14]
Click Additional Clocks in the Settings menu - Click to enlarge
Finally, set one or two clocks to the time zone(s) you desire.
[15]
Add one or two clocks - Click to enlarge
But this is a poor substitute for what we actually need.
3. Add a fourth modifier key
Keyboard shortcuts are life. Every time you can accomplish a task without lifting your fingers off the home row, an angel gets their wings. Every time you have to move your hand over to the mouse or touchpad, a demon spawns and your shoulder gets more wear.
Unfortunately, between apps like your browser and the OS itself, most of the good keyboard shortcuts are already assigned. What we need is a fourth modifier key to add to the family that includes CTRL, Alt, and Windows key. Let's call it the MOD key.
The MOD key would be reserved only for user-assigned keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps your second clipboard could copy and paste with MOD + C and MOD + V instead of CTRL + C and CTRL + V.
[16]
To add a fourth modifier key to keyboards, Microsoft would have to work with hardware vendors, but there's plenty of precedent for the company doing just that. Before 1994, keyboards didn't have a Windows key and now every single keyboard has one. In recent years, the company has gotten laptop makers to add a useless Copilot key to their keyboards.
4. Allow remapping of all keyboard shortcuts
Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, let me remap every keyboard shortcut that the operating system and common apps use. If I want to make CTRL + A my copy key and CTRL + B my paste key, I should be able to do it. If I want CTRL + F to select all text instead of being the find function, let me do it.
5. Bring back the movable, resizable taskbar
In Windows 10 and earlier, Microsoft allows you a lot of control over how the taskbar looks and where it's located. You can drag the taskbar up to make it tall enough to hold even more icons or you can move to any side of the screen, including the top.
[17]
Movable, resizable taskbar in Windows 10 - Click to enlarge
For no particular reason at all, Microsoft decided to strip this functionality in Windows 11. Perhaps the company is hoping to bring it back in Windows 12 and that, like McDonald's reintroducing the McRib, it can take credit for giving the people what they want.
Give us back our movable, resizable taskbar.
6. Firewall for audio
Davuluri may think that people want to work in an office full of noisy people barking at their computers, but most folks don't like unexpected noises breaking their concentration. Even if you're alone in your home and your computer starts beeping or talking, you end up distracted.
That's why every app, including the browser, should have to ask permission before it sends audio to the speaker. Just as Windows User Account Control pops up a dialog box when an app wants to use administrative privileges, the OS should give you a warning and a chance to reject any attempts at playback.
There should also be include and exclude lists for audio permission so you can make sure that VLC doesn't prompt you every time you want to play a local media file.
The browser itself – in Microsoft's case, Edge – should also warn you when a site wants to play audio. Right now in Edge, you can mute tabs (not sites), but only after they've already annoyed you with unsolicited sound.
7. Pin apps to specific screens
If you work with multiple monitors, you probably have certain programs you want on certain displays. For example, I always want Slack to appear in the upper right monitor of my quad 4K screen setup at home.
In Windows, you should be able to change a setting so that, when you launch a particular program, its window immediately goes to a particular one of your displays. Even better, you should be able to pin multiple apps to the same display and have the OS automatically split the screen among those programs' windows.
8. Program groups launch multiple, related apps at once
Many of us have different modes of work on our PCs. For example, if I'm doing web development, I need Notepad++ for writing my code, FileZilla for uploading it via SFTP, MySQL client for checking the DB, and various browsers for testing. If I'm writing for work, I need certain web tools in my browser, Photoshop Elements for editing pics, and Slack for talking to coworkers.
Instead of launching each of the apps I need one at a time, I should be able to click a single shortcut on the desktop and have it launch all the apps and open all the web pages I need to start work. Today, I could script this to happen with AutoHotKey or AutoIT, but it should be built into the OS.
9. Make audio device switching easy
One of the biggest unresolved hassles in Windows 11 is how difficult it is to switch audio output and input devices at the OS level. It seems like almost every day I have a problem where I want to listen to audio on my desktop speaker, but instead the sound starts coming out of my USB headset. A good chunk of the time, my computer also wants to send audio out of my monitors, which have 3.5mm audio jacks, but nothing is connected to them.
Yes, there are ways to choose among your audio devices in Windows 11. The second easiest way to deal with this problem is to right click on the speaker icon and select Sound settings.
[18]
Select Sound settings from the context menu - Click to enlarge
Then, in the System > Sound menu that appears, you can choose which speakers and mic you want.
[19]
Select your sound output and input devices in Settings - Click to enlarge
However, this is annoying because it involves too much mousing and clicking to deal with when you just got on a private video call and discovered that the sound is coming out of your desktop speaker, where everyone in the room can hear it.
The easiest way to change audio devices right now is just to pull the plug. At home, I have my headphones and my desktop speaker, both USB devices, connected to a USB hub that has on/off switches for each port. I just hit a button and turn off the one I'm not using, then turn on the one I am using.
However, I'd like Windows to make switching audio devices much easier. Put some kind of quick switch directly on the taskbar or in the system tray. Better yet, have the OS allow me to assign particular devices to particular use cases so my headphones are tied to Zoom and Teams, but my speaker works when I'm using the browser.
10. Cut the Microsoft-induced distractions
This almost goes without saying, but Microsoft needs to take a long, hard look at everything it puts into Windows and start making its OS shut the hell up. There are too many instances where the operating system tries to sell you on something and, yes, you can disable most of these [20]Windows productivity sinks , but you shouldn't have to.
Redmond should get rid of everything that distracts you from your work. Widget board feeding you silly news stories about the [21]person who caught a deer eating apples from their fruit tree or the pastor who had a near-death experience and temporarily went to hell? Alert in my taskbar letting me know that there's a new trailer out for Avatar 3? Disable it by default.
[22]
Microsoft alerts you to useless things like a new movie trailer - Click to enlarge
Second chance out-of-the-box experience appearing after critical system updates and trying to sell you more stuff? Wave it goodbye. Sending notifications asking you to sign up for Game Pass while you're trying to get work done? Don't even think about it.
[23]Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft
[24]Windows 10 @ 10: How Microsoft led developers round in circles
[25]Windows 10 turns 10: Dying OS just worked, lacked compatibility chaos
[26]German security researchers say 'Windows Hell No' to Microsoft biometrics for biz
What Windows features do you want to see?
Maybe instead of using Windows to shill other services like OneDrive, Microsoft 365, and Game Pass, Redmond could focus on actually being helpful. Maybe instead of pimping out the OS with AI features that are far inferior to anything you can get in your web browser, Davuluri and his team could try to help us get more work done.
You've seen my ten most-wanted features for the next version of Windows. What are yours? Please respond in the comments below. ®
Get our [27]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/28/copilot_pc_sales_grow_slowly/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/05/set_up_windows11_local_account/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/01/microsoft_recall_captures_credit_card_info/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1a15gTxGl4
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aKCrFdJAbqbT_UXxyh5yUAAAAJY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aKCrFdJAbqbT_UXxyh5yUAAAAJY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aKCrFdJAbqbT_UXxyh5yUAAAAJY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/14/microsofts_windows_revision_comment_opinion/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/02/microsofts_plain_text_editor_notepad_gets_formatting/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aKCrFdJAbqbT_UXxyh5yUAAAAJY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t%3D12762
[12] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win1.jpg
[13] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win2.jpg
[14] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win3.jpg
[15] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win4.png
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aKCrFdJAbqbT_UXxyh5yUAAAAJY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win5.jpg
[18] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win6.jpg
[19] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win7.jpg
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/windows_11_productivity_sink/
[21] https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/pets/tenant-accused-of-picking-fruit-off-trees-then-catches-culprit-on-camera/vi-AA1Kzy1f
[22] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/15/win8.jpg
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/microsoft_sued_over_premature_windows/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/01/windows_10_dev_comment/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/10_years_of_windows_10/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/07/windows_hello_hell_no/
[27] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
First of all...
STOP FORCING PEOPLE TO CREATE A MICROSHAFT ACCOUNT !!!
Re: First of all...
Yep, they did themselves out of a duel (sic) boot on my new laptop by defeating TWO methods I found online to avoid it. I needed to run 'doze 11 to disable bitlocker first, but no dice!
OK, I most probably would have nuked it at some point anyway, but it turned out to be a fait accompli.
No wonder every cumulative update in Windows 24H2 there is an issue.
Just get the damn OS sorted, before adding all this unnecessary bloat MS
Windows 23H2 was fine until 24H2 arrived, which has caused be no end of issues since it arrived, even though my desktop has specs, far more than what is required by MS, to run this crap OS.
I dread every cumulative update, which comes out, as it could cause me many hours of grief to get it to work.
That's why I am so happy Microsoft ends support for Windows 10.
Several of these are provided by KDE. However if you allow that much customisation or different ways of doing things people will complain about complexity and inconsistency.
The other problem is that any organisation will develop what it has an incentive to develop. All of the things people do not want are profitable to MS as a whole or something some group within MS want. This is a universal problem with big projects and organisation anywhere.
Fix the last bit of mixed-DPI
It's really common in multimonitor setups to have one "hi-dpi" (4K/5K) screen and one or more "normal" DPI screens, all the same physical size.
On Windows 11, the mouse gets stuck in the hi-dpi monitor. The bottom is the bottom, but the top of the normal is the middle of the hi-dpi!
An application window that spans monitors ends up HUGE on one screen and tiny on the other.
macOS avoids the latter problem by simply banning it - macOS windows cannot span screens at all. I'm not sure what it does with the mouse.
Re: Fix the last bit of mixed-DPI
You can adjust the relative positions of screens. Drag the screen in the screen settings. There is an option to ease mouse transitions across screens. But there will always be issues when monitors are very different.
Being able to have an app across more than one monitor is useful, I would not block it. Maybe it can be blocked if the monitors have different ppi. Then applications need to be ppi aware. Some are not even multiscreen aware properly, move them to a different screen and they will keep on opening dialogs in the old one, stubbornly.
Where an application opens the first time depends on the flags set by the developer... If they are set to default Windows will open it in the main monitor. Many application can rembere where they were open the last time (and 'disappear' if their monitor space is not available). It's not always Windows fault.
Re: Fix the last bit of mixed-DPI
There are two "fixes":
1. Set both to 100%. For the "high-DPI" monitor set the resolution so low the size of your windows are at least close to your other "normal DPI" monitor.
2. Set both to a zoom level you can accept on both monitors.
I always use "2.", and rater get a 4k screen which is LARGE to compensate instead of high-DPI. Side effect: You have so much more desktop space at 100%.
Groups in the start menu
Once upon a time you could visually arrange icons in the start menu start page.
I have a WTS I'm using, the notepad / MSSQL Server Manager there is different from the local one or on WTS2.
Why can't we have nice things?
"And just who is the constituency that wanted supermarket tabloid-style headlines pumped into a taskbar widget?"
Because they cannot sell us more things when we are satisfied with what we have. In the end, "We are the product" MS sells to their "channel partners".
Our productivity does not earn MS money. But AI, our data, and ads, do earn MS money (they hope). So we are forced to use AI, divulge our privacy, and get bombarded with ads.
If they could, they would sell us to the cotton fields and organ harvesters. But they cannot do so yet.
And you ask for nice things?
Re: Why can't we have nice things?
If the world's largest software company needs to rely on the money from toolbar ads - we have bigger problems
Re: Why can't we have nice things?
What makes them doubly annoying is that MS doesn't rely on the ads for money and probably make very little return from them in the context of their overall sales. They just stick them in because they can.
Re: Why can't we have nice things?
Microsoft: Annoying the customer since 1985
Well, just for starters...
No.1. Windows stay put. They do not resize every time you move them. They do not reposition every time you come back after going for a pee. They do not pop back up if you have minimised them. The desktop remembers where you left them (or set the default) and which monitor.
No.2. The same feature is always in the same place on every Office app, be it desktop or 365.
Oh, sod it, I'm bored with this already. just replace the shit with Devuan+MATE+LibreOffice+BrowserOfChoice and leave me alone.
A user specified default cloud storage provider would be nice, with equivalent integration options to the OneDrive app.
Also a version controlled share link for any document in the context menu would be nice, with consolidation features
"version controlled"... Don't. We already had that. The implementation from Microsoft was abysmally bad.
For features, I like the idea of multiple copy-paste clipboards, but associated with whatever virtual desktop I have up. Use a modifier key to go to the global clipboard.
Re: multiple copy-paste clipboards
Oddly WFWG 3.11 had the "Clip-Book" for multiple Ctrl-C or Ctrl-X.
Next . . .
Mozilla
Obey the user's AI
Since Microsoft's OS seems incapable of this, just write an OS that obeys what the AI tells it to do, and leave it to the user's own AI to interface with the user and customise the OS to their benefit
Maybe rather than spending time and money adding lots of new functionality that nobody wants, they should be concentrating on two things
1. Make the software work reliably.
2. Make the software more efficient.
Of course this will never happen. If they make the software more reliable, they can't sell "Newer! Better!" versions all the time.
If they make the software more efficient, the hardware manufacturers will go nuts.
OS/2 had application spaces....
... put applcation and documents in a folder marked as such, and they would open when the folder was opened. Never seen something alike since then.
Windows audio would really deserve a managing app that should bring together input/output control and the mixer app. Windows does allow separate channels for 'voice' and 'music', and can also control the volume for each application. But configuring all of these requires to reach specific controls sometimes buried deep in the settings, and in different applications.
Which bring us to another issues. The new Settings application, designed for touch on a phone, hiding and making difficult to control too many advanced settings. It should be totally redesigned, if the 'old' control panel was no longer fashionable... And don't hide too many settings behind cumbersome PowerShell calls, because MS it's too lazy to surface them in a GUI way.
And please, stop the idiotic Google-like fashion of moving icons around, or hiding them. I hate the copy and paste icons in the contextual menu move up or down depending on the menu position.
Don't mix global search and the start menu.
And bring back a local, standtd help system. Web links to pages that no longer exist, or are too generic, are of no help. Or PDFs.
Make the event log viwer fast again. The XML logging system made it a pain to work with.
A couple of things
Explorer that consistently and reliably syncs the folders panel with the files one.
Away with the stupid dumb right click menu in explorer.
A tree based history view in Edge. Or in fact any of the browsers!
Re: A couple of things
You can have my right-click context menus when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands.
All that's needed to get me to pay Microsoft actual money to upgrade to Windows 11 and beyond is :
Officially don't insist on a TPM and more recent hardware, it may be marginally more secure but the trade off isn't good enough. When's the last time Windows 10 had an exploit that would have been magically fixed with Windows 11 protections, certainly not seen any security people shouting about it? The amount of e-waste generated is criminal.
Don't insist on a Microsoft account. My computer, under my control.
However what's also required is :
Bring back clicking on the clock showing a calendar, or a built in calendar program that lets you perform date arithmetic. I use it all the time at work. I'm sure you could knock something up in Powershell, but I'd rather have an app built in.
Improve the multi desktop functionality, and/or offer a mode similar to the Powertoys widget that creates multiple desktops as separate secure desktops windows cannot be moved between. Sometimes you want to start a program on one desktop, and never have it move
Reduce the difference between a Powershell command prompt and an actual command prompt, especially 'dir' being an alias for 'Get-ChildItem' which has completely different behaviour.
Get rid of Notepad tabs. When a new file is opened and multiple notepad instances are open it's unpredictable which instance it'll attach it to, or indeed on which virtual desktop. Supremely irritating.
If you're going to improve Notepad, go the full hog and just pay the Notepad++ creator lots of money to bundle it in Windows. I'd prefer vim, but I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't.
Make Windows search usable to the average user without needing a reference manual. Common file types should be automatically indexed. If you wish to search by date created it should be there in a search centre, not having to remember any syntax.
Standardised, widely supported enforcement of 'paste as plain text only', rather than having to past rich text into notepad, then copy from there, and paste into the destination application.
Bring back WMR support. It's disgraceful the hardware isn't even getting ten years support, and there's absolutely no way of using it without Microsoft's involvement.
Make it easier to create simple GUI applications using Powershell, stop pretending it's just a scripting language, and lean in to it using the full featured .NET runtime.
As far as I can make out the backup app only backs up to the cloud? Let an external drive also be an option for the average user.
> Who demanded that AI and tabs be built into Notepad, a program that people loved for its simplicity?
Actually, I like the tabs and restore on restart functions that grown up editors such as Notepad++ already have. But AI? No. Just No.
> 7. Pin apps to specific screens & 8. Program groups launch multiple, related apps at once.
Please, yes - to quickly get back to where I was after frequent crashes/unwanted reboots.
I use "launchnmove": https://robsnotebook.com/batch-to-launch-an-application-at-desired-window-position-from-command-line/
> 5. Bring back the movable, resizeable taskbar
This falls into the category of "Why did you remove something that worked?". Also restore:
Cascade/tile app windows e.g. open emails or spreadsheets that I frequently refer to.
Borders on File Explorer windows. The OS is called "Window s ", not "Window"!
The answer to almost all those is...
...Linux!
Almost all those features are present in modern Linux variants.
...and many are also present i Apple OS X btw.
Re: The answer to almost all those is...
"and many are also present i Apple OS X btw."
Hmmm ... not sure about that. In MacOS....
You need an app to get decent clipboard management; I don't know if any of them have multiple, assignable ones.
I don't use multi-screens but MacOS managment of spaces is bloody awful and gets worse with every new OS. It's one of the many MacOS features introduced with a fanfare then neglected, degraded and finally ignored.
You can't have multiple clocks in the menu bar (natively - there might be apps) but you can put a them in the widget sidebar. This needs a swipe to get it on screen but the problem is that even the smallest widgets are huge so once you've more than three or four in the sidebar than it's a swipe and a scroll to find what you want.
Keyboard re-mapping isn't bad, albeit a bit convoluted, and there's a lack of standardization creeping in with newer apps which is a pain. I like the idea of having a button that is only used for custom keys. The Mac has, effectively, got 4 modifier keys if you include the Fn key.
There's no multi-launch, there's no task bar like the Windows one and the mission-control function (which shows all open apps) is useless.
Audio control is much like Windows, requiring a trip to System Settings to change the default audio. Airplay is OK - I stream music to my hi-fi via airplay and can direct other audio to Mac speakers or bluetooth but it can be frustrating; open your bluetooth ear pods and they'll auto connect to the Mac and reset all your other audio-settings too.
In spite of the above I like my Mac and wouldn't buy an MS machine unless a job required it, but most of the things in the article aren't really available in MacOS unless I've misunderstood.
What would I like? Well, the article is about MS so not really applicable but, in no particular order:
- plain-text paste as default,
- Spaces to work as it should, with apps appointed to spaces and staying there and the spaces staying in the same order so I know how many swipes left/right to get to stuff.
- recognize military time in native apps (1643 - no bloody colon) so when I'm typing reminders and calendar entries I don't have to find the bloody colon;
And finally - for the El Reg forum - when I edit a post it should take me straight the edit box, not just the display box so I don't direct the cursor the the edit point only to find that I can't edit and I have to scroll down.
Turn them off ....
Shortcut keys, that is. For fat fingered typists like me, I sometimes have no idea what keys I bashed and the app has saluted that and helpfully decided to pop open some dialogue box or other.
Also second the many calls here for no MS account. There is absolutely no need for this and there really needs to be a choice, properly explained.
1. You get an account, your stuff is backed up to OneDrive (assuming you didn't stick it in some weird folder), but you'll get piles of ads that make your local deliverers of junk mail look like rank amateurs. By the way, the ads tend to come from national gossip rags who clearly think the entire country simply HAS to know about the latest shenanigans of $THIS_WEEKS_CELEBRITY.
2. You don't get an account, you're on your own for backing up, but you won't get ads, and you're free to live in ignorance.
Re: Turn them off ....
As well as turning off shortcut keys, I'd like to turn off drag-and-drop in File Explorer. It's too easy to accidentally press a mouse button and move something. I have used "undo" several times to recover from this.
What's he smoking?
"I think what human interfaces look like today and what they will look like five years from now is one big area of thrust for us that Windows continues to evolve," Microsoft's corporate VP of Windows + Devices said.
Windows 10 & 11 are the worst since Windows 2.0 on a Hercules card.
They have been going backwards since 2003. No-one is going to wait 5 years unless forced to.
Linux Mint with Mate desktop is far more flexible and productive and Debian based distros have been for over 10 years (if you are running later Windows than XP / Server 2003), if you have the applications you want.
Audio device switching is already easy
You can access the audio devices list with just two clicks: click on the network/volume/battery icons, and click the icon to the right side of the volume slider.
Or if you like keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl+Windows+V.
Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, remapping them on Windows would require co-operation from app developers, there is no central mechanism that Microsoft could hook into.
Pretty much all software
So much software these days has nagging, demanding qualities. Whether on desktop or mobile, programs want to upsell, show advertisements, send notifications, solicit the use of AI "features," or just beg for app store reviews. It's a near-constant flood of micro-annoyances, and I wish they would stop. At least in Windows, I've been able to disable the annoying notifications, but other Microsoft programs will frequently insist on popping up "what's new" notifications when I'm just trying to get my damn work done.
From a product development perspective, I understand why these nags exist, which is ultimately to generate revenue, but goddamn if it wouldn't be nice to have a "fuck all the way off" setting in the OS which disabled the entire category of notifications for all applications. It's never going to happen, of course, because revenue, but a man can dream.
On Linux and *BSD, there's both a 'clipboard' and a 'selection'. It took me a while to learn about the latter, but I now find it _very_ useful that I can select some text with the mouse, move over to another program, and click the mouse wheel to paste it, all without any faffing about with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V.
Re modifier keys : my elderly keyboard has two Windows® keys (the left one is remapped to Compose; the right is known to X11 as 'Super R') and a 'Menu' key. I'd support more use of modifier keys, and not just by our friends in Redmond. New keyboards are not necessary; we have CapsLock, currently not doing much of anything except being an annoyance, and I think many of us would be willing to remap one of our Ctrl or Alt or Shift keys to be an added modifier, if that modifier actually was useful somewhere.
Re modifier keys
I've Caps Lock as Compose and Left Win drags a window with mouse click anywhere. But I've mostly ditched Windows since Jan 2017. I do have XP, Win7 and Win 10 on VMs on Linux Mint. Both Shift is CapsLock if really needed.
This
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
Let me clone my retired XP Laptop. Loads in about 3 seconds. USB device pass through works and mapping any sort of suitable port to a COM port,
My top 10
1. Bring back a set of UI with themes and flexibility that Win9x, NT 4.0, win20K XP and Server 2003 had. Even the application menus, radio buttons, check boxes, scroll bars, configurability of Win3.1 -WFWG311 & NT 3.x was better than GUI on Win10/Win11
2. Fix File Explorer and ditch confusing mirror folders. Add option for 2nd window and have file endings on by default. See Caja and Nemo, or Pre NT 4.0 File Manager.
3. Make every key have an AltGr and add a compose key.
4. Consistent menus, never hide less used stuff. Ribbons optional.
5. All settings in Control panel, not 3 places plus console comands.
6. Local accounts and Domain accounts by default. Cloud accounts only an extra.
7. No built in Cloud storage / One Drive. Any as option
8. Local backups to external drive.
9. No auto tiles or maximising or snap for Windows. User control
10. All help as local files (but not PDFs).
Clock suggestion
Try [1]"Digital Clock 5" . I stumbled upon it when I searched for a way to display the current week number along with the date and day of the week within the clock. You can have multiple clocks, transparent on you desktop, each different time zone, each a different style. It can be "mouse transparent", i.e. you can click through the clock on the window controls below. You can make the clock "transparent X-% on mouse-over" so see what is below.
[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/digitalclock4/
Account switching via keystrokes. Keep them consistent!
Paraphrased FTA: "Every time you use a keystroke, and angel gets its wings"
I have multiple local accounts for different purposes. Different customers, different profiles, different activities in the day, etc. I'd come to learn the keyboard keystrokes to switch accounts quickly, but after the 23H2 update (maybe even earlier), the account listing would not even have the last account - or even currently logged in account(s) - in order. In fact, the local accounts seem to rotate randomly in the list you can select from. Not only that, and here's the really frustrating part, is that the memory muscle keystrokes had mutated in a way that actually logged me out of one account WITHOUT PROMPT. Not even a "do you want to log out? you have apps running..." prompt.
FWIW - here's my muscle memory keystroke, but now I've been trained, no, conditioned , by MS to focus on which account I want to switch to before I hit that last Enter to commit:
Win | Up Arrow | Enter | Tab | Tab | Space | [Select Account]
The [Select Account] option used to be predictable, almost defined, as in the last user switched to or logged in with.
P.S. - yeah, I know this keystroke sequence may seem a little laborious to some, but I've been laborious my whole life. :-)
P.P.S. - There are other peeves I have with the Win11 UI changing, but this one is currently #1 on my list.
Ehhhh...
I just switched to Mint, and aside from learning a few minor differences it's like my old Win7 machine without the need to use a restore point periodically to clear faff that would make it slow down.
My list
1. Make "Color the active window by the color of the theme" default.
2. Make the border visible, at least as an option. Especially on remote sessions it is a time wasting search game to hover around checking for a cursor change to know where/if where the window can be resized.
3. Make scrollbars always visible by default, and make them wider.
4. Get rid of "full row select". That is the one thing where the Windows Vista explorer was much better then every incarnation after it.
5. No more tabbed explorer. The Windows 10 (and Server 2016 to 2022) variant was more efficient, important thing like "create folder" required only ONE click.
6. For me personally: Fix the "Nested-vistualization dedup data corruption" which is in there since Server 2022/2025 as first level VM. Worked fine for Server 2016 and Server 2019 (Host WIndows 11/Server 2022/Server 2019) - The "not supported constellation" was added to the support article ONLY for me in July 2025.
7. Make Windows Fast Again. The speed creeeeeeep is really extreme.
8. Stop being to rude to push MS-cloud into every piece and start listening to your customers. I don't care what you do with the home version, but with the PRO version, which is supposed to be FOR WORK, don't push MS account, don't push AI crap, don't push "Arzue Arc" don't push push push push push push.
9. Make Updates Flawless (again?).
10. Fix those many Server 2025 bugs I constantly have to work around. With the feedback which was given LITERALLY years before the release from insiders M$ should have got the message, but no, customers are ignored.
(Only ten? I could make this list so much longer, like making search better and faster, cause a cmd.exe box with a "dir /s" command is often faster, and I can search for files with "*(1)*".)
11. For all administrators sake in exery MMC: Make the divider bar two pixels wider, and move it 200 pixels to the right. Saving us the time for the "Windows Administrator Move" you see in EVERY video any windows administrator has ever put online. Fix that, if the screen is above 1920x1200, the right pane is completely ridiculously out of what, especially in the hyper-v MMC.
12. For Server 2022/Server2025/Windows 11: Fix powershell ISE to make Get-Childitem -Literalpath "\\?\C:\" working again. We need that for long path syntax, and since PS-ISE is on every server it is often THE development environment since Customers don't like having visual studio on every server (especially domain controllers)...
13. Powershell_ISE: When a dark theme is chosen make the "select color" better, i.e. invert instead of using a 40% transparent "Control panel select cursor" color.
14. If the screen is 4k, do NOT make 300% zoom the default, especially not if the OS detects that the screen is large, 'cause it DOES detect the size.
Agh I need to stop now.
Keep in Mind: Only two of the above issues are not UI related. Below the UI is an actually good folly object oriented OS. Dave Cutler did make the right design decisions over 30 years ago.
EDIT:
15. Bring the shadowcopy GUI from the server back to the client OS, and set the capabilities of the client shadowcopy equal to the server shadowcopy. Then I would not need my [1]helper scripts any more.
16. As a payback for the horrendous UI: Give us deduplication for Windows 11 Pro and higher.
[1] https://github.com/Joachim-Otahal/Windows-ShadowCopy
Microsoft has an intriguing business plan. Pay lots of overpaid engineers to create stuff users don't want, then force them to ditch the old stuff they liked in familiar of the new sh*t. The word monopoly doesn't even get started.
Then again, my more recent undergrad students can't type - that's not taught any more - and are confused by having multiple windows open on one screen.
Virtual desktops
Proper virtual desktops, like we had with fvwm/tvwm on SunOS, convex, iris, aix and pretty much every Unix I used in the 90s. It's a problem that was solved over 30 years ago.
Whatever the stuff is in win11 ( desktops ? ) works like sh?t.
An app on desktop x stays on desktop x and so do all its popups. Desktop switching is immediately and obvious. Dragging windows from one desktop to another just works.
This will finally allow me to have one desktop for coding
One for email/office
One for webstuff
And one to banish teams to.
And of course this should just work with however many monitors I'm using today.
(Docked or undocked)
Mine's simple
Make the OS run in <100MB. It's an OS, it should be able to do this easily. If I want an app to do something, I should be able to find one. Most of my problems with MS is it tries to do too much, and doesn't do a lot of it very well. It's telling me today is World Honey Bee day in my search box. Yey. I'd rather it found stuff I wanted, especially when it spends so much CPU 'indexing'.
An embryonic Emacs user ?
Although I never managed to transcend my Vi addiction for the promised paradise of Emacs this Windows wishlist looks suspiciously like the features the lofty Emacs users habitually hurl towards the more lowly.