Microsoft officially announces Windows 11

[OlyAR15]

@OlyAR15 but what does Microsoft "supporting" hardware X mean anyway? When has there ever been an 'old CPU' problem on Windows aside from the hard limit in Win8.1? IMO the only code that MS has gone by historically is that if their updates broke functionality for a popular enough piece of hardware, then they're interested.

It means they don't have to worry about testing to see if the OS works on older machines. And if it doesn't, they don't have to spend resources trying to fix it. Take the issue with W11 and Ryzen chips. It causes a slowdown. Now, because those chips are supported, MS is working on a fix. If that slowdown occurred with older gen intels, then MS can simply wash its hands and say, "It's not our problem."

I really don't get the whining about this issue. MS still supports Win10 for the older machines, so it's not like they are suddenly abandoning all of them. And no one seems to mind when, say, Apple does it. I have an older Ipad Air that is limited to IOS 12. Why can't it upgrade to the latest version? Sure, it may not be able to take advantage of all the latest features, but I don't have that option at all. Yet I'm not going to rail against Apple. As long as it meets my current needs, I'm happy using it as is.

 

[VivienM]

I really don't get the whining about this issue. MS still supports Win10 for the older machines, so it's not like they are suddenly abandoning all of them. And no one seems to mind when, say, Apple does it. I have an older Ipad Air that is limited to IOS 12. Why can't it upgrade to the latest version? Sure, it may not be able to take advantage of all the latest features, but I don't have that option at all. Yet I'm not going to rail against Apple. As long as it meets my current needs, I'm happy using it as is.

You don't get the whining?
a) MS is going to support Win10 until 2025. So everything unsupported in 11 is e-waste in 2025.
b) PCs are a mature technology. For many, many people and uses, a sandy bridge with enough RAM and an SSD is more than good enough. For some people, you might even be able to go back to C2Q/C2Q. Yet those systems will all be e-waste in 2025.
c) They've drawn the line really close. My 7700 is barely 4 years old and it's essentially in a 'no new OS for you, just be happy to get our security updates for 4 years' state already.
(And meanwhile, a crappy N4050 Celeron is supported. But my 7700 with 64 gigs of RAM is not)

Apple, meanwhile, dropped my mid-2014 MacBook Pro in Monterey. So I got every OS update until and including Big Sur - that's six years of major OS upgrades (so for seven years that machine could run the 'current OS'), plus however long they'll keep security patching Big Sur. So let's recap - Apple - full updates for 6-7 years, then security updates for who-knows-how-long. Microsoft - full updates for, technically, never (Win10 was already current when I built this machine) and, 4 years in, is now in 'security-updates-only-for-you' mode.

And umm... as for your older iPad Air, my mom had one of those. It's long obsolete in a segment that was heavily, heavily improving every year (unlike the mature PC segment). It's worth noting that my iPad Mini 4 which I sold a while back and bought in, oh, I dunno, 2015?, would still be supported in iPadOS 15 so they've lengthened their lifecycles on iPad as well.

 

[OlyAR15]

You don't get the whining?
a) MS is going to support Win10 until 2025. So everything unsupported in 11 is e-waste in 2025.
b) PCs are a mature technology. For many, many people and uses, a sandy bridge with enough RAM and an SSD is more than good enough. For some people, you might even be able to go back to C2Q/C2Q. Yet those systems will all be e-waste in 2025.
c) They've drawn the line really close. My 7700 is barely 4 years old and it's essentially in a 'no new OS for you, just be happy to get our security updates for 4 years' state already.
(And meanwhile, a crappy N4050 Celeron is supported. But my 7700 with 64 gigs of RAM is not)

Apple, meanwhile, dropped my mid-2014 MacBook Pro in Monterey. So I got every OS update until and including Big Sur - that's six years of major OS upgrades (so for seven years that machine could run the 'current OS'), plus however long they'll keep security patching Big Sur. So let's recap - Apple - full updates for 6-7 years, then security updates for who-knows-how-long. Microsoft - full updates for, technically, never (Win10 was already current when I built this machine) and, 4 years in, is now in 'security-updates-only-for-you' mode.

And umm... as for your older iPad Air, my mom had one of those. It's long obsolete in a segment that was heavily, heavily improving every year (unlike the mature PC segment). It's worth noting that my iPad Mini 4 which I sold a while back and bought in, oh, I dunno, 2015?, would still be supported in iPadOS 15 so they've lengthened their lifecycles on iPad as well.

Why would it be e-waste? It's not like the computers are going to self-destruct in 2025. You can still use them. People are still running Win7, even though support has long ended. Some people are probably still running XP. And MS will likely create security patches for W10 long after support ended. By that time your unsupported CPU will be over a decade old.

As for my ipad, it still works. It still does what I need of it. Even though it isn't supported, it hasn't self-destructed. So again, why are you whining so much? Either stick with Win10 for the duration of your machine's lifespan, or upgrade. Or run Win11 unsupported

 

[VivienM]

Why would it be e-waste? It's not like the computers are going to self-destruct in 2025. You can still use them. People are still running Win7, even though support has long ended. Some people are probably still running XP. And MS will likely create security patches for W10 long after support ended. By that time your unsupported CPU will be over a decade old.

As for my ipad, it still works. It still does what I need of it. Even though it isn't supported, it hasn't self-destructed. So again, why are you whining so much? Either stick with Win10 for the duration of your machine's lifespan, or upgrade. Or run Win11 unsupported

I'm sorry, but I think that running an OS or any software that isn't currently supported by the vendor for security updates on any system connected to the public Internet is reckless. I can tell you that I don't have any family members, work-related machines, or anybody within my sphere of influence running Windows 7. (If a trained IT professional needs to run an unsupported OS hardened on a VM, away from the public Internet, etc. that's a different thing)

Running Win11 unsupported seems to be more of an option than it was a few months ago, so that's at least comforting.

And why am I whining so much? How would YOU feel if you built a high-end desktop 4 years ago, expected it to have a roughly ~10 year lifecycle, and Microsoft says, 4 years in, "oh, sorry, but your processor doesn't meet our security and reliability expectations, so while an N4050 will get our new OS, your ancient i7 7700 with 64 gigs of RAM will just get security updates until 2025 and then... I guess if you want it to be a host for malware you can keep using it. Or maybe go check out a Linux distro."

This is completely unprecedented. I've been using Windows for 26 years. They have never, never taken high-end hardware that ran Windows X really well and said "no Windows X+1 for you". If anything, they used to twist themselves into pretzels (e.g. supporting 386s with 4 megs of RAM for Win95 when any reasonable person wanted at least a 486 with 8 megs) to support really old systems that no reasonable person would want to run the new OS on. Windows system requirements were always, if anything, too conservative - if they said min. 32 megs of RAM, you really needed 128. If they said a 233MHz processor, you really needed a 700MHz processor.

 

[mikeymikec]

Why would it be e-waste? It's not like the computers are going to self-destruct in 2025. You can still use them. People are still running Win7, even though support has long ended. Some people are probably still running XP.

I run a computer-fixing business. The amount of customers who want to be running supported software far, far outnumbers those that don't particularly care about it, I'd guess at a ratio of about 50 to 1. I've got two customers running XP and maybe two running Vista. Ten at most running Win7 would be my guess.

And MS will likely create security patches for W10 long after support ended.

Back up this assertion or admit that you pulled it out of your ass. I can recall maybe one occasion when an unsupported version of Windows was patched in a particular instance, the WannaCry attack that hit WinXP machines in 2017 for example.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Windows system requirements were always, if anything, too conservative - if they said min. 32 megs of RAM, you really needed 128. If they said a 233MHz processor, you really needed a 700MHz processor.

I remember a guy with too much time who for fun and games tried installing XP on a Pentium 100/64MB RAM*. Technically it worked, but you couldn't really use it for anything other then the OS itself. I think the absolute minimum for XP(RTM) to be halfway usable is a Pentium2 233MHz. With as much RAM as you can fit.

*Aye, was I.

 

[mikeymikec]

I don't buy @OlyAR15 's "time-saving support" argument at all. When Win10 was being offered as a free upgrade to Win7/8 users, who had the impression that MS had or was ever going to support these free upgrades? The answer to remarkable upgrade problems was roll back, end of story. A year or two before the free upgrade, MS made massive cuts to its QA department, and that's supposedly the time that they spent extensively testing super-old hardware to see if it could handle the upgrade? What a crock.

Going by that experience, assuming for a second that MS thought that the Win10 free upgrade offer went badly (which is a baseless assumption), all they needed to do was to offer the upgrade on the computers they wanted to even on as absurdly simplistic requirements as the processor gen. Their marketing people would say that they're offering the upgrade to only those that they believe will have the most 'optimal' experience or something even more airy-fairy/non-committal sounding, and the implication is that if you go out of your way to do a clean install of Win11 on hardware that wasn't offered the free upgrade, well, that's your business. Aside from the 'free upgrade' business and MS's u-turn on that front (comparing Win10 to Win11 here), that's basically the way that MS has always handled shall we say 'non-ideal' hardware.

One could argue that MS with its current strategy is seeking the same outcome as I've just described just with different (odd) means, but the fact of the matter is that when MS decides to U-turn to restrict its users' behaviour in an unusual manner, the right thing to do is for MS to give out the facts with which people can make informed decisions. They've said "Win11 crashes more with older hardware" but nothing more than that, to which one should logically ask why it is crashing more, and more to the point, if that's the real reason for MS's new strategy, then there must have been a tipping moment that caused MS to make that decision, so what was it.

Alternatively, if they don't want users to make informed decisions, then take the matter out of the users' hands entirely and only offer the free upgrade to the platforms they want to and hard-code restrictions into the clean install procedure so users can't install Win11 on 'non-chosen' hardware.

 

[VivienM]

I remember a guy with too much time who for fun and games tried installing XP on a Pentium 100/64MB RAM*. Technically it worked, but you couldn't really use it for anything other then the OS itself. I think the absolute minimum for XP(RTM) to be halfway usable is a Pentium2 233MHz. With as much RAM as you can fit.

*Aye, was I.

I tried installing Vista on a PIII 700 once. DVD wouldn't boot - gave weird errors that I concluded at the time meant that the PIII didn't support some CPU instructions it was using.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot don't do much of anything to block the 0-days in MS's system code.

Thing I saw/read seemed like it gave excellent protection vs ransomware. I see the benefit to corporate clients, maybe to Grandma or Mom & Dad, for me it isn’t a compelling reason to upgrade to win 11.
My admittedly incomplete balance sheet looks like this:
Protection vs ransomware- good but not particularly useful for me
Rounded edges and a more apple like experience- ugh I hate that sh*t
Lighter- well that is good however if it impacts my ryzen performance it isn’t worth it
Direct storage- sounds cool but god know if/when games will support it

Wow, run Android Apps natively? That's impressive and I'm really interested, but the TPM requirement?

I have zero interest in this, I have concerns over what the privacy policy would be for those apps and what access they will get. I cannot think of any app I have a need to run on my PC that doesn’t already have a web log in like my ecobee.

 

[mxnerd]

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Rufus: Create bootable USB drives the easy way

rufus.ie

Rufus 3.16 now added the removal of TPM & Secure Boot check

• Version 3.16(2021.10.13)
  • Fix ISO mode support for Red Hat 8.2+ and derivatives
  • Fix BIOS boot support for Arch derivatives
  • Fix removal of some boot entries for Ubuntu derivatives
  • Fix log not being saved on exit
  • Add Windows 11 "Extended" installation support (Disables TPM/Secure Boot/RAM requirements)
  • Add UEFI Shell ISO downloads
  • Add support for Intel NUC card readers
  • Improve Windows 11 support
  • Improve Windows version reporting
  • speed up clearing of MBR/GPT

 

[Aikouka]

So, I upgraded one of my machines to Windows 11 since it had Windows 10 Pro. The big thing is that I prefer local accounts, and since only 11 Pro can do that, I don't want to deal with any upgrades on a Home edition. (I used to get Pro for remote desktop capability.) Anyway, for the most part, it doesn't really bother me... except for one thing... you can't simply say "show all of the system tray icons" like all other Windows editions that had a hide option. In this one, you have to either drag them from the pop-up menu or go into the settings and toggle any hidden items. (Note that new ones will likely be auto-hidden.)

 

[ultimatebob]

You don't get the whining?
a) MS is going to support Win10 until 2025. So everything unsupported in 11 is e-waste in 2025.
b) PCs are a mature technology. For many, many people and uses, a sandy bridge with enough RAM and an SSD is more than good enough. For some people, you might even be able to go back to C2Q/C2Q. Yet those systems will all be e-waste in 2025.

I'd imagine that people will have found ways to get Windows 11 running on most "unsupported" hardware by 2025. Hell, people have it running on obsolete Core 2 Duo based systems NOW.

If they don't want to go that route, I'm sure that they can find a Linux distribution that supports the older hardware. Throwing a system away just because it doesn't meet some obscure Microsoft system requirement is just foolish, though.

 

[ultimatebob]

Back up this assertion or admit that you pulled it out of your ass. I can recall maybe one occasion when an unsupported version of Windows was patched in a particular instance, the WannaCry attack that hit WinXP machines in 2017 for example.

Microsoft has released a few emergency patches for Windows 7, long after it's end of support date.

Here's one example, there are others:

July 6, 2021—KB5004951 (Security-only update) Out-of-band - Microsoft Support

support.microsoft.com

 

[mikeymikec]

Microsoft has released a few emergency patches for Windows 7, long after it's end of support date.

Here's one example, there are others:

July 6, 2021—KB5004951 (Security-only update) Out-of-band - Microsoft Support

support.microsoft.com

Emphasis on the word 'emergency'. It's a rare occurrence and should not be counted on for security in unsupported versions of Windows.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Still looking for an answer. Besides better ransomware protection and that direct storage thingy does windows 11 do anything better than windows 10?

 

[deustroop]

Still looking for an answer. Besides better ransomware protection and that direct storage thingy does windows 11 do anything better than windows 10?

The Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K Review: Hybrid Performance Brings Hybrid Complexity

www.anandtech.com

"Windows 11 brings the full use of its Thread Director technology online. ......
The operating system is still king, and can choose to ignore what TD suggests, but Windows 11 can take all that data and make decisions depending on what the user is currently focused on, the priority level of those tasks, and additional software hooks from developers regarding priority and latency.

The idea is that with Windows 11, it all works. With Windows 10, it almost all works."

 

[Fanatical Meat]

The Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K Review: Hybrid Performance Brings Hybrid Complexity

www.anandtech.com

"Windows 11 brings the full use of its Thread Director technology online. ......
The operating system is still king, and can choose to ignore what TD suggests, but Windows 11 can take all that data and make decisions depending on what the user is currently focused on, the priority level of those tasks, and additional software hooks from developers regarding priority and latency.

The idea is that with Windows 11, it all works. With Windows 10, it almost all works."

Dumb this down. What does it do?

 

[Fenixgoon]

for AMD users, is Win11 performance up to par yet? with OSes i'm fine with adopting almost out the gate (I was perfectly happy with Vista), but I don't want a substantial performance hit when that's the whole reason I bought the system I did

 

[Fanatical Meat]

for AMD users, is Win11 performance up to par yet? with OSes i'm fine with adopting almost out the gate (I was perfectly happy with Vista), but I don't want a substantial performance hit when that's the whole reason I bought the system I did

Me too and I agree I was perfectly fine with Vista....
Per the other thread there is some kind of AMD patch and it works but there is something weird about if you install a different CPU and losing the patch performance gain.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

These sound like they could be useful:

The Best Windows 11 Utilities to Install Now

https://gizmodo.com/the-best-windows-11-utilities-to-install-now-1848013350

 

[Fanatical Meat]

These sound like they could be useful:

The Best Windows 11 Utilities to Install Now

https://gizmodo.com/the-best-windows-11-utilities-to-install-now-1848013350

Breezing thru that list, I see nothing of value to me. Typically I don’t like adding crap to the OS.
I am sure at some point I will move to Win 11, I just don’t see any value added with win 11 vs win 10.
I do like the longer support time and I think direct storage *could* be great provided people program games to use it.

 

[OlyAR15]

These sound like they could be useful:

The Best Windows 11 Utilities to Install Now

https://gizmodo.com/the-best-windows-11-utilities-to-install-now-1848013350

I saw that list, and nothing really interests me. I've gotten used to the W11 start menu, and don't really feel the desire to change it back to W10 or earlier. All the other "fixes" that these programs do seem more like sidegrades than upgrades, or can already be done via the registry. Still, I guess having more variety isn't a bad thing.

 

[GrumpyMan]

I really like Windows 3.1. Windows 11 seems like such a big number. I don't know if my desk can support the weight.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I really like Windows 3.1. Windows 11 seems like such a big number. I don't know if my desk can support the weight.

In that case, I really wouldn't advise upgrading to Windows 3.11...

 

[Captante]

I've got 11 Pro dual-booting with 10 Pro now and so far its working well.

The only show-stopping issue I ran into running setup from within Win 10 was that I have a start-menu app called "Start-10" installed and the 11 install program ground to a halt as a result trying to force me to uninstall it.

Fortunately setup is now apparently "smart" enough to not bork startup options at random when booting from a USB drive to run setup these days. All I did was create a 150gb partition on the primary NVME, point 11 setup in the right direction and click install.

Despite a dire warning from Windows that "things might not work as intended" its been rock-solid so far. I STILL prefer 10 though & with my own personal "hybrid" Start-menu.