Microsoft is making changes to the startup screen, taskbar and Task Manager in Windows 11. The changes are more about reducing annoyance than major overhauls.

All three changes have shown up in the Dev Channel, which is the first place new features shown up for public testing. These aren't always guaranteed to make it out into the final public release, but Microsoft has spoken publicly about these features. That suggests it intends to keep them, rather than just looking for feedback on the concept.

The change that will benefit most people is to the Second-chance out-of-box experience (SCOOBE) screen. This shows up during login (unless users have disabled the "feature") and asks users to review some key settings.

Single Screen System

In its current form, it's particularly annoying as it involves going through multiple screens before being able to get on with using Windows. The new version is a single screen with toggles for each setting.

Annoyingly, it seems these may be set to "on" by default, reflecting Microsoft's "recommended" settings. At first glance it looks like users need to manually turn them off to keep things as they are, but there's actually a less prominent "Keep the current settings" button at the bottom. (Source: neowin.net)

Another change is to the Taskbar for users with multiple monitors. Currently, clicking on it will only show the Notification and calendar on the primary display. That's changing so it can appear on any display.

Giving 100% Maximum

Finally, Microsoft is changing the way CPU usage appears in the Task Manager. At the moment, the stats listed for Performance and Users work differently to the one for Processes. The Processes display would often show multiple processes as each using 100% of CPU, which was naturally confusing.

The explanation is that the Processes tab didn't take notice of how many cores a CPU has. This is a feature that lets a CPU act in some ways as if it was multiple different processors and appear to do more than one thing at once.

Under the old system, a process could each use 100% of the capacity of a particular core and Task Manager would show it as if it was 100% of the entire CPU's capacity. The new system means the displayed percentage will refer to the total capacity, meaning the total of all processes should no longer exceed 100%. (Source: arstechnica.com)

What's Your Opinion?

Have you encountered the SCOOBE screen? Is this an adequate change? Do you pay much attention to CPU use in Task Manager?