Windows 11: the incredible bugs of our first stable release – 01net.com

On October 5, Microsoft officially began the deployment of its new operating system, Windows 11. This major update, proposed in waves, starting with the most recent compatible machines, should be deployed more widely in the next few weeks. to come.

Owners of machines meeting all of Microsoft’s criteria for installing Windows 11 must therefore be patient to hope to migrate their machine under Windows 10 to Windows 11 through the official channel, namely Windows update.
Those who don’t want to wait and whose PC perfectly meets Microsoft’s specifications can install this update without waiting, by launching it manually.

Anyway, Windows 11 is officially available in a stable version, and can be downloaded freely from the Microsoft site. After testing three months during the Preview Insider on our Surface Go Laptop, a Microsoft machine, it was time for us to do a clean reinstallation of Windows 11 to get back on track. Unfortunately, not everything went as planned.

The Windows 10 Start menu

To reinstall Windows 11 cleanly on our machine, we created a bootable installation USB key from the Media Creation Tool Windows 11, the official tool that Microsoft offers on its site.

The reinstallation of the OS itself went perfectly. It was when setting up the operating system that the problems started.
If theoretically, the Pro version of Windows 11, which we reinstalled on our machine, allows the creation of a local account, the OS configuration wizard should have offered us to connect to our Microsoft account to complete the machine settings. It was not the case.
Never mind, it is quite possible to add your Microsoft account later from Settings. Once all the Windows 11 configuration windows had passed, the desktop displayed was surprising: we had the Windows 11 wallpaper, but the Windows 10 Start menu.

After checking in the Settings, Windows 11 was nevertheless installed on the machine. This first bug was fortunately only of short duration since a simple restart of the machine was enough to resuscitate the centered Start menu of Windows 11.

The Microsoft Store for absent subscribers

But a second bug, much more annoying this time, manifested itself while we were researching the new Windows 11 screenshot module. that Panos Panay had teased on Twitter.

Unable to get hold of it, the tool is simply missing from the system. Windows, however, includes another option. When activated from the menu Settings> Accessibility> (Interaction) Keyboard> Use the Print screen button, it allows you to use the Print Screen button to launch the screen capture utility. Here again, we are doing nothing. If the utility opens well and seems to let us take screenshots, none is saved on our machine, not even in the dedicated Screenshots directory, found in the folder Pictures Windows 11.

Never mind, we decide to try a search on the Microsoft Store to see if the official Microsoft screenshot tool can be downloaded there, as is the case in principle for the applications of the giant of Redmond.

Surprisingly enough, the Microsoft Store is not pinned to the taskbar, as it was on the Previews we tested before. Unfortunately for us, after thoroughly exploring the section All applications from the Start menu, and after querying the Windows 11 search engine, not Microsoft Store.

Obviously, this problem to find the Microsoft Store in Windows does not seem to be unknown to Microsoft who published on its support pages (in sometimes approximate French), advice on how to find it. After trying all the suggested manipulations, the Microsoft Store remains with absent subscribers.

The only remaining solution is to post a comment on the Microsoft Comment Hub (which by the way offers us to evaluate Windows 10), to describe the problem we are encountering.

Microsoft Edge unusable

During the use of this stable version of Windows 11, however freshly installed, we were able to detect other bugs, and absences on which Microsoft did not communicate.
The Microsoft Edge web browser was unusable, shown to be obsolete by Windows 11, and we had to redownload and reinstall the browser for it to work.

It remains to be seen whether our case is isolated. The bugs we were victims of while using this stable version of Windows 11 are in any case very surprising, no problem of this type having been detected during our use of the Preview.

The problem could, however, be due to the ISO downloaded by the Media Creation Tool, Microsoft’s tool for creating an installation USB key.
After reinstalling Windows 11 from the settings of this bugged version, taking care to download a new copy from the Cloud, the version of Windows 11 that powers our Surface Go Laptop does not seem at all the same. The configuration of the OS forced us to identify ourselves using our Microsoft account, and all the bugs mentioned above have disappeared. The Microsoft Store is back, Microsoft Edge is working “Out of the box”, and the new version of the Screen Capture tool is in the game. An astonishing turnaround. A possible error from Microsoft which is even more so. Your Windows 11, do you want it with or without a bug?