Like a lot of people, I stubbornly stayed on Windows 10 until support for it ended on October 14th, 2025. OS upgrades on Windows can be problematic, thus fresh re-installs are recommended. I’ve been using Windows operating systems since 3.1, this is a well-known fact to me. Regardless, I figured I’d try the direct upgrade anyway. Spoiler alert: Major instability issues. BSODs, driver incompatibility, massive performance degradation for GPU-intensive games (~25% FPS drop, eventually leading to full game crashes and system BSODs). Eugh, but fine, a complete reformat and reinstall from scratch was always part of my expectations. So I took a local backup, formatted my boot drive, and installed Windows 11 from a USB stick.
I reinstalled drivers, ran updates, reinstalled a few critical software packages (like Firefox), and thought my troubles were over. The only hurdles I expected were basic annoyances like turning off anti-features like OneDrive and CoPilot, and getting used to needing to hold shift when I right-click in Explorer. The first day went fine enough. Played some games, even recorded some gameplay. Then I rebooted and everything went to hell.
All graphically-intensive games started to run extremely poorly. Gameplay would last for roughly 10 minutes before resulting in a crash-to-desktop. At one point, even Discord restarted itself. Every few minutes, my computer would lock up, then play my actions in fast-forward to catch up. I eventually diagnosed this issue to Windows Update “helpfully” installing a 15-month-old NVIDIA driver. Annoying, but solvable:
I used DDU to completely shred the old driver in safe mode, then rebooted without any network to install the latest driver package available from NVIDIA’s website. This worked… for a day. Then symptoms started to crop up again, not as severe as before, but still plenty impactful.
The main issue was the massive GPU performance dip. I have an RTX 4080, not the newest card, but really nice, plenty of headroom to play most games at their highest graphical fidelity. I play a lot of Hunt: Showdown, and I try to record gameplay so I can make clips for my friends and the internet. The Windows 11 performance hit made recording gameplay impossible. It would freeze OBS, then Hunt, then my computer. Even lowering settings didn’t help.
To troubleshoot, I did everything I could think of, including (but not limited to):
I spent days trying to make Windows 11 as performant as my Windows 10 install, but I just couldn’t make it work. I’m sure there’s some magic incantation somewhere (or something dumb I’ve forgotten to do), but I just couldn’t make it work. My options boiled down to: