Over the last six years, I have been using a Microsoft Windows 10-based computer as a secondary machine for my work. In terms of hardware, it uses AMD’s AM4 platform, and it is a custom-built machine that I assembled from parts. One of the remarkable things about this platform is that AMD has supported several generations of CPU (Central Processing Unit) on the same platform. This is something I decided to take advantage of recently, given that AM4 parts are now past end-of-life and availability is becoming tenuous.
Through the past week, I rebuilt the machine, moving from an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU to a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. That was the hardware side of things; on the software side, earlier today, I upgraded the machine from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 11 Pro.
I recently posted about a likely future move from MacOS to Windows, and commented on the awkwardness of some aspects of the user experience with Windows. Today, I ran into another example: when upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you can choose to perform a completely fresh installation (with no software applications and no user data preserved), you can choose to retain the applications and data (in essence, ‘everything’), or you can choose to retain the data (but not the applications, making for a potentially smoother update). I chose to retain the user data, but do away with the applications, as I would be installing them anew.
True to its word, the Microsoft Windows upgrade did preserve the user data … but it reverted the display of files so that certain previously-displayed files (mainly related to the operating system) went back to their ‘hidden’ state. As I was performing the upgrade on an existing installation of Windows, I expected that it would preserve the display state, but that was not the case. In the end, this hindered the installation of additional (non-Microsoft) software, as I could not locate the previous user data to transfer across to the new software.
Specifically, within my fresh installation of Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail program, I could not find the previous Thunderbird-related user data under the AppData folder within my user folder—as Windows had reverted that folder to a hidden state. In the end, after a bit of searching to diagnose the problem, the solution was to right-click in the parent folder (that contained the hidden folder; I knew where the hidden folder should be, but could not see it), then choose ‘show hidden items.’
Once that was done, I was able to access my previous Thunderbird-related user data (e.g., address books, mail folders) from within Thunderbird. This one small fix, performed directly and easily from the main Windows user interface, resolved all the access difficulties I had been having when reinstalling Thunderbird (following reinstalling Windows).
I hope this anecdote will be of help to someone else one day, though bear in mind that as newer versions of software are released, this fix may no longer apply—or hopefully, no longer be needed if there are improvements to the Windows upgrade process.