I'm presently in the hunt for a fairly inexpensive Win 11 Pro desktop, as the end of support for Win 11 Pro is not that far away, er, well, IF MS will ever get "12" fully launched...
I must confess that even though I bought (lucked into a good deal!) a Win 11 Pro laptop last year, and it has been fairly trouble free, I'm still not fully up to speed on Win 11 Pro. Several seemingly simple actions have been unnecessarily complicated in "11", which is one reason I bought a "stop gap" Win 10 Pro desktop to replace my outdated 10 Pro machine. (The latter still works, but my "stopgap" machine is much faster and rarely crashes.)
Since Win 12 is not hugely far off, and my budget is increasingly squeaky tight (THANKS, Brandon!) I don't want to spend a lot on a new desktop machine, but, just for security alone it'd be best for my primary desktop to be an "11", I think...
It looks like I should be able to get a Win 11 Pro desktop machine with a NVme SSD for drive "C:", and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, for well under $200. But many that have the ports I want (lots, and much preferably to include at least one HDMI port) have those under 8th gen processors.
Are they big trouble in the making?
Thanks, All!
I could be wrong but I think windows11 also supports 32 bit processors, and the main problem with loading or upgrading to windows11 is typically not having enough memory. I think the minimum is 16gbs of ram.
Windows 11 can be installed on also all computers , down the ISO from Microsoft and burn it with Rufus one of the options is to remove the requirements and remove the requirement for a Microsoft account
This list
Here are the CPUs that officially can run Windows 11
https://www.pcworld.com/article/394793/what-cpus-can-run-windows-11.html
starts with 8th Gen as the minimal requirement. It’s an older article FWIW.
Might be a good time for me to get a cheap 7th gen for a Linux box.
I bought a refurbished pc with Win 10 upgrade and it worked fine til an update broke the video driver. I was unable to find the correct driver because Dell said it was unsupported because they did not sell the configuration I had, and the refurb seller said “ alll sales are as-is” and it was past the warranty period. Just one example of what can happen.
Buy a used gen 8 or newer and if you need more ports buy adapters and plug in ports.
Use Rufus. It copies the Windows .iso file to a USB stick, then it disables the blocks that prevent installation on older PCs.
I used it to install Windows 11 on a 4th generation Haswell CPU with no TPM chip Works fine.
Well, I have a couple so-so offers on eBay, and a couple better ones, so it’s looking like I can come up with an acceptable price and go at least 8th gen on the processor. Maybe even a NVme drive. :-)
I nabbed one of those Dell docking “hubs” with 4k HDMI output port, for just over $10 (with “free shipping and a power adaptor, so, that may take care of the HDMI output.