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Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Won't Stop You From Installing Windows 11 on Older PCs (theverge.com) 89

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Microsoft is announcing today that it won't block people from installing Windows 11 on most older PCs. While the software maker has recommended hardware requirements for Windows 11 -- which it's largely sticking to -- a restriction to install the OS will only be enforced when you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 through Windows Update. From a report: This means anyone with a PC with an older CPU that doesn't officially pass the upgrade test can still go ahead and download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually. Microsoft announced its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements in June, and made it clear that only Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPUs were officially supported. Microsoft now tells us that this install workaround is designed primarily for businesses to evaluate Windows 11, and that people can upgrade at their own risk as the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability. Microsoft won't be recommending or advertising this method of installing Windows 11 to consumers.
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Microsoft Won't Stop You From Installing Windows 11 on Older PCs More

Microsoft Won't Stop You From Installing Windows 11 on Older PCs

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  • I would have sworn that Microsoft would abandon the requirement specifically because they have been obsessed with total installs as a metric for several years. This is letting people use Windows 11 while still preventing the ability to force it on users. I suspect they will change their time when they realise how few people meet the auto upgrade requirement (secure boot disabled, TPM disabled).

    That said I'm not surprised the requirement dropped. Microsoft's flagship hardware product the Surface Studio which

    • Wait ... Microsoft is only doing auto updates to Win11 for people with Secure Boot disabled?

      Disabling Secure Boot is a new-machine ritual for me (before "install linux"), but I didn't think your average windows user cared about it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Xenx ( 2211586 )
        The way they worded it is weird. They're listing secure boot disabled and TPM disabled as reasons why people wouldn't qualify for auto-upgrading to 11.

      • Wait ... Microsoft is only doing auto updates to Win11 for people with Secure Boot disabled?

        No I just wrote it in an archaic way. The default for many system is secure boot disabled and the default for most BIOSes is TPM disabled. Windows 11 upgrade requires both to be enabled.

    • I suspect the requirements will be downgraded to some kind of "Windows 11 PC" certification over the next few months. They can't afford to have hundreds of millions zombie Windows 10 PCs around forever, as that is a much bigger security nightmare than the one they're supposedly trying to protect us from by passing these stringent requirements.

  • people can upgrade at their own risk as the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability.

    So, situation normal -- business as usual.

  • I've noticed that whenever a computer is slow, it is always because it has a hard drive. Why not ban hard drives entirely from being the primary data storage on any device? I am serious. Get rid of them ASAP, I am willing to write my senator, city councilman, whoever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zekica ( 1953180 )
      Or they can maybe not simultaneously install updates to store apps, system updates and scan for viruses.

      I have several Linux VMs installed on a large HDD and they are not as slow as Windows is on the same HDD.
      • Same.

        I used to do a lot of work on a Linux VM hosted on a HDD, running as a guest OS on a Windows machine, where the host OS was on a SSD.

        Guess which one was faster?

        The Linux VM was slower when doing things that legitimately slam disk I/O (for instance, "compress 100 GB of stuff"), but for things like opening web browsers and so on, the VM was fine.
    • install the operating system onto a solid state drive, SSDs always boots and runs faster than spinning platters, save the old spinning platter drives for data storage if they are big enough and worth bothering with, otherwise toss em
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Apple won't let you do your own upgrades, and Linux won't run LightRoom.
      In the business and scientific world, there is little software written for anything other than Windows (IME, YMMV.)

      • Re:Between Steam, Chrome/Firefox, vlc, KDE and Mac (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:42PM (#61736573)
        Linux runs Darktable, which is in many ways better.

        • Linux runs Darktable, which is in many ways better.

          And in even more ways worse. What is it with open source programmers producing interfaces which look like they threw up on the screen. I have both installed. There's no comparison. Actually the only reason Darktable is still installed is because I'm too lazy to uninstall it. I'd rather reboot and edit photos in Lightroom any day. Mind you Darktable does have significantly lower resource requirements so it's a win if you have an underpowered PC.

      • Right. How many supercomputers run windoze?

    • I confine Windows to virtual machines on Linux hosts but that's not convenient for everyone.

      If a company with enough cash wanted to fix the Linux compatibility issues with Windows applications it could do so, and some like Valve are working at it.

      Professionals can just buy new compliant hardware since PCs (if you are making tech money and not just some wanker) are trivially inexpensive as tools of the trade go. As a mechanic can afford a welder or tire machine other pros can afford the tools of their trade

    • Because for 90% of the PC users out there Windows is inertia. They've used it for decades, they use it at work and for quite a number of people it in fact does "just work". That doesn't mean it works flawlessly but it does. The issues the majority of people have with Windows is a lack of deeper understanding of how to work within the OS itself. Putting them on Linux won't get them that knowledge either.

      Also it's just the case that in the metrics that matter to most people Win10 is pretty alright these da

      • The other thing that hurt Linux's efforts on the desktop was the Linux user base. I remember playing around with Linux 20 years ago and the learning curve was quite steep then. When asking questions to the community I kept getting met with "RTFM NoOb" and other similar rude comments. The elitist attitude of the Linux community drove many away I'm sure.
    • I have been very pleasantly surprised with Proton, tbh. Most of the remaining compatibility issues with my laptop and games are related to Optimus.

    • The software I use to do my job is not available on Linux.

  • "Microsoft now tells us that... the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability".

    Wait! Microsoft has guarantee's on driver compatibility and overall system reliability!?

    Wow, can Microsoft give me a reimbursement in all the time I've ever spent troubleshooting my dos and windows issues over the past 3 decades?

    • Wow, can Microsoft give me a reimbursement in all the time I've ever spent troubleshooting my dos and windows issues over the past 3 decades?

      This is why I never gave Microsoft one dime, my employers picked up the tab for any licenses I used for all my hardware. I try not to touch windows at all anymore, it was working against me more than for me lately.

    • Actually, that started becoming a thing with NT. Aka OS/2. Co-developed with IBM.
      After that, the problems were almost always drivers or bad software (like malware). Hence them locking down the system a la Apple and doing WHQL and building in their own malware scanner (albeit it being a total piece of crap, and mostly security theater, always has been, always will be), and all that.

      Of course all of that is acts of going down the path of evil totalitarian dictatorship... as I said, a la Apple, ...
      But you can'

  • They should. I think it will be funny.
  • is that Windows has become so terrible that now they can hardly give it away

  • and just jump to Linux at this point. It's extremely usable today and it's not spying on everything you do and sending reports of your photos back to the feds. It's time to get off big tech if you haven't already.

  • I was expecting them to only cave in much later when it becomes painfully obvious that nobody would downgrade to 11 unless you pay them. At this rate the TPM requirement will be gone entirely long before 10 reaches its EOL.

  • Older hardware? (Score:3)

    by mikeiver1 ( 1630021 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @03:52PM (#61736391)
    I still use an old HP Z800 Workstation. Fastest pair of 4core Xeons under factory water and 96GB of RAM as well as a SAS SSD and a pair of 15K SAS drives in RAID0. Old yes and does not qualify under their stupid recommendations. The fact is that this machine would not even notice the load of Win11. Allot of old machines wouldn't either. Why they chose to do this I don't understand and no reasonable explanation has been put forth by them either. Just about every machine sold over the last couple of years should be able to load and run the OS. If they can't then the OS is shit. An OS should not put a game type load on the processor and system resources.

    • How many watts does it take?

      Please give your number in power plants.

      • Enough to keep the room warm in the winter some what. About 200W idle I think and a bunch more if pushed!

    • lol at that computer

      • Why? I have a few HP Z600s with dual X5675s (so 12c/24t) that still have unbeatable price/performance (a pair of X5675s is ~$25 shipped, and registered DDR3 is dirt cheap)
      • Price all in from the start to the finish and all sourced from Ebay used for the most part was only shy of $1700.00. Full specs are basically ridiculous. A matched pair of Xeon X5687 (4C8T @ 3.6GHz each) Factory processor water cooler kit 96GB of ECC DDR3 Hitachi 400GB Enterprise SAS SSD A pair of Seagate 15K 480GB SAS drives RAID0 from the on board LSI SAS controller GTX980Ti superclocked video card 1150W power supply Bluray and Mdisk burner Windows 7 pro license that had a free upgrade to Win 10 Pro. VERY
    • Microsoft can't really afford to piss them off. There's too much scrutiny on tech companies right now regarding antitrust and chrome and Firefox make desktop Linux viable, plus the various things valve is done for gaming. So Microsoft is handing them a chunk of cash in the form of forced upgrades.

  • What I want to know is... (Score:3)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:38PM (#61736543)

    Can you upgrade from Win 10 by enabling firmware TPM, and then disable it after the install?

    • Almost certainly. Windows 11 would need to have a backup in case the TPM is inaccessible. Just note that if during setup TPM was used for something then you may be in for a treat when rebooting (e.g. when the TPM died on my surface device due to a screwed up firmware update Windows Hello stopped working, and Bitlocker stopped working and asked for the ludicrously long unlock key to boot the PC. Also the firmware screwup also showed that Secure boot was using TPM as I got a error booting saying winload.efi w

  • Makes a degree of sense (Score:3)

    by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @04:41PM (#61736567)

    When you look back at some of the past versions of Windows, you see that Microsoft occasionally skips ahead to target what is the bleeding edge at the time. Windows NT made use of those new fangled protected memory, and NT 3.51 was specifically targeting the 486, to the point that Microsoft delayed its release for six months so Intel could work out some issues. XP's Luna interface was more than most IGPs of the time could handle and resulted in people bitching endlessly until around SP2 when the hardware largely caught up. XP also generally required at least 256MB of RAM to run well, as anyone who ever tried running it with only 128MB will tell you. Vista had massive under the hood rewrites of major subsystems, like the process scheduler being redone to take better advantage of multi-core CPUs, and the Explorer shell was rewritten to use DirectX instead of GDI+, and that is a considerably watered down version of what they were originally planning. Again, IGPs of the day weren't really up to the task and people bitched endlessly until the hardware started to catch up. Now Microsoft is doing it again.

    It makes a certain degree of sense from their perspective since they see it as laying the necessary groundwork for the next several years worth of development. Most long-lived programs, like Windows, will end up going in directions no one could have imagined 5-years ago. When XP came out, the idea of multi-core CPUs didn't even exist, then came Hyperthreading and then full multi-core CPUs. When Windows95 came out, video cards were very basic things that just displayed an image on the screen, so the idea of a fully 3D hardware accelerated user shell wasn't even possible. Instead of a steady trickle of disruptions, they opt for one large one every so often. It doesn't make it any less unpleasant, but it's the least bad option for the largest number of their customers.

  • What specifically makes an i7 7700K running at close to 5GHz (overclocked), with 32GB of DDR4 and a fast M.2 SSD unfit to run Windows 11, but then some 8th gen i7 with half the RAM and a standard SSD and running a few thousand GHz less somehow perfectly acceptable to Microsoft? I get you have to make the cutoff somewhere, but there are a ton of systems out there that go 6-7 generations back that are still quite fast. I don't think TPM is the reason as most systems can allow you to add it on the motherboard.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What specifically makes an i7 7700K running at close to 5GHz (overclocked), with 32GB of DDR4 and a fast M.2 SSD unfit to run Windows 11, but then some 8th gen i7 with half the RAM and a standard SSD and running a few thousand GHz less somehow perfectly acceptable to Microsoft?

      Microsoft is already backpedalling furiously.

      They have already announced that while you can't use Windows Update to go from Win10 to Win11 on "unsupported" systems, you can download a Win11 iso and install it manually.

      Which demonstrates that this is all just pointless bullshit.

    • I don't know and I was looking for an answer also... my laptop is quite capable with a i5 6th gen it even has TPM2.0 but I don't know what make the 8th gen so special? 2 more cores? AVX512? no clue...

  • No more small taskbar icons mode... (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @05:05PM (#61736653)
    ... That would be a issue for me. Why is Microsoft taking up more of my usable screen space with Windows structures unnecessarily?

    • No more anything taskbar. It's been completely gimped. No choosing where to place it on the screen, no right click context menu, not drag to pin, no pinning files, it's like they went back to windows 95 level of functionality.

      Oh but it's center justified. I MUST HAVE IT! or at least that's what MS thinks.

      • I have read the reasons Microsoft has stated for disabling the functionality of the task bar, and what they are doing does not seem to correspond with the reasons stated. So I have to ask, what is the problem that Microsoft is trying to solve by removing the useful functionality of the taskbar?

        • So I have to ask, what is the problem that Microsoft is trying to solve by removing the useful functionality of the taskbar?

          Slow Linux uptake.

  • Subject is why I may never run Windows 11.

    The only reasons I'm running Windows 10 are lack of alternatives and the feeble and fading hope that I won't get pwned and destroyed by a new security vulnerability that was inherited from older code but remains unpatched in older OSes.

    Even if Microsoft claimed the older machines were supported for Windows 11, I wouldn't believe them. And even less credibility from the manufacturers who are desperate to sell me a new machine.

  • hypervisorlaunchtype = off

    because if the answer is yes, then almost all of the special requirements are moot. That’s the trick to making sure virtualisation-based security isn’t used if you apply it using bcdedit prior to the first boot. The main reason for the 8th Gen requirement is because MBEC emulation could create significant overhead in some circumstances on older CPUs (wilders forums used to have a thread on it back when Credential Guard was new)

    Assuming a new enough graphics card t

  • As I mentioned in a previous post or two, I took the plunge into Linux with Mint. So far, with only minor quibbles, everything does what I want. All I need is better documentation or more precise instructions on how to install software and I'll be set. And no, sudo apt-get install whatever is not instructions.

    No way in hell I'm going to Windows 11. At work, because I have to. But at home, no way, no how.

  • Doesn't this sounds like a shitstorm brewing? Based on the historic Microsoft Windows GOOD/BAD/GOOD/BAD production schedule it would only make sense for Windows 11 to be a complete shitshow before they gut it, keep the start button and repackage it as W12. Maybe I'm just getting old but aside from some runtime compatibility issues, mostly created by MSFT, I could still be happily running Windows 7 right now without any loss in productivity. I click twice to launch an app or my browser...then I don't touch

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Of course. There's no type of hell like Microsoft Hell.

      Can't resist.
      Bill Gates is involved in an auto accident. They operate and seem to save his life. While under he heads to heaven. St. Peter says - Bill, you're going back. You're not dead yet. However we can show you around a bit. Since he's the richest man in the world he is allowed to chose if he goes to Heaven or Hell. He shows him Heaven and it's kind of boring. People playing harps, everything is proper, etc. The he shows him Hell. Man it's popping!

  • You could get antiX [antixlinux.com] to run on an old PC.

    DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux ... [distrowatch.com]

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