- Windows 11 users see a positive change but also a less welcome
- The good news is the ‘second chance outside the box’ NAG has been streamlined significantly
- The bad news is that there is a new nag-pop-up in the start menu that pushes you toward taking a OneDrive subscription
Microsoft has cleaned up an annoyance with Windows 11, but unfortunately seems to have introduced another – and more annoying – irritation in its place.
Let’s start with the good news here that Neowin marked and involves the ‘second chance outside the box’ (SCOOBE for short). It’s Fancy-Talk to a NAG screen that appears after the start of the desktop and tries to make you configure items in Windows 11 that you don’t bother when you originally created your PC.
Setting up your Windows PC is known as Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE), as you just got the device out of the box and turned on it-so this panel pushes essentially these things again on you again, hoping that you may be using the Windows Backup app, for example (or Switch to Edge).
As it exists at the moment, this scoobe nagging is a multi-panel affair that you need to click through (there are three panels if my memory earns properly).
However, in a recent preview release in Dev Channel for Windows 11 (Build 26200.5722), however, Microsoft has changed Scoobe, so it’s just a single panel and you can reject it with a single click.
At least now, when it appears – and if you leave parts of the Windows 11 setup unfinished, it will continue to emerge every few months – it will be more painless to hover aside.
So it’s something (guard) positive – but unfortunately Microsoft seems to have introduced a new nag in its place.
Windows recently noticed the new, more annoying, addition that has arrived in the start menu in Windows 11 and consists of a pop-up saying: ‘Action advised-security copy your PC’.
Under it is something spiel about backing your files, settings and so on in the cloud, and if you click ‘Continue’ prompt Microsoft, you give you whipped to Windows security copy. (And that backup app is relieved by OneDrive -and with the low amount of free space included in Microsoft’s cloud storage service, you almost certainly need a subscription that is at the heart of this prompt in selling you something).
Analysis: Scoobe Dooby not
So while this start menu addition is a warning in light of it, it’s really just a way to try to get you to make a subscription with Microsoft. And while this may be a useful prompt to remind some people they need to back up their files, the problem is that others may have already sorted a backup via another app (or gone elsewhere in the cloud) – but if they haven’t used Microsoft’s official channel, then they will be tricked into doing so.
As Windows latest makes it clear, these requests are likely to continue to appear regularly – like Scoobe – and there’s no way you can turn them off. That’s because Microsoft has marked this Windows Backup NAG as a ‘required’ prompt, so it can’t be avoided, unlike scoobe that you can actually turn off. (You can do so in Settings> System> Messages> Additional Settings).
In my book there should be no such thing as mandatory nags, and if you want to use Windows 11 without being plagued by a single pop-up in these lines, you should be able to mark a box in that direction. Interestingly, Windows latest observes that with a test Windows 11 installation using an EU region, this alarm did not show in the starting menu -so this change may not happen in Europe because of its data rules (which in some ways proves a blessing).
