Windows 11



  • edited July 4
    Windows 11 running on a 5 year old Intel NUC:

    ok, it's a VM... and it's slow as balls. But hey, it's running.
  • The system requirements seem absurdly high, but I guess Microsoft wants OEMs to sell more computers.

    I'm still using an i7-2600, and now apparently it's as old as a Pentium II to Microsoft. (Then again, if ACPI exists, Vista and 7 can hypothetically run on a Pentium II!)

    Good thing I've been running Debian with MATE for years.
  • edited July 5

    Only 4 years to go until the 2600 is as old as a PII was when it was released.
  • @SomeGuy Actually, there is an arm64 Windows 11 compile that I've heard users are running on M1 macs.
  • Wha?

    I mean, I know Microsoft had an ARM version for some tablets and stuff, but are they actually planning on selling an ARM version for the Macintosh, or is this just something that will go the way of the DEC Alpha Windows 2000? (Which BTW, the DEC Alpha was a 64-bit CPU and everyone snubbed it back then because binary hardware compatibility was of critical importance, but I guess no one cares any more.)
  • Actually, MS has been adopting the "ARM for All" approach for a bit now. They have been producing arm64 compiles of Windows Server builds as well.
  • Turns out that if one's Windows 7 machine meets the system requirements, and wants to switch to Windows 11, it would have to be a clean install.

    Not really an "upgrade", is it? 🤨
  • And they are already torching the bridge to Windows 7 users. I'm expecting all of the Chromium-based browsers to stop updating soon, and Firefox will probably follow a while later.

    But support for anything older than four nanoseconds is immediately dropped and the users get screwed over.

    Considering the current state of the GPU market, I'll cling on to this machine for a good while.
  • @robobox How long have you had yours for? I've had mine for almost a decade, would you believe 🤯
  • Around 8 to 9 years, but it's in good shape.
  • Bought an el cheapo HP laptop with the amd ryzen 2200u and Win 10 Home - soon after it was made available. It had good specs for an entry level and I thought it would make an excellent beater laptop for my truck, esp once I installed Windows 7.

    Well fool me - Win 7 would not install, and it took days of asking and getting angrier, as I found out that amd does not present acpi to the Win 7 installer, effectively blocking it.

    Microsoft has endless ways it seems to me, to force people to conform to their world view.

    Well, this is a major turn-off... and if memory serves me, 10 was at it as well. Let's hope that change won't be final by the time it's released.
  • It's really easy to change it in 10. Windows 11 definitely does make it harder.
  • If they're going to keep it that way (and god forbid), a lot of people will be angry and this could drive many of them away.

    How many people in the world use Edge anyway? 🤷‍♂️
  • Other than power users, I'm guessing the vast majority of people won't care at all. You have to remember, users are dumb when it comes to IT things. They don't care about the same things you or I do.

    Other browsers like Chrome are going to have to either change the setting themselves, or dumb down the process for their users.

    As for how many people use Edge, apparently its market share is only 7% while Chrome's market share is almost 70%. I don't think Microsoft has escaped the bad rep they earned with Internet Explorer. Plus, a lot of sites that drop support for Internet Explorer often wind up recommending Chrome and providing a link to download it.

    Not only that, but Chrome is probably the default browser on most peoples phones if they're running Android. So when they go to try and get online with their Windows computer, they are probably looking for what they know, which is Chrome.
  • Well, seems that Firefox has found a way to bypass this new measure...

    It can set itself as your default browser, so you don't have to.

    This is the issue though. The other browsers cant or aren't supposed to be able to change the settings themselves. I'm sure Microsoft will patch whatever workaround Firefox is using at the moment.

    highly doubtful of that.
    32bit Vista & Win7 could run on at least a 1Ghz Intel Pentium 3. definitely not Pentium 2s bcuz they're too "slow" and a far below the minimum cpu "speed" requirement
  • Just came across this, and thought I'd like to share it...

    If anyone wants to try out Windows 11 without having to install it and having to meet such stringent requirements, you can.

    I've tried out from this myself and it feels good, but it's a force of habit of moving the cursor to the bottom-right corner :D
  • It's now released.

    Will it be a roaring success... or not? 🤷‍♂️
  • I imagine most PCs that can run it well will eventually upgrade to it.
  • Only for Win10 PCs though... because I seriously doubt Windows 7 PCs can because of really stringent requirements. I know mine won't anyway.
  • edited October 8
    They're certainly going to exclude a lot of PCs that could have probably run it fine if not for the TPM requirement.

    I was under the impression they were going to skip the TPM check for virtual machines, but it appears that's not the case. It was super easy to get it running on Hyper-V. Literally just a checkbox. But for ESXi, I had to install vCenter and set up a KMS server to be able to enable the vTPM. Fortunately, vCenter 7 has a built in KMS server. So it wasn't too bad.

    There's definitely going to be a few virtualization platforms that will not be able to run it yet though. But as far as I know, there are plans in the works for Xen and KVM to add vTPM support. So hopefully, eventually, it'll be a non-issue.

    As for the final release of Windows 11... it's rather disappointingly the same as the preview. I haven't dug too deep into it, but from an end user perspective, nothing changed. Which means it's still just as buggy and bifurcated as it was before. Not only do we still have this weird mix of old and new things with Control Panel and the Settings app, but we now also have two context menus. Why?!! What was wrong with the old one? And if you were going to do a new one, why keep the old one?! Seriously, this feels like an unfinished product.

    Actually, as I'm typing this, right clicking on the desktop just stopped working altogether. Srsly, Microsoft? You really thought this was good enough to ship?
  • What does Microsoft even use the TPM crap for?
  • @BlueSun
    Seriously, this feels like an unfinished product.

    At least it wasn't rushed out for the next school term like it was for Windows 10.

    But yeah, you'd think they'd address all the known bugs from the preview before releasing it 🤷‍♂️
  • @SomeGuy I think the main use is for crypto keys that are not stored in main memory, so they would be harder for malware to read them. In combination with something like bitlocker drive encryption and secureboot, the drive key could be stored and it would be very difficult to steal the drive and the key at the same time, unless you stole the entire computer. I think it's a little over the top for most users, and will just make it so that if your drive starts to have issues and you want to clone it to another, you'll have to jump through a bunch of hoops. Friends of mine bought a cheap new laptop for some college classes and it was just too slow. I suggested more RAM and an SSD (which I guess still isn't always standard on new computers) and when I went to clone the drive, I couldn't even get the cloning software to boot on it until I disabled secureboot. I tried multiple types of bare metal cloning software and they would all just hang.
  • I am aware of bitlocker. Windows 10 has bitlocker, which is used to encrypt drives. Windows 10 Bitlocker requires TPM (well, technically there is sort of a workaround.)

    Windows 10 does not require TPM. Windows 10 does not require that you use Bitlocker.

    Does Windows 11 require that you encrypt your drives?
  • That's a great question and I think there is conflicting info out there currently. Some things say that bitlocker is enabled by default, and others say it's not even available in Home versions.

    My opinion, and I'm open to being wrong, is that Microsoft is setting the bar high for new computers with "supported configurations", because they only make money on OEM and volume licensing deals, since they are giving the software away to normal home users. So if they act like you need newer hardware you will buy it, with windows, and therefore money for Microsoft. This might be why people here are reporting that they can install it anyway on unsupported hardware... because microsoft can still make some ad money off of us and our obsolete hardware, even if they cannot get the big bucks of an OEM license agreement like with a new computer. So they aren't shutting the door completely
  • Does Windows 11 require that you encrypt your drives?


  • Installed Windows 11 on an unsupported Dell XPS laptop from 2013. Other than just the general suckiness of modern Windows, It seems to run just fine. Fairly smooth, even. The laptop does have TPM enabled, but the CPU is way older than the oldest "supported" model.

    Why did Microsoft set these arbitrary limits? Nobody knows but them, but I have a suspicion that they didn't want another launch like Vista's, where people installed it on machines that really couldn't handle it. A lot of the machines running Windows 10, came with Windows 7. Some of the early Win7 machines could barely handle 10. Even still, I think they were too strict on the CPU requirement.
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