Ghost Town Sage

Windows 11 Garbage Heap

The spinning disk of rubbish.

It's official, Windows 11 is a spinning disk of garbage. It became official last July when I finally retired my old Windows 10 computer and bought this new Win-11 one. The chronic defects have been maddening, and most are the sign of amateurs at work.

The first problem I ran into was a bit ridiculous. I keep all of my data files on a separate drive (the E: drive) from operating system (the C: drive). This makes managing and backing up my files a lot easier - just backup the whole E-Drive.

However, my data drive is a Solid State Drive with a SATA cable, and when I got my new computer it didn't have an extra plug. So for now the SSD is attached with a USB cable. And that's when the trouble started. Several times that first month, I exited my text editor and told it to save, it then exited but didn't save. So I had to quickly re-launch the editor and retype everything that I just lost while it was still fresh in my mind.

This happened several times, so I jumped on Google to see if other users had this same problem. Aparently this seems to be pretty common.

It turns out, Windows 11 shuts off USB ports if they sit idle for more than ten minutes. So if I'm typing away for 20 minutes, the save will fail, and if the save was while exiting the program, I just lost my data. Windows knows this particular port is attached to a disk drive that's in use - but too bad, it shuts it off anyhow.

I dug through the Windows Setup program and found an item to not shut off the USB's for an hour. That greatly improved the situation, but that's not the real solution. Windows needs to not shut off disk drives ever, and that didn't seem to be an option.

I'm a programmer, and Rule One for anyone who's writing retail software is: Don't Lose The User's Data. No matter what else is wrong with your software, don't lose data. So Windows 11 fails this test. And it's still happening - anytime I'm gone for more than an hour, and when I return I exit the program without thinking. In fact my compiler is stil on my old computer for this one reason. I'm afraid to load any new software on this dangerous mess.

And the problems don't stop there. I use Notepad a lot for writing stories like this and outlines for bigger stuff, and Notepad has its own list of problems. The main problem is that Notepad doesn't ask to save when I click the exit button [X] at top right. The program exits and keeps a copy of the file in memory, where it can popup later. But when that happens, I think it exited and saved, but it didn't save. So then I copy the file off to another drive where I can work it on a different computer, only to find I'm working on an out-of-date copy. And then I have to go back through both copies to see what's what in both versions. This is Failure 2 of losing the user's data. Notepad is loaded with other problems besides this, to the point that I'll be removing it from the computer shortly, after I make a few adjustments to my own text editor.

There's yet another DLUD problem with Windows that goes back to Win-10. When browsing the folders in Windows Explorer, a few of the files are shown with the wrong file date. Windows displays the files with several dates: Date Creates, Date Modified or just Date. The problem is, every once in a while these dates get out of sync; "Date" is some earlier than "Date Created".

As explained above, I frequently copy files between several computers and I always compare the file dates to ensure I'm copying the file so that the new replaces old. But if Window Explorer is displaying a wrong date on one of the files, then which way do I copy ??? As near as I can tell, I've always caught this because the date was wrong enough to arouse suspicion, but who knows. My jerry-rigged solution is to change the folder columns from Date to Date Modified. But that works but only if I catch the problem first. This seems to be happening with some of my older programs that are using FAT-32 functions to write to a NTFS drive.

A related problem is a mismatch between FAT-32 and NTFS because of daylight savings time. NTFS corrects for DST, but FAT-32 does not. This means, if I copy a file from NTFS to FAT in February they'll have the same time stamp. But in April the NTFS file will be an hour newer, even though neither file changed.

This is a huge problem because I backup my data drive (NTFS) to a thumb drive (FAT-32). I do this with a program that compares the dates of files on the From drive to dates on the To drive, and then only files that are newer get copied. But the problem is, the first time I do this after "Spring Forward", every file on the From Drive is an hour newer, and so it tries to copy every file. Calculating the uncorrected time stamp is nearly impossible, so my solution was to modify the program to add 1 hour to the To file time. Note that the Windows Command Line function "XCopy /D" will also copy newer files over older files, and it has the exact same defect.

M. Henry August 2025.