Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies. Ciprian Adrian Rusen

Microsoft chose the feature sets assigned to each Windows edition with one specific goal in mind: maximize Microsoft’s profits. If you want to move from Windows 11 Home to Windows 11 Pro (the only upgrade available to individuals), you need to buy the Windows 11 Pro Pack. To buy an upgrade, click or tap the Start icon (shown in the margin), Settings, System, and then About. Then, inside the Related settings, find the Product key and activation information.

      Similarly, moving from Windows 11 Home in S mode to plain Windows 11 Home requires only a trip to the Microsoft Store.

      Upgrading is easy and cheap, but not as cheap as buying the correct version the first time.

      Narrowing the choices

      If you're a regular home user, you can dismiss five Windows editions immediately:

       Windows 11 Enterprise is an option only if you own a large business and want to go through Microsoft’s Volume Licensing program or purchase a Windows 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 for Enterprise subscription.

       Windows 11 Education and Windows 11 Pro Education, similarly, can be purchased only in large quantities. If you’re a student, faculty member, or staff member at a licensed school, you must contact the IT department to get set up.

       Windows 11 Pro for Workstations is useful only for professional users with expensive hardware and specific needs. Most people should ignore it.

       Windows 11 IoT is a viable choice for enthusiasts and software developers who want to tinker with Raspberry Pi and program their own devices to perform specific tasks.

      BITLOCKER AND ENCRYPTING FILE SYSTEM

      BitLocker was introduced in Windows Vista and has been improved since. BitLocker runs underneath Windows: It starts before the operating system starts. The Windows partition on a BitLocker-protected drive is completely encrypted, so bad guys who try to get to the file system can’t find it.

      Encrypting File System (EFS) is a method for encrypting individual files or groups of files on a hard drive. EFS starts after Windows boots: It runs as a program under Windows, which means it can leave traces of itself and the data that’s being encrypted in temporary Windows places that may be sniffed by malicious programs. The Windows directory isn’t encrypted by EFS, so bad people who can get access to the directory can hammer it with brute-force password attacks. Widely available tools can hack EFS if the cracker can reboot the computer that is attacking. Thus, for example, EFS can’t protect the hard drive on a stolen laptop or notebook. Windows has supported EFS since Windows 2000.

      EFS and BitLocker are complementary technologies: BitLocker provides coarse all-or-nothing protection for an entire drive. EFS lets you encrypt specific files or groups of files. Used together, they can be hard to crack.

      There’s also BitLocker To Go, which provides BitLocker-style protection to removable drives, including USB drives. You should use it when storing important data on your USB drives.

That leaves you with Windows 11 Home, unless you have the need to do one of the following:

       Connect to a corporate network. If your company doesn’t give you a copy of Windows 11 Enterprise, you need to spend the extra bucks and buy Windows 11 Pro.

       Play the role of the host in a Remote Desktop interaction. If you’re stuck with Remote Desktop, you must buy Windows 11 Pro.Note that you can use Remote Assistance any time, on any Windows PC. (See Book 7, Chapter 3.) The Windows 11 Pro restriction is specifically for Remote Desktop, which is commonly used inside companies but not that much by other types of users. Many business users find that TeamViewer, a free alternative to Remote Desktop, does everything they need and that Remote Desktop amounts to overkill. TeamViewer lets you access and control your home or office PC from any place that has an internet connection. Look at its website, www.teamviewer.com.

       Provide added security to protect your data from prying eyes or to keep your notebook’s data safe even if the notebook is stolen. Start by determining whether you need Encrypting File System (EFS), BitLocker, or both (see the BitLocker sidebar). Windows 11 Pro has EFS and BitLocker — with BitLocker To Go tossed in for even more protection.

       Run Hyper-V. Some people can benefit from running virtual machines inside Windows 11. If you absolutely must get an old Windows 7 program to cooperate, for example, running Hyper-V with a licensed copy of Windows 7 may be the best choice. For most people, virtual machines are an interesting toy but not much more.

      64-bit is the new normal

      If you’ve settled on Windows 11 as your operating system of choice, there’s no more stressing about whether you want the 32-bit flavor or the 64-bit flavor of the Home edition, as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows 10. That’s because Windows 11 is the first consumer operating system from Microsoft to support only 64-bit processors. It doesn’t work on older 32-bit processors, and it accepts only modern hardware that meets its strict security requirements.

Not being able to use Windows 11 on old hardware can be annoying, but there are important benefits to this enforcement on Microsoft’s part:

       Performance: The 32-bit flavor of Windows — the flavor that everyone was using more than a decade ago — has a limit on the amount of memory that it can use. Give or take a nip here and a tuck there, 32-bit machines can see, at most, 3.4 or 3.5 gigabytes (GB) of memory. You can stick 4GB of memory into your computer, but in the 32-bit world, anything beyond 3.5GB is simply out of reach. With many desktop apps acting like resource hogs, such as the Google Chrome browser, you want 4GB or more on any PC.

       Security: Security is one more good reason for running a 64-bit flavor of Windows. Microsoft enforced strict security constraints on drivers that support hardware in 64-bit machines — constraints that just couldn’t be enforced in the older, laxer 32-bit environment.

      

There’s only one problem with 64-bit Windows: drivers. Some people have older hardware that doesn’t work in any 64-bit flavor of Windows. Their hardware isn’t supported if the manufacturer decides that it isn’t worth the money to build a solid 64-bit savvy driver so that the old hardware can work with the new operating system. You, as a customer, get the short end of the stick and are forced to buy new hardware.

      Applications, however, are a different story. All 32-bit apps work on 64-bit Windows and shouldn’t be an issue.

Which Version of Windows Are You Running?

      You may be curious to know which version of Windows you’re running on your current machine. The easy way to tell is to first log in and press the Windows key on your keyboard. If your desktop is like

       Figure 3-1, you're running some version of Windows 10. Note the Windows-logo wallpaper, the large Search box in the lower-left corner next to the Windows icon, and the large tiles on the right side of the Start menu.

       Figure 3-2, you're running Windows 11. Note how the icons on the taskbar are centered, not left-aligned as they are in Windows 10. Also, the tiles from the Windows 10 Start menu are gone, replaced by traditional shortcut. And there’s a new Recommended section that lists recent apps and recently opened files, for quick access.

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