Windows 11 continues to creep up behind Windows 10 With Windows 11 still failing to set the world alight, campaigners are warning that millions of perfectly good PCs could become landfill fodder when support for Windows 10 runs out in eleven and a bit months. Figures compiled by StatCounter show that Windows 11 commanded a 35.55 percent share of the desktop Windows market in …
No such luck. Remember, that for 99% of the laptop buying public, no Windows -> no sale, so the refurb houses would not be able to sell them. There may be a few on eBay, but the Linux boot-USB wielding public is a tiny proportion.
Worse, the inability of any old computer to be resold will ensure that they all are going into landfill.
All those £50 corporate Dell sub-minis you were buying as servers and stuff? All going. All the cheapie Dell 1U rackmounts, with loads of life left in them? Gone.
Donate-a-PC for developing countries' schools? No Windows, no good.
This is Not Good News. It's an environmental armageddon.
They won't, for the most part, be going anywhere.
Of those that are capable of being upgraded and are in the hands of businesses which care, some will have been upgraded and some will be being held off until the last minute because their users don't want W11 sooner than they have to have it.
The rest, which aren't capable of being upgraded, and which you see as landfill will be being used by those for whom the existing updates are a monthly nuisance and will be quite glad to see that stop. Their users are not going to spend good money to climb back onboard that bus once they've got off.
Unless Microsoft were to send out a bricking update - which I don't think even they would expect they could get away with - they will continue working. The only difference in their users' view is that they'll stop getting upgrades. Nothing else. Zilch. Nada. They continue to be PCs running W10 until their PSU caps bulge.
I take it that the $30 extended upgrade offer is a realisation by Microsoft that that's the situation but they can try to screw extra money out of some of the irreconcilables.
>Unless Microsoft were to send out a bricking update - which I don't think even they would expect they could get away with
If its anything like Windows XP it won't brick the system, just degrade its performance to the point where its functionally useless. With Windows XP the Service Pack 3 did the trick -- systems that used to be OK started taking for ever to start and getting erratic peripheral faults. Nothing too obvious, just "time to replace the hardware" type problems. Remember that most users are trained to think of things wearing out as a natural part of their lifecycle; software doesn't actually wear out so it has to be continually upgraded to preserve the illusion it does. (One strategy would be to lock a disk cylinder so that disk use and wear becomes a sort of gradual run down as errors on that cylinder gradually increase -- lots of retries, seeks (or the solid state equivalent) will cause the software to wear out just like the physical device.)
(BTW -- My Win10 update strategy is called "Linux".)
Solid state devices don't tend to degrade over time, if a sector dies then it stops working entirely - once it's mapped as bad, it's not used again. Once you run out of enough spare sectors for the size of the drive, that's it, it's corrupt. Or if a whole chip stops working or if something goes wrong with the controller, then it's dead, Jim. No chance of recovery outside de-soldering the storage chips and putting them on a new board to see what's there, which will require the services of a recovery company most likely with specialist equipment.
She doesn't trust doing anything financial online, so no bank, brokerage, credit card, etc. sites are ever accessed. She doesn't keep anything important on it like photos or whatever. So nothing of value can be accessed or lost if someone gets in.
That's probably true of more and more people, even people who don't reject the idea of doing anything financial online like my mom, because they manage all that from and keep their important stuff on their phone and not their PC.
Way way WAY easier to remotely break into a Windows PC though. How many ransomware attacks have you heard of targeting phones? I've heard of zero. So many happen on PCs every day that it isn't news unless it is against a major business, hospital or utility.
Yeah, the hyperbole isn't helpful here. Mainly it's a question of who will blink first: MS when Win11 is the only supported version and it still isn't growing enough, or enterprise and institutional users getting to the end of Win10 support and refusing to needlessly and expensively upgrade perfectly functional hardware just to meet an artificial OS imposition.
If enough people hold out, MS might just feel pushed relax their hardware requirements. Yeah yeah, it's a pipe dream. It would take a concerted global effort, one I just don't see will happen. Plus MS win either way, since ent's and int's usually must use a supported OS, so they'll have to pay either way. Although it's still a far lower cost than junking perfectly good hardware.
One way that might work is if governments refused to upgrade their estates, on environmental grounds. They're about the only orgs with sufficient might to force MS to relax it's hardware requirements. And of course, if MS did relax them, all the people forced to upgrade beforehand would be rightly pissed off. Some class action potential there.
"If enough people hold out, MS might just feel pushed relax their hardware requirements."
Why? What's in it for them?
The whole H/W requirement is to get you to go out and buy a nice, shiny W11 capable PC which will come with a new W11 licence for which you will, indirectly, pay MS money.
The only concession here is to let machines that already meet the criteria upgrade for free.
If you're not going to buy a new computer W11 licence then you can buy $30's worth of extra updates. If you do neither than as far as MS are concerned you can get stuffed. If you're not giving them money they don't care.
It's there, in plain sight, right in front of you.
Microsoft's only interest is in the money you give them.
I don't think MS can increase backwards compatibility now. They're now writing software into the OS which requires certain CPU flags (as of 24H2) so older processors simply won't run whatever code it is.
Unless they undo those changes then it's not going to be possible any more.
I hate to say it but we're back to the old days again - before Vista came along each new version of Windows had higher minimum specs than the one before it, requiring upgrades. Vista changed that - 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 all had the same or similar minimum requirements to Vista which has lulled people into believing that's the "new normal" over the 15 or so years that that's been the case, but it's clearly not sticking around for the long term.
Suspect there are millions of PCs running W10 21H2 that have already stopped receiving updates.
Had a surprise, with a friends work laptop, it had been GPO’d to 21H2, so that the user could not manually perform an update to 22H2, but potentially could do an update to W11, which seems to by pass the GPO settings…
I love my brick in a sock!
A half brick is more traditional, surely?
Have you tried shoving a whole brick up a sock? You might have a bit more luck with a pair of panty hose but that might be perceived as being rather nancified.
At any rate you can't get a decent swing up, fast enough, with a full brick to maintain the element of surprise.
A half brick in a footy* sock - a pairing made in heaven.
<sub>* Rugby if you need to ask.</sub>
Dear Sir or Madman.
Introduced in "Kung Fu Kapers", a 1975 episode of the British comedy television series The Goodies. In the episode, "ecky thump" is a secret Lancastrian martial art using black puddings as a weapon.
Governments around the world need to step in and force MS to drop the restrictions else (as the article says) there will be masses of unnecessary WEEE.
I have been upgrading via rufus just to see what happens, but I suspect the better solution will be to image, install a free-for-commercial-use hypervisor and restore the image to a VM. That way it still complies with the licensing terms and run with that until the end of the life of the PC
The most likely solution is that they'll just be kept running as is. They're not being used by the likes of elReg inhabitants. They're being used by people who think they're just PCs and will stay just PCs until the day they don't boot any more.
Their users don't care.
Exactly the experience with my parents.
It wasn't until last year that I realised my dad's elderly iMac was way past EOL for updates from Apple. He has eventually agreed after much explanation that it requires replacement with something that is more secure and up to date (never mind the HDD that must be getting increasingly untrustworthy inside). Beyond home finances / web browsing and his music / photo collections he doesn't use it, his daily driver usually being an iPad. A bit like an iPad, he'd rather a computer that "just works".
Mum took about a year of convincing to replace her ten year old android phone with something newer that could actually run things like whatsapp and allow her to keep in touch with everyone easily.
There are plenty out there who don't have someone tech-savvy to assist with replacing their out of date stuff...
I reach the UK retirement age in January 2026. I am already working part-time. My 2 day week starts tomorrow, and my NHS pension pays me for the other 3.
I imagine we will be spending plenty of money on new kit that we shouldn't really need but, as of my 66th birthday, that is not my real problem!
I have a PC at home that probably doesn't run Win11 but It does run Linux - probably Ubuntu. It has a separate data drive so I shouldn't lose much stuff either.
I can leave that with people, mostly no older than my kids,
I'm ageing too - 80+ - and I have been a Mint user for years, with an additional 2 Tb HDD in my homebuild purely for backup and data storage. My wife has an "old" ex windows laptop (< 5yrs ), also running Mint but sadly without the capacity for a second data drive. Now looking for a higher spec second hand machine with more flexible upgrade potential; M2 card or the like rather than spinning tin.
It will most likely be a "casualty" of Win 11 and cost maybe as much as £50 - or less. I'll probably have to pay more than that just for the second HDD to get the spec I want. Then it will probably go on working reliably for more years than I've got left.
Interesting comparison.
The car manufactures have a vested interest in promoting both the real features and the emotive features of their offerings.
The magazines likewise do test drives and comparisons, using well known metrics.
I suspect a challenge OS distro’s have, is they have not got the same level of marketing and produce promotion material.
So Joe Public don’t really have any thing to go on to compare say MINT with Ubuntu.
My primary laptop was bought in January 2018 (an HP 17-Y002NA) and it upgraded to Win 11 without a complaint shortly after it was released. So if a 6.5 year old laptop (and probably not even the current model at the time) can run Win11 things can't be all that bad. My mail server is running on a refurbished HP desktop of some kind and it doesn't want to know and I don't care. I reckon it's safe enough - it runs headless and even when I'm doing maintenance I prefer to browse on the remote machine and transfer files via the LAN.
I do think that MS should relax the hardware requirements, though.
What I don't understand is how Microsoft still can't see how dreadful Win11 is. I'll try it from time to time on a VM but it's simply a bad OS. With gaming still not having moved on from the PS5 generation, other than the yahoos interested in LLMs and Machine learning there little to no reason to upgrade hardware. A Zen2 processor is still doing its good work on a B450 board. The hardware really hasn't been struggling at all.
Sadly, although I dual boot Ubuntu and Win10 I still don't have a long term solution past the EoS. Windows 11 isn't the solution for me with it's bloat and it's poor design choices. Ubuntu, and indeed all Linux distros are not the solution either. They carry with them the *ability* to do almost anything, but not the usability either without a massive learning curve.
There are those here on elReg who I'm sure will criticise those planning to just ride out the expiry of Win10 support. Fact is though that there is no realistic solution. The machines that work now, will be capable of running things as they are in another eleven months, so from a User perspective why should they be thrown away.
Microsoft tried these scare tactics once before with Win7/8 and failed. Users often don't understand the impacts of EoS. Which means the real question is - how long before Microsoft wake up and realise that they either need to remove trash like copilot, or extend support for Win10 again. The real answer of course is that both need to happen. Just like it went down last time!
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