Of course, when Windows 11 first came out in October of 2021 I tried it out on my Ryzen 5 laptop I tried it out on this in both a virtual machine which I have maintained to this day and a "Windows 11 To Go" installation on an external NVME hard drive. Both worked with no problems. Much of the hardware on the list of what is and is not approved for Windows 11 was not actually physically tested by Microsoft. Many of those who shared their observations with Microsoft were not just ignored but were treated poorly.
Ironically, my wife's laptop from the same time period which has an Intel Core 5 8650 APU and a discrete AMD Radeon GPU is on the approved hardware list for Windows 11 and gets constant nags and reminders of this. We tried Windows 11 on it again just last week. It works very poorly with it. I found a different display adapter driver that kept it from freezing up every ten minutes, but Microsoft replaced it with the original an hour later. So I found a way to prevent that but it also had problems with other drivers and harware.
And there were other problems as well. When the uprade caused awful performance I resorted to a clean install of Windows 11. Microsoft automatically encripted every partition on both drives in the computer during the install which caused other issues. I wasted days troubleshooting all of this before I realized that the best solution for this computer was a clean install of Windows 10.
There are valid reasons why I prefer Windows 10 over Windows 11. None of Microsoft's attempts to condemn our old hardware to the landfill will be successful. There are alternatives and workarounds to keep them kicking.
Even though this article is 4 months old... it makes many good observations, and I felt that it would be worth the read for those who are growing more concerned about Microsoft's declared "Windows 10 End of Life" event coming up less than 6 months away on October 14. This actually is a despicable act by Microsoft if one studies all of the ins and outs. Because of continual advances in hardware most consumers would be upgrading to Microsoft's latest offering eventually anyway without their typical strong armed approach. But they just can't seem to help their typical loutish behaivior.
Sorry Typo... it is a little less than 8 months until October 14.
Oh boy, here we go.
Go with Linux. It will keep your old computer working for years.
No. And hell no.
My wife's new computer with 11 has been nothing but trouble. I am restructuring an older with 10 for her, this week. Registry hacks will be used to block OS upgrades.
is there something wrong with W7?
My upgrading to 11 made my desktop nearly useless because I can’t print off of it.
I have dual boot Win10/Ubuntu on a SuperMicro motherboard with i7 ninth gen, 2x2TB NVME, 32 GB RAM. It runs fine, but I have it set up as BIOS, Not UEFI, which Windows 11 wants. I want the ability to swap out hardware without causing a nervous breakdown. Windows 11 is primarily spyware, and patches to Windows 10 have made it a junior version of spyware. I want nothing to do with Cloud Drive and am annoyed that my work on Win 11 defaults to Cloud Drive whenever you want to save or retrieve anything.
Do you remember when Windows 10 was released, that Microsoft said this was the LAST version of Windows? That anything after that would be a completely different product? They reneged, but I am not surprised.
I know you have previously notified the Windows ping list about this, but thought I’d shoot this your way in case any cave dwellers still haven’t heard about it. ;)
Will Windows 11 work on my Vic-20?
I am not that computer savvy, and my desk top is old. About 8 years. So, I plan to get a laptop that will have Windows 11 on it and get a new printer. Any comments/advice would be appreciated.
Windows 11 makes it easier for the government to capture everything you do on your computer - every keystroke. So that’s the reason for the forced upgrade. And the spyware is embedded in the chips, so no software fix. That’s the reason for the forced upgrade.
Now, the good news. Microsoft will actually continue to support Windows 10 for up to 3 years at $30 /year. In 3 years (and $90 down the line) you can decide whether to buy a new computer, upgrade to Linux, or just keep using 10. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended-security-updates
Of course it doesn’t actually die. It just stops getting updates. And pretty soon new software won’t support it. But if you’re happy as is you can keep it. They aren’t going to disable it.
I have Windows 10 on a nine year old computer that had become a little glitchy until I figured out a fix. It is now running fine. But it’s old, will have to be replaced at some point, and cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
I have never used the Cloud. In Windows 10, that was an option that I had to select, and I always specifically declined. I do not have anything sensitive on my computer, but I just don’t like the idea of Microsoft having everything automatically. Not that I distrust them or question that Cloud security will never be breached ... but I don’t trust them, etc.
I want to store my files locally, which I do on external hard drives that are not connected unless I am using them. These don’t do anything fancy. They are just big, dumb, thumb drives that mirror everything exactly as I have them on my desktop and don’t do any helpful rearranging or encrypting. Aside from a home fire that wiped everything out, I’m safe.
I’m not sophisticated enough to know what I don’t know, but I have seen several suggestions that Windows 11 will make full integration into the cloud automatic. Is this true? If this is the default option, is this something from which I can opt out, given that I am not a tech savvy user and don’t want to be fooling with tricky fixes?
There’s something wrong about the way Microsoft is running their OS. 10 years seems too short of a window of support on one.
BTTT
Go back to Win-7 Pro x64; still the best OS that MS has ever released.
How do I figure out what Windows do I have?
No!
Not ready...
heck, i haven’t upgraded from windows 7 ... just use the “User Agent Switcher and Manager” addons to fake latest versions of chrome, firefox and Windows to the outside world and pretty much all websites still work just fine ... and so far, H&R Block Software continues to work just fine on W7 ... i could care less about much of anything else ...
I have a laptop that was very expensive and top of the line in 2017. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have TPMS 2.0 and the CPU, although very fast, isn’t “approved”. There are ways to get Windows 11 on this laptop without those things, but it may degrade security and MS may on a whim stop updating it if I do. So, I might buy a used Win11 laptop and put Linux on the older machine. I have software the requires Windows and I just can’t get rid of it yet/cut the Windows 10 machine off the network.
Or, I might just get a very powerful laptop, put Linux on it, and run Windows 10 on it un-networked in a VM.
These days, I would NEVER operate an unsupported machine/OS on a network or introduce new un-scanned software on it.