More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11 Nearly 43 percent of millions of devices studied by asset management provider Lansweeper are unable to upgrade to Windows 11 due to the hardware requirements Microsoft set out for the operating system. Microsoft made it so that Windows 11 does not install on devices that lack a recent TPM-equipped CPU. It is possible to get …
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And their point?
Like others I have refused it. The PCs I have are (mostly) working just fine. I don't need another great upheaval and "new improved (shite)" user interface to help me do things.
It is no surprise that so many are not fit for Windows 11. If does not bring any benefits to most people and a world of pain.
Why would you ditch perfectly good hardware? This is the argument that was at the top of the list when the requirements for Windows 11 first became known.
Creating landfill due to shoddy software is insane and not just an affliction of Microsoft/Windows.....
I got 2 systems fully capable of Windows 11 which are staying put on Windows 10 for the forseeable future.
I don't see the benefits of Windows 11 worth the time for me to backup everything and do a full fresh install. I don't bother with upgrades, I rather do a full install to remove all the cruft.
I'm using Win 11 on my work laptop as part of our testing process and in my opinion its not worse than Windows 10 which about the highest praise I have had for a new Microsoft OS for as long as I can remember.
I have several Dell Latitude laptops that are EOL for the business, but still working fine so I have factory reset one back to the standard out-of-box experience.
After the various updates install, it offers to test if Win 11 is an option, but fails.
However, if I download a Win 11 .iso and install from that it works fine, so I am completely confused.
Can my laptop upgrade to Win 11? The answer seems to be No, maybe, yes.
I have a system which could easily run Win 11, with a spare switchable sata power supply, and a spare disc bay, plus i7 chip and 32 Gb ram on a recent MSI 490 mobo. Plenty good enough.. and Ive got a spare 2 Tb ssd kicking about somewhere.....
But I'm sticking with Linux Mint. Of course, if I really wanted Windows there's always VirtualBox... except that I think MS have disabled Win 11 for virtual machines (?) So the question becomes, what do I actually need / want Win for?
Got me there.....Can't think of even one half decent reason. Linux does everything I need.. QGIS for mapping, Inkscape for filling in the fiddly details and SVG graphics, Libre CAD for 3d design, Audacity for my music collection and GIMP for the holiday snapshots I screwed up, plus Libre Office for "work" ....
Oh - and of course all of this stuff actually WORKS. Why would I want to change that??
Windows 11 is not disabled for VMs - it installed easily through Parallels on my 10 year old iMac.
It ran well and I was tempted to default to the VM for all my MS Office needs (as MS stopped updating their suite on High Sierra). However, my video editing needs (for local charities) outgrew iMovie and none of the video editors that would fit the bill could be installed on High Sierra. Running a Windows version was an option, but a 10yo graphics card is limiting.
I upgraded to an M1Pro MacBook Pro and use the DV Resolve editor. Win 11 (ARM) runs fine as a VM (as does Ubuntu 22.04) - covers all I need for now - ad hoc dives into them to maintain familiarity and testing.
Insofar as Win 11 goes, I find it no better nor worse than Win 10 - if anything, the interface is getting more Mac-like (and almost seamless when running the VM in coherent mode).
"Windows 11 is not disabled for VMs - it installed easily through Parallels on my 10 year old iMac."
Yes, it isn't gratuitously disabled for VMs, but the VM needs to meet all the hardware requirements and I think a clean VirtualBox VM struggles with that. There are some instructions on the interwebs about how to hack the Win11 installation so that it works. It may not even be necessary anymore, I don't know. My own Win11 VirtualBox VM was created a few months ago. However, without the excuse that I need to check that my stuff still works, I can't think of a good reason to upgrade.
The interesting question is what happens in 2025 when all this "legacy" hardware is still going strong and MS want to turn off support for Win10. The original decision to require certain hardware for Win11 must have been made pre-pandemic and pre-chip-shortage, when it must have seemed fairly reasonable (to an MS exec) to suppose that pretty much everyone would be running on newer hardware by 2025.
>The interesting question is what happens in 2025 when all this "legacy" hardware is still going strong and MS want to turn off support for Win10.
Given how many companies are beholden to investment analyst forecasts, MS exec's won't really care - if you are not using W11 and M365 then they aren't getting any subscription revenue from you.
Obviously, companies with volume licence agreements will still be paying, but MS know they can apply pressure to bring them back into line.
But if they drive people to other OSes, they'll never get any subscription revenue. They will have turned customers of Windows (and, let's not forget, Windows applications, of which MS sell quite a few) into users of other OSes.
And for what? The OS is supposed to abstract away hardware details. Why can't Win11 cope with older hardware by not offering certain features?
That is the calculated risk - which they are already taking with their on-prem server offering, remember it is a common business strategy, often implemented out of the application of the 80:20 rule. (Which gets quite interesting if you apply it to board rooms, something Tom Peter's - management writer, alluded to...)
I suspect unless PC World et al. fully adopt A.N.Other OS distribution (Currently they are favouring Apple, but they could adopt some Linux-based distribution and thus grab a bigger slice of the on-going support sales and revenues, although I would not totally rule out something from left-of-field like ReactOS! ) Joe public will have little real choice: it's either Apple or Microsoft.
>Why can't Win11 cope with older hardware by not offering certain features?
Commercial decision. MS has made many similar decisions in the past to encourage upgrades to their new OS and Office product offering.
Personally, I think physical TPM is a dead end technology, Windows really needs to include a software TPM, so that my VM/cloud instance can fully benefit from TPM.
If Steam games don't like Proton (or WINE), then I don't like them. There are plenty enough games to fill my free time thousands of times over that do work in Linux. My gaming laptop is Windows free! I just wanted that Redmondian monster out of my life for good, and now that it is out of my life, it is indeed good!
Win11 is a waste of time purely from the standpoint that it doesn't seem to offer anything worthwhile. I've got Win11, it works, it games and i can code on it but I see not really advantage day-to-day over Win10. I'm sure under the covers there's patches here and there, a few features and MS have continued the irritating thing of hiding more useful dialogues under a heap of simplistic kludge, however when it comes down to it the only people winning are MS shareholers. I'm lucky as I got my Win11 off MSDN, so someone else footed my upgrade bill, others not so lucky.
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I run Linux GUI apps daily. Not gonna get a new and expensive Win11 box to do that when my 7 year old ThinkPad does it faster and better without Win11 and a copy of my go to Linux distro........
My other daily driver is an even older HP EliteBook portable workstation. Came with Win10, won't go to Win11. And again, I'll not be replacing this second user clunker just for Win11.
I replace my (generally) second user hardware when it no longer lights up. Not when M$ says.
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When I travel, I take a MacBook (work mandated) and use Anydesk to get to my machines back home. The graphical login works well, cut and paste even. And if you're on a tight network bandwidth there is a VPN option so you can just ssh into your remote Linux systems.
I just about got to understand enough of Windows 7 to fix most things, Windows 8 was a head scratcher, Windows 10 then obfuscated even more of the supportability options. I dread the time when I hear "Oh look, my laptop has just been upgraded to something called Windows 11" from my partner.
It offers quite a bit that's worthwhile if you have a 12th gen Intel CPU, and there have been a number of enhancements to security functions that are a bit too in the weeds for a lot of users.
This is a prime example of why, despite what everyone claims, if Microsoft said that they'd release Windows 12 in June, and it'd be nothing but performance tuning, bugfixes, and security enhancements, everyone would pan it despite all the claims that this is exactly what people want. Without some flashy whiz-bang "slaps you in the face" obvious new feature, no one thinks the OS has any value. Even the people who profess to be geeks/nerds won't bother looking past the surface to see things like improvements to the process scheduler to take advantage of Thread Director, or how they've increased security around things like ASLR. No one cares about hardening of the driver API except when it means old drivers break and it takes a bit for mfrs to come out with new ones. Few people even notice the slow, but steady, progress that has been made taming the Windows UI that has been kind of the wild west since Win95. Doesn't matter what people say, they don't want bug fixes, security updates, and performance improvements, they want new features. Without that, it doesn't "offer anything worthwhile."
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Way to prove the OP's point!
No, not all of us are so enamored with the [damn] past that we can't move forward. I, for one, like Win10 yet am waiting for Win11 to stabilize and prove itself.
Win7 feels like an antique compared to Win10 but if you're stuck on partying like its 2011 then all the best to you.
To be honest, ANY version of windoze is the past....all they do is change the lipstick on the pig (usually badly), but the core architecture is antediluvian.
The file systems are antiques - the fact that FAT still exists at all is shameful - and there are so many better file systems available on Linux. NTFS dates from 1993 and is awful.
The OS itself is still based on windows NT (also 1993) and has many anachronisms, like the Registry and utter idiocies like Pagefile.sys and Hiberfil.sys. Windows powershell is primitive compared to the rich range of choices on Linux. Windows NT was never really meant for networking, and IIRC, the windows TCP stack was ̶s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶n̶ based on the one from a version of BSD Unix. WinSock was a copy of BSD sockets - the BSD copyright notices are still in the string resources of the binaries. Most have, fortunately been rewritten since around the time of the joke called Vista, but they are still poor..
So...no, W11 is not the future...it's m$'s way of eking money out of the past.
Just because something is old doesn't necessarily make it bad. Linux is just a clone of Unix, which is even older than Windows, so by your line of reasoning, it should be even worse.
This isn't meant to be pejorative, but you sound like someone who just discovered Linux <6 months ago. Many of us have been there and done that. For me it was back in the mid-90s when you actually had to know your shit to get things working. I'm talking editing config files to manually enter modelines to make monitors work reasonably correctly and scouring web forums looking for anyone who had an even remotely similar problem to give you some ideas on how to approach your problem. RPM was barely a thing, never mind any kind of repos like today, and most of the time you had to install apps by compiling from a source tarball. The honeymoon period will pass and then you'll realize that Linux is far from perfect. It's been a running joke for like 20+ years that this will be the year of Linux on the desktop. It exists in a perpetual state of "almost there" constantly chasing the taillights of Microsoft and Apple.
Same here, I dipped my toes into the Linux waters with Redhat 5.2, of which I still have the box set floppies of. Then Redhat 6...
which promptly told me this thing wasn't really going anywhere, at least in terms of supporting the functionality I needed (desktop publishing / editing, and laptop support).
And, 20+ years later the latter has vastly improved but the former really hasn't changed much :-(
Yes, I agree, for those who weren't there, they have *no* idea how much "joy" it was getting Linux working. Yes, nothing like having to recompile the kernel because they didn't have the necessary build switches set. And figuring out driver support. And compiling your tarball. And, especially, being told that these things are 'essential' to attaining 'real computing experience'.
To a guy who bothered to raw hex-edit HDD's to fix data corruption issues.
Was it a 'fun' learning experience? Sure. But I realized / decided that sitting in front of a computer and tearing your hair out to get it to do things that you need it to, rather than simply have it ready for you, was no longer 'fun' when I'd rather be doing the real things I consider "fun". "Oh, Windoze suxs!" is so relevant when Windows has the applications that I need, for both *all* my hardware (from GPS systems, to helmet communicators, to photo flash & camera firmware updaters, to tablets, to Ethernet bridges) and software. Fun? If the weather is better than miserable, I'd rather be out riding than sitting in front of this machine.
As was said wisely earlier in the thread, "Os's don't have any value. The programs that run on it do". Bingo. For rabid fans with a particular axe to grind, yep, the OS matters.
For the rest of us: We have work to do. And "work" does not involve wasting time in getting our TOOLS to work, before we even start work.
Yup. I got my start downloading floppy images for Slackware95 I think. I don't remember the specific version, but it was definitely Slackware. Tried probably a dozen or so different distributions back in the day, and Gentoo's the one I stuck with the longest. Of course that was when I had an abundance of free time. These days, what little free time I have is precious and I don't want to have to spend it futzing around trying to get something to work. I just want to get things done and move on. I get really pissed off when I turn on my Xbox or Playstation, because I have maybe 1 hour to play a game before I have to go to bed or work or do something else (stupid adult responsibilities) and then I have to download some massive patch that eats up like 20 minutes of my 1 hour to relax. I miss the days of the PS2 when you popped the game disc in and away you went, no downloads.
And then, if Microsoft even TRIES to change something, all they get is complaining!
"FAT still exists at all is shameful". And what would happen if MS killed off FAT support? Easy answer: heads will roll. I can already hear the yelling as users can no longer conveniently access old data, having to jump through hoops because some group of techies decided that their old data didn't matter squat.
Registry? Hmm, and sticking settings in an arcane text configuration file, placed who-knows-where depending upon the associated user of said file, is any better?? An arcane text file system so bad that creating GUI interfaces to completely control the editing and settings contained in said file is pretty much impossible??
You are simply being blind to *nix's own problems. which is why the only truly successful desktop implementation of it has as much of its *nix history buried as possible - MacOS.
The Windoze TCP stack was "based on" a broken, development version from BSD - and they've never bothered to fix it. All their networking was "borrowed" from other OSs, and the endless kludges they've applied to try to make it work properly (and "securely") have just worsened the situation.
"...Few people even notice the slow, but steady, progress that has been made taming the Windows UI that has been kind of the wild west since Win95...
I agree with your points except this one.
Windows 7 nailed the UI experience (I don't really include XP because it was just too cartoon-garish out of the box, but arguably the stability started there with SP3). In fact Win 7 nailed the whole OS ideology quite nicely. It was pretty enough to be enjoyable to use, it was functional enough that it faded into the background, it was clever in how it performed certain functions slower than Vista, but appeared to the user to feel faster and MS seemed to finally be getting a handle on security.
Then the next few releases were a travesty. Windows 8 was a pitiful attempt to force a mobile OS on a desktop user regardless of whether they had a touch screen or not. You can argue all day it was an ok OS other than the desktop but given that's the thing people see and use, it's not a valid argument. And herein also began a pernicious trend with MS and Windows - you get what we want you to get and fuck you if you want different. Explain why, in the beta, you could set a registry key to give you a normal desktop but they removed it when it went live? If people had had that choice, then it wouldn't have been panned.
8.1 just tried to fix some of the UI issues.
Windows 10 went a good way to fixing them but continued the trend of mixing Control Panel and System Settings - you could achieve the same thing in two locations. And one of them didn't even have an OK button to confirm the change!? You could do silly things like zoom in on the taskbar icons on the right by pinching and zooming a trackpad. Why there?
Why did they add advertising into the base OS? Why on a Professional version did I get a frigging XBox Gaming Bar that I couldn't remove? Why did I get a bunch of telemetry that I could neither disable nor peer into exactly *what* was being sent?
Windows 11 for me has its own oddities and quirks that I've covered before but at least on the Enterprise version I am currently running the adverts have gone, though I am not a fan of the weather icon in the bottom left corner expanding with the crud it does - it seems to be basically a copy of the crap "news stories" you get when you launch a default Edge and just feels a wasteful distraction on an Enterprise version.
That's not really what I was talking about. I mean how, if you know where to look, you can still find dialog boxes from the NT 3.1-3.51 era and everything that followed. I'm not a fan of the flat minimalist look of 10 and 11, but at least things are consistent throughout more of the OS than ever before. If they managed to convert everything to a consistent UI design then they could potentially do like GTK and add themes that let you change how individual widgets look while still maintaining the consistency of how they operate.
"no one thinks the OS has any value"
That's because, with so many excellent, free alternatives, it doesn't.
Even Micro$oft are banking on the fact that consumers consider the OS, the apps, and even the hardware little more than necessary tools which need to be replaced relatively frequently.
Os's don't have any value. The programs that run on it do. The OS is nothing but a layer between the hardware and applications , manages memory , storage, peripherals, a user interface and connectivity. Most of it (except the user interface) is invisible.
A perfect operating system would completely stay out of my way, let me run the applications i need, keep my data secure ( not only from external influences but also from hardware failures). It would eb invisible, need no configuration and just work. Windows 10 Enterprise comes pretty darn close.
I use the OS needed for the task at hand. I run NX, Solidworks, Altium and a bunch of other CAD and technical software. Windows. 7 year old Zbook G3 Win10. works like a champ.
I surf the internet , do online banking , create some videos and edit some photos : MacOs on a Mac ( a used one, 2015 model)
Social media and other spielerei : ipad
Phone ? that's for making phone calls. (and email / text if really needed, or the odd quick picture)
Windows 11 ? no thanks. Both my laptops are not able to run it. Don't need it, the applications run fine on 10. They even run on 7. So until the performance really becomes sluggish , or the applications absolutely need 11 , there will be no hardware upgrade. And if there is an upgrade to new hardware, by then there will be machines available that can run it.
Some of us would very definitely not pan it - I've been consistently vocal in my admiration for all the genuinely good stuff that MS have added to each new version of Windows (i.e. all the stuff you've just mentioned there), whilst at the same time being entirely critical of the way that, in order to get our hands on these genuinely useful things, we have to sacrifice an ever increasing amount of stuff that we as individual users found genuinely beneficial from earlier versions of Windows that MS have felt no longer need to be included, not even as something that can be unlocked by people in the know (or at least in possession of the appropriate registry keys), let alone as something which is at least provided as an option to replace whatever increasingly shit default we now get out of the box.
And THAT'S the problem - MS are no longer content to provide genuinely useful upgrades in isolation, they just have to bundle them up with a load of crap that some of us really don't want but feel compelled to accept in order to get the genuinely good stuff. It's almost as if MS are abusing their position, but, oh, what foolish thoughts are these, MS would never do such a thing, would they...
So PLEASE, by all means give me a Windows update that provides me with security enhancements, performance improvements, stability fixes - all the good shit that'll make my PC-using life genuinely better. Give me that, and that alone, and you can be absolutely certain that I for one will be praising MS from the rooftops.
You may well be the exception that proves the rule, but you need only look at the comments here, or Slashdot, or just about anywhere else to see that you're the odd person out. People buy things for the new shiny features, not because Microsoft refactored the code and made it 4% faster in specific use cases. They don't care about bugs fixed unless it affects them specifically.
No doubt Microsoft can provide reams worth of research to back that all up. If there isn't some shiny new feature, people won't adopt it. Look at the gaming world. It could be the most fun game ever created, but if the graphics are seen as "last generation" or just bad, how many people won't even give it a chance based on that alone?
That may be true if you're trying to persuade someone to part with their hard-earned in exchange for the update. But that's not what's happening now, nor was it what happened with W10 before. When OS upgrades are being given away to all and sundry, IMO there's more of an incentive NOT to mess around with what users already know from their existing systems and simply to focus on making as much of the upgrade as seamless and transparent to the user as possible.
Reassure them that, post-upgrade, their system will still look and feel as close to how it does right now, and chances are people will just let the upgrade happen. Tell them that, as part of the upgrade process, there'll be a list as long as your arm of changes in the UI which, oh, by they way, you'll also then have far less ability to customise back into something that looks and feels more preferable to you, plus as a Brucie Bonus we'll also throw in a shit-ton of telemetry, advertising and so on, just for shits and giggles because we can, and quelle surprise, uptake of the free upgrade wasn't nearly quite as impressive as MS hoped for.
Same goes for games - yes, you might want to focus on throwing all the latest rendering tricks into your latest release to persuade people to spend money on it, but if you're trying to persuade them just to install the latest update to a game they already own, not so much. Mind you, given the growing number of new games being released that are deliberately designed to look and feel like something from the 8/16 bit eras, I actually wouldn't mind one bit if MS took this approach with Windows updates and offered us a retro UI theme with the next feature release...
The UI sucks, but otherwise you're 100% correct. There have been a lot of changes under the hood in win11, including better scheduling for P and E cores. I'm running 11 on all of my windows systems and it's been rock solid and performs well. I did install software to make the UI work like it did in windows 7.
The most hated Windows versions are the ones where Microsoft tries to leave behind some of it's legacy cruft and be more secure or stable.
Vista introduced UAC, and changed the driver model, both things that Windows had been lacking for years, but of course, that broke things so it was panned.
ISTR Vista also being panned for how well (or not) it performed compared with XP on the same hardware, as well as for the way some manufacturers went a bit OTT in paring down their system specs to the bare minimum that could still be advertised as "Vista Capable", which further added to the perception of it being a bit of a dog.
So whilst things like UAC did nothing to endear Vista to some users, I don't think it's safe to use the Vista experience as a measure of how well perceived a Windows release will be the next time MS decide to add features which bring genuine benefits at the expense of backward compatibility - release changes like that whilst also ensuring that the overall user experience is at least no poorer in terms of perceived system performance, hardware requirements etc, and you're giving users fewer reasons, and particularly fewer which are immediately obvious, to start their journey with that release off on the wrong foot.
Taking a personal example here - I recently learned that my trusty old (but still damn reliable and more than adequate for my needs) bubblejet printer is too old to have had any W11-compatible drivers released for it. Whilst I was able to cajole it into more or less working by installing the W10 drivers for a different model, it still isn't working quite as well as it ought to.
But the changes in the driver model between 7 and 11 which caused this problem aren't the reason why I dislike 11 so much, because I already disliked 11 long before this printer issue came to light. No, it's all the non-essential changes, the radically restyled UI being the obvious example here, which get on my nerves, and have done so ever since MS first started experimenting with such things back with 8.
If MS gave me an official method for turning 11 into something that looked like 7, including all of the options 7 gives me to tweak my system how I'd like it to look, as opposed to me needing to rely on third-party hacks which may or may not continue working beyond the next OS update, whilst leaving all of the core aspects (security, stability etc.) of 11 as-is, then I'd be a happy bunny. I could quite happily live with my printer not quite working properly, or my old USB gamepad not quite working properly (something else I've more recently discovered), because I *can* see how the underlying changes which caused these incompatibilieis are beneficial, and so I can accept them. OTOH, foisting what, to my eyes, is a barely useable UI isn't something I can see any benefit in, thus I can't bring myself to accept the need for it, thus I can't bring myself to accept the OS that foisted it on me...
The uptake of Windows 11 by businesses is very much like Windows 7 and Windows 10 transitions before it. Businesses don't want to upgrade, especially when the only thing they get with the 10->11 upgrade is "we don't drop support in 2025". Its like a protection racket - "nice network you have there, it would be a shame if an unfixed security hole let the hackers in".
At least with XP->7 there were some useful upgrades, and XP was getting pretty creaky by the third SP with patches on top of patches on top of patches. But 7->10 had little to recommend it other than a needless GUI change (though at least they undid the worst of the Windows 8 GUI) so mostly businesses upgraded because they had no choice if they want to maintain support.
Not sure why Microsoft wants to force this rather than implementing all the 'features' they claim for 11 in the regular Windows 10 releases. Maybe in reality there isn't much difference between installing Windows 10 2022H2 and installing Windows 11, but it still sounds (and I'm sure is) less risky applying a big patch like you do once or twice a year than to do a full upgrade.
Do they even make any money on iterating the Windows version number anymore? Are they charging small businesses to upgrade Windows 10 to 11 (on hardware where that's possible) All the larger ones are on subscription now so they pay the same regardless.
Reading through the comments here, there doesn't seem much love for Win11, or much loyalty towards Micro$oft, only very little appetite for the extra work this will entail, for apparently little or no advantage.
And yet, eventually companies will, no doubt, be steamrollered into buying new kit and new licences at significant expense - even though the gear they have is perfectly serviceable (which to me, is the most odious thing of all). They probably won't even pause to consider whether jumping to an alternative might be feasible. :/
>Maybe in reality there isn't much difference between installing Windows 10 2022H2 and installing Windows 11
From reports there is a big difference between upgrading to W10 22H2 and W11 22H2 - with W10 there is a very good chance your system will still be operational, with W11 22H2 be prepared to rollback...
That, in the light of this fairly unsubtle shakedown by Micro$oft, businesses have still not switched to Linux.
Indeed. Maybe Linux doesn't offer as many advantages as some people think.
I mean - how long have people been waiting now for 'The Year of Linux on the Desktop'? All those years and still nowhere in sight. Makes you think, doesn't it?
;)
Or far more likely...
It's the massive advertising budget that Microsoft have, to counter any rise of Linux within the business sector.
The old adage, that you never got sacked for recommending IBM, ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment") really needs to jump a generation, to get reinforced, as:
The new adage: "You'll never get sacked for recommending Linux" (especially over Windows 11).
It needs a ground swell.
'We're done with Windows 11', it's landfill crud in the making.
Businesses generally don't buy what's "best" or even "better"; they buy what they know. Makes sense. Linux is seeping into small, esp. tech, businesses, even MSFT is noticing. But remember Linux is free, so no-one actually profits from sales, except installation and maintenance fees. Redhat is kind of "on the desktop", so it's a small step.
I've been using Linux since 1995 and install it for free on friends' machines. They never complain, always agree it's better. But I've never had a company ask me to switch from Windows to Linux. QED.
Now is the time for a major ad campaign, touting the advantages of other operating systems, that unlike Microsoft, just work... For far less money, updates and all.
Knock MS market share down a couple of pegs, or more. Yeah, I know complacency is hard to overcome, but for each conversion, makes the next a bit easier.
Many businesses will have blocked the update as they will do it when they are ready,
Many consumers don't have the compatible hardware yet so will get Win11 with their next new device.,
A small proportion of techies aware of the situation have blocked the update.
The operating system is only a small part of the the puzzle.
It is that minor but hugely significant detail that is why so many businesses have not switched to Linux. Just not paying for a Microsoft Windows license is a pittance. There is everything else that is tied in, Office 365 being the notable whammy.
What appears obvious to highly skilled people posting here is not representative of the real world.
Retail users of computers simply will not bother with Linux as it is seen as too difficult and a pain in the arse. If computers were sold with Linux installed along with an Office application people might start to switch on price however most people go with what they know. If they know Linux then they are in the minority and can sort it out already.
From a business perspective what other options are there that offer what Microsoft can?
Google Workspace on Chrome but I am not sure that is really much of an improvement.
Well... depending on what kind of data you process there is trouble with the cloud (and the CLOUD Act) - so Office 365 is (currently) not an option.
Oh, and considering how much of a mess Word makes with many of my documents I am not really sure it is mature software. Oh, and it has a tendency to convert the apostrophy ' into single quotes ` and ´ - if I wanted those characters I would have typed them in.
I seem to recall that it had less of an own mind back when it was called "Microsoft Word for Windows". And they changed keyboard shortcuts. Again. I am not saying the alternatives are better - they just suck in different ways and in ways that cause less trouble for me.
Has WORD still got the annoying bug that stops you inserting text above a table/image at the top of the page.e.g. if you start with the table, because you've created that first, or simply copied it from elsewhere, and then want to go back and insert your actual writing above it you can't (unless you remembered to leave a line or two first.)
I've not had to do this for a few years - but it was a real pain. Workaround was to insert a page break instead,first. And delete that later.
Oh, and it has a tendency to convert the apostrophy ' into single quotes ` and ´ - if I wanted those characters I would have typed them in.
Apparently it also converts a terminal `e´ into a `y´ (it's apostrophe). Oh, wait, sorry ... it's the browser that does that
What "other operating systems" would those be? You can't seamlessly upgrade your Windows 10 PC to Linux, and you have to buy new hardware to go with macOS.
Your major ad campaign would be a complete and total waste of money. And I'm typing that on a Linux desktop, having used one as my main desktop at home since 1997, so I'm hardly some anti-Linux pro-Windows crank.
You can't seamlessly upgrade your Windows 10 PC to Linux
You can. It takes about 5 minutes in most cases. The longest part of the job is deciding which Linux distro to install - in my cases it's either (mostly) Mint or Manjaro. The tutorial for the newly upgraded system takes a few minutes, and the user (usually) contacts the installer within a few days to thank them and almost invariably comments "I can't imagine why I didn't do this ages ago!"
Windows 2000 was reliable and fast and it was quite pleasurable to use. It didn't get in my way very much. I didn't have any security problems with it (though I know others who did). My Windows rating: 9/10, nearly 10/10.
Windows XP. Initially I had some problems with it. Later I had no problems at all. It got in the way a little bit but not very much. My rating: 9/10.
Windows Vista. Didn't use it. Saw some other people struggling with resource requirements. Probably a bit ahead of the typical PC of the time.
Windows 7. Considerably heavier on resource requirements. Why the hell does it use that much memory as soon as I start it up and am not yet running any apps? But pretty reliable. Not anywhere near as snappy as Win2k, which is my gold standard for judging Windows. 7/10.
Windows 8. Didn't use it. Saw it in the shops and played with it for a couple of minutes. Immediately hated the tiles and knew this crap was not for me. My rating 3/10 (biased opinion based on about 5 minutes of use).
Windows 10. Why does this thing need so much resources? I am only trying to run a few apps. Other than that it was/is pretty stable. 6/10.
Windows 11. Haven't used it. I've seen the requirements and can't be bothered to have a slow arse experience just to run the latest Windows.
I guess the point of this tome is that Windows seem to have become crap++ since Win2k, a little bit at first with XP (which was actually not bad), but it went down the crapper completely after Windows 7. Why is this? What is going on at Microsoft? Do they hate their customers? Why inflict this effed up repugnant sh*t (thanks Jules) on people?
You say it was always crap then give 2K 10/10 ... doh!
In general, early to mid-term adopters usually found resource/performance problems as that was always the Wintel yo-yo model of software driving hardware upgrades to get reasonable performance.
What is interesting is that we hit the buffers - a 5-7 year old machine can run most of the stuff users want to run pretty well so, to push more hardware, MS had to invent artificial barriers to os upgrade that require hardware upgrades but are not reliant on perceived performance hikes. Win 11 is a just a failed cash machine.
A great many people would run Win7 with security updates and be happy but that doesn't make Wintel money ...
I'm still working daily on a Lenovo ThinkPad running Window 7 because it's easy to work with and doesn't stall everything to "upgrade" by adding new bugs. But this morning I found that a new Microsoft Bluetooth mouse will not work with it. Essentially these days it seems that Microsoft does not support its users, it's just busy making everyone buy new hardware and trash their original hardware.
The history of evolution suggests that Microsoft is no longer a "farmer" and has now become a "hunter-gatherer" - we're all just Microsoft's lunch these days.
>The history of evolution suggests that Microsoft is no longer a "farmer" and has now become a "hunter-gatherer" - we're all just Microsoft's lunch these days.
Honestly, I think a large part of the industry - and not just Microsoft - has moved on from "hunter gatherer" to "rent seeker". Want to use your PC? Pay us daily with your privacy, telemetry data, eyeballs-on-adverts...
The icon reflects my attitude to this trend. Not to your comment, which was coherent, literate and entirely reasonable :)
> Essentially these days it seems that Microsoft does not support its users, it's just busy making everyone buy new hardware and trash their original hardware.
There are many legitimate complaints about MS. But this isn't one of them. Win7 stopped being supported in 2020. There should be no expectation that any newer devices will "just work".
"A great many people would run Win7 with security updates and be happy..."
Ah, that's me. I still maintain a Windows PC for my older games collection and occasionally for some video/audio editing apps for which that I already have windows licenses. This weekend I finally gave up and updated the gaming PC to Win10. It's... exactly the same as Windows 7 except for a bunch of new annoyances, like the non-removable "XBox game overlay" that duplicates the functionality of steam (which copied the features of previous gaming overlays from 20 years ago) and all the other new annoyances we know and love. No change in performance, frame rate, core OS features, except for increased background resource usage from all the "Apple did it so we will too" features they added that I never asked for and don't use. (Cortana? Big props to Apple for normalizing always-on audio spyware!)
Heck yeah I'm not impressed.
And, has been expressed here many times, those of us who (like to think that we...) are more tech-savvy, disable all the telemetry and usage feedback at the very first opportunity, because we resent being spied on. So the only feedback the vendors see is from the "average" users, including those who struggle to operate a computer without accidentally stuffing the mouse up their nostrils.
Windows 2000 was the first Windows that brought together the NT kernel, the Win95 start menu*, and USB support.
Everything you need, in fact. Peak Windows.
XP started up a lot faster, which was welcome, but didn't otherwise add anything useful. Worryingly but presciently you had to configure away the stupid Teletubbies UI in favour of the (well-named) Classic scheme.
It's been downhill ever since. There really hasn't been any kind of compelling reason to upgrade other than running out of support.
-A.
* Yes, yes, NT4 had the Win95 UI. But not USB support. No SATA either.
Windows 7 did add some useful features IMO, such as the re-worked taskbar and the snapping of windows to screen sides. Since then though, each new version has added next to nothing of value whilst the UI progressively got worse. 8 was hideous, 10 is ugly and inconsistent, 11 is prettier but has less start menu/taskbar functionality than Windows 95 had.
>Peak Windows
That would have been Windows Server 2003 and XP-SP3 (Classic UI), although Windows 2000 did much to prepare the ground.
I find it interesting that my new Thinkpad will directly support Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 with Lenovo provided drivers etc.
Anyone else notice how Win7 has gotten better once Microsoft stopped supporting it. It just keeps running. I don't have a forced reboot every few weeks, usually followed with troubleshooting whatever MS broke with their update.
(OMG I am not getting 'security' updates! Yeah, whatever. I use quality 3rd party security and don't click stupid things.)
A few answers.
Back when MS did the waterfall development method, they tended to put out things that were a bit ahead of the curve as far as the average PC of the day. Like XP's new skinning system was more than the IGPs of the day could really handle and it took a few years for them to catch up, plus you had computers shipping with only 128MB of RAM which just wasn't enough. Vista included a more or less, ground up, rewrite of the UI as a DirectX 3D app instead of a clunky software rendered 2D app. It also included a lot of other necessary under the hood improvements needed to keep Windows a viable system going forward. They also improved the security of the driver API significantly, which unfortunately meant breaking compatibility with older drivers, but the result was worth it.
As for your question about Windows 7, it has to do with the fact that a lot of people labor under the very false assumption that having free RAM is a good thing. It's not. It's like buying a McMansion and then you only use maybe 2-3 rooms, the rest just sit empty all the time. What's the point of having them if you're not going to use them for anything? So, starting around the time of XP and definitely Vista, Windows started doing predictive caching. Loading a bunch of commonly used DLLs and other things into memory so that when they were needed they didn't have to be read from disk. Thus creating a much smoother experience overall. It wasn't perfect, but it's gotten a lot better as time has progressed. You can turn it off, but it is a self-inflicted performance hit. Reading anything from disk vs RAM is going to be thousands of times slower. The fastest spinning rust disk against the slowest RAM is still like challenging a fish to a foot race.
Win 8... The attempt to shoehorn a UI that was absolutely amazon on mobile, onto desktops is one of the great blunders of Microsoft's existence. However, the rest of the OS was actually quite nice. There were some nice little improvements to things like the file copy/move dialog boxes, task manager got a sprucing up, loads of under the hood improvements for the process scheduler to deal with the subtle, but oh so important, differences between SMP and multi-core CPUs. Lots of security hardening. Of course all anyone ever bothered to look at was the UI. All in all, I give MS credit for at least trying something new. They failed miserably, sure, but they took a chance that something might be better instead of stagnating.
Win 10 resource question: See Windows 7 explanation. Same reason. It's also why your web browser seems to be using some ungodly amount of RAM. If it didn't do that, you would be complaining about how it takes several seconds to do something simple like switch to a different tab. The OS will automatically dump things from RAM if it needs more, but when you close an app it will immediately seek to fill some of that space with something else you might use in the near future.
Win 11 is actually pretty nice too. Especially if you have a 12th gen Intel CPU like me. More under the hood work on the process scheduler to make it understand the difference between Intel's P and E-cores, some nice refinements to the UI to make it more consistent. More improvements to the security model... You don't even have to look that hard to find many of the improvements, but you do have to actually look. I do question their decision to use the 10X UI when it wasn't finished, but most of it probably has to do with people who wouldn't consider upgrading unless there's some feature that pretty much literally slaps them in the face. You are a typical example of people who won't even put in a minimum amount of effort to look past whatever changes are immediately obvious and base your entire decision on that.
This is why I support some amount of programming be taught in schools. Not because it will train the next generation of app developers or any such high minded nonsense. Do it to give people some rudimentary idea of just what goes into writing even the most basic of apps, and they maybe look a tiny bit deeper than the most obvious of the surface level features.
...would you want to? Win11 may be slightly less eye-bleedingly ugly than Win10, but it's a bug-ridden mess. There are some quite serious bugs in the initial setup wizard that can make it take 2-3 attempts to even setup a new machine and get to a usable desktop. This has bitten us a few times recently, with brand new factory-fresh machines. Never had any such issues with Win10, hideously ugly though it was.
Hardware requirements? That'll be the same fictitious hardware requirements that can be relatively easily averted?
Windows 11 is nothing more than an annoying marketing gimmick to try and force hardware churn for no benefit to the end user whatsoever. There is nothing in it that shouldn't be there as part of a regular update to Windows 10.
I don't think Win 10 or even 11 is ugly. But then I don't much care what it looks like- I see programmes and a desktop. The programmes look how their publishers make them.
The desktop is my background with my icons ( I do wish they'd fix the recycle bin refresh bug though, so that I don't have to amend the registry each time I change the icons).
I'm more bothered with practicalities. Each successive version of Windows has made it more difficult for me to change and organise.
I do not want a start menu made up of an alphabetic list of programme names and other crap that the software publisher sees fit to throw into it. I don't even remember the names of some of the programmes-or what they do when I see the names. I want my software grouped by function so that if I need a programme that does something I can look in the right start menu folder, e.g. Graphics for an icon editor. I've nothing against calling a programme "Greenfish" - but it's hardly a helpful name when I need to use it in 18 months time and have to remember what it's called. Or Wise if I want to find my programme to set my PC to turn off in a couple of hours.
And so on
We have 8000+ Windows devices & we are not even looking at Windows 11 yet.
Most, if not all of the PCs and Laptops have a TPM and can be upgraded but with support running until Oct 2025 why would we bother? It's a PITA for very little benefit so I imagine the project will be looked at in the first quarter of 2025.
Personally, I upgraded one at home to Windows 11, there is functionally very little difference so haven't bothered with any others.
Yeah, pretty sure they run these stories just to watch us monkeys dance after they wind us up.
This is a recycled press release with literally ONE factoid in it. Great Landscaper put a number to one obvious reality, that we don't give a shit about windows 11, and probably won't until either long term support runs out or they finally add FEATURES that matter to us.
Dear M$, no features, no fucks. That simple.
Funny that Lansweeper mentions hopes of windows 11 driving PC adoption without pouring cold water on them. I'm more likely to upgrade PC hardware for faster wifi support right now than windows 11. I'm more likely to upgrade them for faster storage.
It's like the opposite of a self fulfilling prophecy, where in this case anyone dumb enough to believe Win 11 will save the day/quarterly earnings reports will achieve the opposite of that by not giving us a better reason to upgrade, of which there could me many.
Almost all of the Windows machines around here are Win10 or earlier, in some cases much earlier, as there are XP machines for talking to very expensive hardware which still works but which isn't supported by versions of Windows beyond XP. We are in the process of moving all of our users to Mac and Linux, mostly Mac, as almost all of our required apps (other than the ancient stuff for talking to the above-noted ancient hardware) is available on Mac but not on Linux. We have some custom software; it is being rewritten for Mac and Linux. We have a very few Win11 machines, mostly because certain senior people are MS fanbois. Every time there's a problem with a Win11 system that isn't a problem with Win10, or there's a problem with a Windows system which isn't a problem with Mac or Linux, it's carefully documented, as is what it takes (money, time, effort, whatever) to fix it. Yes, there are problems with Mac or with Linux systems that aren't on Windows... it's just that they're documented, too, and there are a _lot_ fewer of them. There have been more problems with the tiny number of Win11 systems, all brought in despite my objections, in writing, in the last year than with all Mac and Linux systems, combined, notably including problems printing. The Windows fanbois tried to paint the Macs as expensive toys and the Linux boxes as useless paperweights... except that the expensive toys still work, and work for _years_, and the paperweights can do most of the work that the Windows boxes can, only faster and cheaper. The total cost of ownership of both Macs and Linux systems is demonstrably lower than the TCO of Windows systems, at least around here. Even if the Macs cost more to buy, they last longer and require less support, and I can prove it with actual numbers. MS is continually pushing Office; iWork and LibreOffice are free, and can do most of what we need Office for. Free is hard to beat, and a major reason for the lower TCO, you wouldn't believe what the Microsoft365 bill for a few thousand users is, even if we take all possible discounts.
We will be running Win10 until the last Win10 machines die. We will be running Win 7 and XP until the 3rd-party hardware and software which requires them die. We will not care if Win10 goes out of support, any more than we care that XP and Win7 are out of support. New machines will be either Win10, as necessary, or Mac or Linux. And we don't plan on buying many new Win10 boxes.
We have extensive experience keeping older, no longer supported, boxes off the Internet and in keeping items such as USB drives away (there are tools in the BIOS to turn USB and other ports off; use them, and if all else fails there's always a little epoxy, that always works) so that malware attacks are difficult. Yes, we can still be hit by malware, but Windows always was more vulnerable than Macs or Linux, so it's just more of the same, and the vast majority of Windows malware can't touch Macs or Linux, so the fact that we're gradually winding Windows down means that there will be fewer targets.
We will not be moving to Windows 11. Not now. Not ever.
When I use W11, I use it as a Virtualbox guest....but VBox doesn't yet do TPM pass-through, so although I have a full TPM 2.0 chip on my Desktop, the W11 guest on my KUbuntu 22.04 can't see it yet...VBox 7 is supposed to fix that.
In the meantime, there is a Registry (shudder) hack to disable both the TPM and the Secure Boot checks, and allow upgrades. I won't post the links, in case it gets El Reg in trouble - or me with them! - but they're easy to find with Neeva (yes I use Neeva to avoid Google, and I run it on Opera and Brave), and trivial to set up....if you don't mind using regedit. The primitiveness of still having such an awful thing as the registry is staggering in 2022....but windoze still has Pagefile.sys and many other anachronisms from the 80s and 90s. Sorry - a personal hobbyhorse! The point is that you can use W11 without TPM and secure boot. I just can't see any good reason why you would want to.
I would do this tomorrow if I felt MS wouldn't break my machines at some later date. I can see some MS message pop up like, "Windows 11 cannot update because of unsupported registry modifications." or some such. No thanks. When 10 goes out, so do I. Going to Linux.
You are, sadly, totally correct. M$ have no scruples about overriding user preferences.
Going to Linux is always a better choice. I recommend KUbuntu 22.04 or any variant of Mint. I cut my teeth on SuSE, and I recommend that too - use Leap and not tumbleweed for a good, stable and well-supported distro. Try most of them from a USB stick before you commit to any changes.
Also keep your w10 license, and transfer it to a W10 virtual machine once on Linux. That's what I did, and it's legal.
lucky buggers
We had one of our more critical PCs updated to windows 11 after the software we use on it all the time said it was ok to goto windows 11 and they updated the software as well
Now we have a network printer in that room and another 2 PCs that cant goto windows 11
They can still see and use the printer... however the windows 11 can see the printer if you use the IP to log into the web admin page on the printer... however windows 11 refuses to actually print to it
Cue much swearing and a call to IT support (me)
Downloaded the printer drivers for 11 from the printer's website... install........ type of printer USB, or network IP..... click the option to manually set the IP, finish install, print test page.... all is good
Come in this morning..... wont see the network printer again and wont print to it. arrrghh win 10 ones are fine still............
Wheres my 3lb lump hammer?
I'm only a small drop in the ocean so they'll be fine without me.
And why did I misread "Lansweeper" as "Minesweeper"? I mean it's common knowledge that Minesweeper is one of the most important applications to run on Windows so I will forgive myself for thinking that this game had some suprising new capabilities...
I have 8 PC's in my home network: Movie server, backup, e-mail, daily-driver, sandbox, etc. When 10 goes out of support, I'm moving them all to Linux. Either Linux Mint, or Zorin OS. I will be gone from Windows forever. If I thought for one nano-second that 11 had *any* performance, security, or feature benefit, or any benefit to anyone other than Microsoft, I might consider GETTING RID OF ***ALL*** MY YEARS OF WORK ON THESE MACHINES and buying new ones !?! No, I won't do that. Goodbye Microsoft. (I already have one machine running Zorin which took me about 1/2 day to get 90-95% there. Almost all the stuff I really care about is just fine...BTW, anyone know why I can't get VNC to work?)
Lucky 4... or is it more than 4, lucky 9, out of 10? Out of W11. And this is from _personal_ experience when I tried to install W11 on my pi4. Yes, I know, I'm a dirty old mansplainer, a pervert and masochist, so I just had no choice but to indulge my filthy, unhealthy, kinky, seedy fantasies and REALLY see what it's like to go through W11 setup. I'm pleased (disgusted?) to report my expectations were met, exceeded and I was taken to the entirely new areas of 'customer experience'. Which is really something, given my solid, unwavering day-to-day pessimisms (world going to shit), with 30 years of Windows 'experience' to contribute to that.
Be aware that the W11 22H2 feature update doesn't seem to install if the machine isn't fully compliant (even if attempting the install from ISO) - don't know whether the clean install method still works, but that's beyond most general users anyway. This seems to apply if the machine is currently running either W10 or the original release of W11.
This reinforces the view that it's a bad idea to install W11 on non-compliant hardware as there's nothing to stop Microsoft blocking feature updates like this, and indeed they could do the same with security updates, or brick it completely with a future update, if they wanted to.
I'm surprised that the number of computers unable to run W11 isn't higher to be honest! Most of our remaining desktops at work couldn't - but they are decent machines which work fine so I've no intention of replacing them in the near future.
And by the way, the Pro version at least of W11 22H2 does allow local accounts at setup and doesn't insist on an MS account. It was suggested on here that it might only allow MS accounts but that doesn't seem to be the case. Not tried the Home version yet to see what the situation is there.
There are pc's that can run windows 11 without issue other than the fact they aren't supported by microsoft. I use windows 11 on my 1950x threadripper based pc that isnt supported but i have no problem that people with supported processors don't have, and even then just minor annoyances of a new and great os. I did this by bypassing the cpu requirement check via registery and upgraded from a mounted iso of windows 11. I also havn't been denied any updates and all other requirements are met.
Have you tried installing the 22H2 feature update? I expect you'll find that it won't install and the best you will manage is a clean install.
And there's nothing to stop MS from completely buggering an existing installation on unsupported hardware at any time they choose, if they want to do that. There's certainly no way I'd risk it in a work setting.
So.....trade with the evil empire....and do not be surprised when your outcome is pretty bad!!
Here at Linux Mansions we are up to 5.19.13 on Fedora 36.......
.....and we've never had crap like this Windows 11 stuff since before Fedora 5.....that would be sixteen plus years ago.
.....so the recommendation here is this: format ALL of your hard disk to ext4 format, then install Fedora 36 (or Mint, or Ubuntu...take your pick)......
.....and say goodbye to the evil empire.................
So many living in the past pining for Windows 7 or some other favorite piece of history. If you went back to Windows 7, you would find it not to be what you remember it to be. I used to be that way until I tried several times over the years to go back to older Windows versions, older software, hardware and found it was not the utopia that I remembered it to be. I have fond memories of Apple II, the original Macintosh, used to love using the DOS prompt back in the day, the novelty of Windows 95 but going back to them was to shatter a fantasy of perceived better times, things, places.
Your memories are altered, filtered and in many cases false from the reality of the actual past event(s). Unwillingness to learn, adjust and adapt to changes keeps you in the past and unable to move forward. The changes from Windows 10 to 11 are minimal and very easily learned and adjusted to, it is still Windows 10 under the hood. If staying with older hardware and O/S works for you then great, but wishing for Microsoft to go back to a Windows 7 GUI is wasted energy that is better used to learn and adjust to changes.
Using Rufus 3.20, I was easily able to install Windows 11 on a 12-year-old Acer Aspire 7740 laptop. Note that the CPU is a first-gen intel i5-580m (3Mb L2, 2-cores, 4 threads, hyperthreading, 2.67Ghz-3.2Ghz). Using Rufus to remove all the TPM/RAM and CPU requirements, Windows 11 sees it as a compliant computer. All updates were downloaded and installed by Windows Update. Absolutely no issues. All hardware was detected and drivers were installed. It really is remarkable how fast this laptop is now. It's considerably quicker than the Windows 10 installation that was previously on it. FWIW, I have also experimented with various flavors of Linux on it, and every.single.time the Linux installer would take a dump when trying to find drivers for all the various devices in it.
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