Microsoft says you won't be able to swerve Windows 11 min specs

[ik9000]

Raymond Chen, a programmer who has been involved in Windows for more than 25 years, answered a question about it a while back.

Also a while back (2013) a developer made an anonymous post on hacker news, it's about why Windows is slower than many operating systems, but he touches on the reasons why when he says...

...

so basically what we've been saying for a while. The talent has diluted with key people leaving for new pastures/retiring, or in some cases encouraged out the door (I'm citing one of the main excel dev gurus who left MS feeling they, and their team were pushed after office2010 - I wish I'd retained the article. Essentially suggesting the expertise and long-term understanding was no longer valued vs the wage cost on the balance sheet) and the last good stuff was win7 and office 2010 IMO.

Someone at Google told me a similar thing re rewarding new vs improving old. It's a problem with the review systems and reward/incentive structures at tech companies. It's not unique to MS. A good company needs both but they bias towards rewarding innovators and creators, give those people the promotions and bonuses etc. People who refine and improve existing ideas get cul-de-sac'd in the modern structures.

[Iota]

One of the earliest purchases I can remember from Microsoft was buying up SubLogic and re-branding their product as Microsoft Flight Simulator. I think that has gone quite well over the years.

14 year hiatus since X, 150GB download at launch, buggy launcher on release? Guess that sets the bar pretty low then.

Nadella is doing a way better job.

At making MS more profitable, certainly.

Another big corporation I work for has announced they will be updating their setups to AMD and Win 11 next year. I reckon that I now have at least 100,000 sales of new Win 11 setups next year, all of which will have Office365 and associated services from Microsoft on board. This is what myself and others are saying. So about -5 versus +100,000 in this thread then if we're keeping score

That's only part of the bigger picture though. The company I work for uses MS products certainly, but interestingly has moved away from other MS products in favour of Google Android and iOS devices. In terms of mobility, what does MS truly offer now that can't be done more efficiently with Android / iOS integrations? It's not a small company by any means (FTSE 100), so if they're diversifying away from the MS product stack through lack of serious options, how many others are doing that?

So keeping score on pure install base / setups isn't showing the entire picture.

so basically what we've been saying for a while. The talent has diluted with key people leaving for new pastures/retiring, or in some cases encouraged out the door (I'm citing one of the main excel dev gurus who left MS feeling they, and their team were pushed after office2010 - I wish I'd retained the article. Essentially suggesting the expertise and long-term understanding was no longer valued vs the wage cost on the balance sheet) and the last good stuff was win7 and office 2010 IMO.

Someone at Google told me a similar thing re rewarding new vs improving old. It's a problem with the review systems and reward/incentive structures at tech companies. It's not unique to MS. A good company needs both but they bias towards rewarding innovators and creators, give those people the promotions and bonuses etc. People who refine and improve existing ideas get cul-de-sac'd in the modern structures.

That perhaps helps explain quite a bit, especially when it's easier to maintain something that narrows down the focus a bit by not supporting older hardware, making it easier for newer developers who don't always have insight into some of the older parts of Windows.

[matts-uk]

I think the *technology* needed merging. Windows NT was stuck with a Motif style front end, and Windows 95 had been scrubbed up cosmetically but was horribly unstable.

NT recieved the 9x GUI two versions ahead of XP.

This was also an era when Microsoft were getting the jitters from Linux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents) and seemed mindful that they had been shouting from the rooftops that they offered a simple single Windows platform rather than the array of Unix flavours of the past. In reality, the various Windows APIs were an incompatible mess and getting worse.

From a background with DOS/Netware/WfW within hardware vendors, I started work for one of the country's first MS Solution Providers during November 1993 (NT 3.1 / SQL Server 4) - A Power Builder shop moving green-screens to Client/Server. When the company I worked for sold up in 1996, I went contracting and continued travelling around the country undermining and dislodging Novel and Oracle, AIX and HPUX, and a couple jobs stripping out Banyan Vines. From what I recall Open Source was not a competitor at the time but rather a potential competitor. I was way too busy to even look at Linux until about 2003, when Apache2 co-location started to feature in the projects I was commissioned for.

Personally I always thought getting an architect from VMS to design their next gen operating system was Microsoft's big dropping of the ball.

Nobody can deny Microsoft's success cornering the desktop market in the 90s and 00s. Technically though, NT became more and more of a mess the more Dave Cutler's influence (VMS) waned. MS compromised the design when they moved the GDI from user-land to the kernel (NT4) to get the 95 GUI performing adequately. As sales took over stability and security started down a hill and fell off a cliff when XP launched. XP brought hardware support and a naive user base to NT but the copy paste of hacks and competing APIs from the Win9x and 16 bit years sacrificed stability and security on the alter of sales.

What the M1 brings is control. Apple supposedly whined at Intel for years about poor GPU performance for example. Now they can make the things they want to make.

However good the M1 is or is not, it sits in a garden with walls that are being steadily raised.

[DanceswithUnix]

NT recieved the 9x GUI two versions ahead of XP.

Indeed you are right, I think my internal Windows timeline was skewed by spending too long on NT 3.51 back in the day. I mainly remember my experience of NT 3.5 to 2000 of them being able to run Office and not much else. Certainly not games, nor drivers for any of the hardware that I seemed to own at the time.

I was quite a late adopter of XP for home use, partly because my attempt to use 2000 had been such a disaster I didn't want to go through that again.

Nobody can deny Microsoft's success cornering the desktop market in the 90s and 00s. Technically though, NT became more and more of a mess the more Dave Cutler's influence (VMS) waned. MS compromised the design when they moved the GDI from user-land to the kernel (NT4) to get the 95 GUI performing adequately. As sales took over stability and security started down a hill and fell off a cliff when XP launched. XP brought hardware support and a naive user base to NT but the copy paste of hacks and competing APIs from the Win9x and 16 bit years sacrificed stability and security on the alter of sales.

Linux was pretty niche back at that point, but interesting enough for me to push my own development in that direction.

In the 90's, as well as real-time embedded work, I was writing device drivers for ISA & PCI cards for various operating systems; mostly SCO, Unixware and Linux but also some DOS, WfWG & Windows NT. From where I was sitting, Windows was always internally a mess. I remember the whole GDI from userland to kernel farce, and just took it as an admission from MS that the basic architecture was wrong and they didn't know what they were doing. It was at the time when MS had been saying that OpenGL was slow and DirectX was the way forwards, only to have it shown that their OpenGL layer was incompetently written and was the entire reason for any lack of performance. The Windows network stack was laughable. And yet, Microsoft managed to claw up market share by carefully targeting to the managers with the purse strings. Novell was undercut aggressively until Netware was no more, and then the Windows free client licences went away and MS started charging through the nose. Support for all sorts of machines was promised with great fanfare from PowerPC to Alpha, and then quietly withdrawn. Then there was the horror of Internet Explorer...

My memory of Windows in the 90's is basically nothing but lies, dirty tricks and incompetence. But yes, MS gained a lot of ground.

I partly blame IBM for not making OS/2 a 32 bit operating system from day one. Then getting Microsoft to help write the windowing front end, like MS were ever going to do anything but take the money to develop Windows and hand IBM a bag of dog poo at the end of the contract.
The world would also have been a better place if IBM had chosen the 68000 rather than the 8086 for the PC, but there you go. It would have set the PC release back a few months, and instead we set the whole computing world back about a decade fighting small/large/huge memory models and himem.sys settings, as well as making little endian memory layouts the dominant format despite being dumb as hell but a nice performance hack if you are doing interrupt handlers on an 8 bit 70's CPU, which we clearly aren't any more.

Apologies for the rant, but I feel better for that

[3dcandy]

14 year hiatus since X, 150GB download at launch, buggy launcher on release? Guess that sets the bar pretty low then.



At making MS more profitable, certainly.



That's only part of the bigger picture though. The company I work for uses MS products certainly, but interestingly has moved away from other MS products in favour of Google Android and iOS devices. In terms of mobility, what does MS truly offer now that can't be done more efficiently with Android / iOS integrations? It's not a small company by any means (FTSE 100), so if they're diversifying away from the MS product stack through lack of serious options, how many others are doing that?

So keeping score on pure install base / setups isn't showing the entire picture.



That perhaps helps explain quite a bit, especially when it's easier to maintain something that narrows down the focus a bit by not supporting older hardware, making it easier for newer developers who don't always have insight into some of the older parts of Windows.

Not denying that people are moving away from Windows. But for the companies I work for, they did in 2019 and are coming back in droves.
Various reasons are given, one that comes up a lot is we have people who have worked with Windows for 20 odd years and their productivity plummets with a move away. We tried it, it didn't work. Win 11 aligns with our new hardware refresh nicely and Office 365 is exactly what we want. We use Teams a lot and it will be included....

The ebb and flow is always there. MS played a blinder with a quick announcement and then almost straight away a useable version.

[Jay-Bruce]

I sometimes , more often of late , yearn for the early days of mass computing ( 386 /486 ).
Computing was more fun for me then and you had control of what was on your PC and what it did. The way things are headed the only control we will have is the on and off switch , er , maybe. lol.

A couple of years ago I remembered an old PC where all of the following functions were separate add in cards: Sound, Graphics, TV Output, Wireless Networking, Ethernet, Multi-Drive-Storage (Raid and or SATA), Additional USB ports, Bluetooth as a USB module. Now When I look through the glazed sides at my Rampage 6 Omega motherboard, with the exception of graphics and TV output, which are technically on any modern GPU with HDMI, everything in that list is present. The ironic thing is that nowadays some software developer has arbitrairily set some hardware requirements that a three year old flagship PC just narrowly scrapes through yet a young, slower, less equipped and eminently less capable budget box breezes through.

So... "You won't be able to cheat the upgrade, particularly in organisations," implies they know its actually possible to cheat the upgrade, just not officially.

This therefore completely removes their arguement for the tight restriction being to improve security as its clearly going to put the hundreds of thousands with older hardware at risk when they stary googling how to install windows 11 on older hardware.

Am I the only one expecting to see a rake of forum/reddit threads along the lines of " HELP! - I downloaded this Windows 11 requirements bypass tool and now my PC won't turn on..."?

I sometimes , more often of late , yearn for the early days of mass computing ( 386 /486 ).
Computing was more fun for me then and you had control of what was on your PC and what it did. The way things are headed the only control we will have is the on and off switch , er , maybe. lol.

Computing then was a hobby, and people who had computers at home knew about them, unlike nowadays. I remember being an IT support tech in the late nineties / early naughties, and dealing with the horrors of the un-informed people wondering why a £100 setup from the classified adverts section of the paper wasn't downloading movies really fast over their dial up internet connection, through a browser with eleventeen hundred toolbars installed and popups galore.

Linux is for you

Not for me. Playing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys, declaring what memory is available and the interrupts of your sound card, having graphics cards which aren't compatible with each other... I think that very few people will honestly miss that.

PCs these days largely work. Sure, sometimes they don't, and because they're a lot more complex it can be harder to understand why. But it's still way better than how they were in the old days, at least on the PC side, when you pretty much had to be an enthusiast to use them.

Now the Amiga, that was better.

OS/2 was a missed opportunity for the PC market, it had a lot of the advantages of the amiga, but access to the better hardware on PC, and by "Warp" it was actually a good OS

Even back in those days I was running Linux on my work 386-20, so no I don't miss autoexec.bat and all the himem nonsense

But noone would ever need more than 640kb.... But you needed every KB of it for dos gaming, #rememberQEMM

Having fun with a Pi4 and a nice Amiga image on an ssd

Wait! What!?!? How? SATA on Amiga? IDE SSD? x86 Amiga? Workbench on Powermac?

Autoexec.bat? Yeh I had to configure that recently on my Windows 95 VM.

It now fills the screen with thousands of "ARF"s on boot.

Also, LH mscdex /d:mtmide01 is seared into my memory because it kept disappearing and Wing Commander wouldn't work.

MS went to a lot of trouble to promote W10 so its disappointing this philosophy has taken over. Fair enough any new PC will be OK or any from a few years ago can be made compatible if you know to go into BIOS.

But Ive just upgraded but want to use my older 6700K/Z170 with the same OS as my newer PC - not be stuck on W10 which has only a few years left. I enabled TPM OK but its rejected on CPU age alone.

A huge number of people wont be offered W11 when its rolled out and may be confused as to why not.

My gaming laptop that I'm typing this is a 6700k with 64gb ram, and a full-fat gtx1080 graphics card, not one of those piddly max-q "lite" versions, you need to spend north of two grand to get the same performance today, yet this will not meet the Win11 requirements check, while a £500 i3 laptop will - aye OK...

If they stick to the current criteria. There is a school of thought that MS are .... rethinking .... some of those criteria. Whether that is true or not I've no idea, but if they stick to current minimum spec, they are going to risk intensely irritating an awful lot of people.

They really screwed the pooch with this requirements, but have doubled down on it, and utterly boxed themselves into a corner. Marketing wise they can undo the damage by releasing a "Lite" / "Home" / "Personal" edition of Win11 that accomodates grey area hardware such as my laptop mentioned above, but lacks the enterprise friendly "digital fort knox" TPM 2.0 & >9th gen CPU requirements, or they could spin the security related requirements into the enterprise/corporate editions like they used to do with "bitlocker", which AFIK still goes into only the pro version of windows?

Not sure how blocking people from upgrading is going to keep devices more productive, have a better experience, and better security than ever before so they can stay protected, in just over 3 years they won't be, they'll just be a mountain of e-waste.

Also i know companies want people to always buy the new thing they've just released but calling their own devices "capable but slightly out of date" when they're only 4 years old is a bit extreme, even Apple support their hardware longer than that.

The e-Waste side of it is going to be tragic, and sadly a lot of sheeples will rock on down to PC world on black friday and buy a new "better" £500 celeron / i3 laptop that "must be better because it runs the new windows 11".

Enthusiasts on forums forgot all the bad press about Vista,8,etc which meant they never did that well. It was mostly bad press from non-techies due to their bugginess and excessive hardware requirements.

Windows 10 only gained traction because Vista and 8 was so poor,and Windows 7 and 10 seemed better and was more or less given away as an apology. In between them,MS showed similar hubris to know,but ended up screwing up as a result. But all the tinkering MS is doing with Windows 10,has actually pushed more non-techies towards other OSes now.

Hardware enthusiasts and gamers on forums don't care,as they will jump to any new MS OS,which means they can self justify new hardware,and so do MS fans. Most non-techies I know don't seem to even care that among about Windows anymore. Its lost its allure over the last decade. Unless you are a gamer,most I have seen just replace hardware when its not working properly. People are far more interested in upgrading their smartphone more often,as it gets far more use.

For the average person Windows 11 does not anything much differently and all MS is doing is artifically locking out devices. Unfortunately for MS and all their fans,there are far more Android/iOS devices and I see increasing number of non-techy people using such OSes for daily use. The hardware is getting more and more powerful now.

Also MS has forgotten,that so many people and businesses have pushed forward hardware purchases due to work from home,so its most likely SIs and MS have cocked up on the timing. Most non-techy and non-gaming types from my experience will keep their laptops and desktops for years,hence why there is such a huge market for secondhand and refurbished desktops and laptops. Many on tech forums don't seem to realise how big it is.

All I can see by then if MS makes it harder to run Windows 11,people will just ditch their Windows 10 devices and not bother with another Windows device. They can just put more money into their Android/iOS/ChromeOS devices. In fact in many countries,and especially among much younger people worldwide their Android/iOS device is their main PC.

For power users,Linux exists. The reality is outside of PC gamers increasingly Windows does not have that ironclad grip it once had. However,even PC gaming revenue is still smaller than smartphones,tablets and consoles overall.

The long support times of MS OSes was one of the good things they did,but if they end up cutting down more and more,then for most there is no real disadvantage compared to an Android/iOS/ChromeOS device then. Ultimately a very poor longterm business decision from MS,who increasingly seems like Intel,stuck in an echo chamber of yes people. It was the same issue you saw with them in denial about Windows Vista and Windows 8.

Windows 8 was f#@+ing horrifically bad, 8.1 was little more than a patch to undo some of the damaging design decisions of 8, and it 10 that was the first "real" windows in ages. Although I still prefer 7 over all those other versions, were it not for VR gaming I'd be on 7 and only 7, as it it I dual boot.

I agree that Microsofts stance on Win11 hardware requirements is going to margianilise a large section oftheir fanbase, but I'd like to add that Linux Gaming is becoming a thing.... So maybe Win11 will become the "enterprise" platform, but really I think the two "one" characters could be tallie marks for Vista II another unloved and poorly recieved blemonge of an operating system that puts distance between microsoft and the market.

Quite possibly on the syndrome part.

All of the businesses have one thing in common, they're here to profit off consumers. Not a single one really has anyone else's interests in mind and each have their core strengths. On the subject of MS in enterprise markets, I think Amazon are also a very real threat. Personally I'm a user of each of the competitors products, depending on usage scenario. Microsoft wise, it's purely OS, so if they screw that up there are other options available. If end users migrate away from using Windows as their primary OS, how does that end up affecting their other businesses such as 365 and the enterprise environment? It's the one thing in my own opinion they cannot afford to get wrong.



Microsoft have repeatedly dropped the ball over the years. Sometimes they seem quite directionless, and they'll buy someone like Nokia and completely drop the ball. Instead of focussing on their core strengths and listening to consumer feedback.

I can only think of Github as an example of how they've not cocked something up.

I still laugh my butt off at how long it has taken them to not completely migrate the control panels that worked into the new mongmode interface format. They've been faffing around with that for half a decade, and it's still not done, and that which is "done" is a mess, its a joy to jump into an old version of windows like 7 with a real control panel.

[Jay-Bruce]

And why all this long tooing and froying?

Oh,because I pointed MS screwing up all the time on the consumer side,has only meant iOS/Android has increasingly been the consumer OS of choice(just the numbers). See how a ton of them jumped in here the second I pointed it out. Interesting.

So all the MS supporters responses?? Oh,this is all part of a perfect plan by MS,everyone should just accept it,MS knows best,etc. Then something,something Office 365 business sales. The competition will all die off,because of their masterplan,etc. On how people should just keep quiet,and they don't care a damn about consumers,because Uncle MS knows best? Seriously,after 20 years of upsets,people have faith in MS?? Is this what tech Stockholm Syndrome looks like?

Not a single one of them can actually criticise what MS is doing,without a positive spin on it and then using "but business sales" to try and bury any negativity about their consumer decisions. Yet in the same breadth can criticise Apple,Google and all their competitors.Hmm. These companies never have your interests in mind,so its upto consumers to defend themselves. Plus don't gush too much for MS in enterprise,because its the competitors which keep them real!

It is more MS gratuitous backpatting,like they did before Vista and Windows 8/8.1 on how everyone was wrong and they were right,and ignored customer feedback. But unlike then,there are real personal computing alternatives for lots of the masses. MS seems to have forgotten this.

Plus business laptops already had TPM2 due to the use of Win10 Pro/Enterprise,etc so its not even a business move really. Yet even if you have TPM2,etc on their own branded products Windows 11 won't run. Like Intel the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.



That is the point I am trying to make. The non-technically minded people increasingly use iOS/Android based devices. Now,look at the Apple M1,its capable for general purpose tasks and is basically based on a smartphone SOC. So now think in the next few years how powerful these devices are going to be for general use.Now you have things such as wireless displays longterm you can see smartphones being able to be docked,etc. So I am uncertain what MS is trying to do - from their constant breaking of Windows 10,and them increasing removing the unique selling aspects of Windows,etc its almost like they are actively trying to lose customers.

So who is Windows 11 for?? Like Windows 10 its becoming more and more dumbed down and restrictive for techies,it very restrictive on what hardware it uses(for no real reason) and for non-techies I can't see how it really changes anything? MS failed miserably with its smartphone OS,so Android/iOS just have way too market penetration. Even Huawei is going to probably have a greater chance of penetrating that market with Harmony OS.

MS are just really short sighted as a company. They have enough resources to allow the OS to be customised for both power users and non-techies if they wanted to - its what you see with Android,lots of variations in UI aspects from different companies. But MS again just go marching forward regardless of what anyone says,and their supporters will clap enthusiastically as the trench gets dug!






That is the issue - if MS is trying to force upgrades like with iOS/Android devices and reduce lifespans,etc whilst iOS/Android are now pushing longer support,people can merge device requirements.

Techy people might just decide to go Linux and Valve has done a lot to make Linux viable for gaming. Even the new Steamdeck is Linux based,and that has not put off PC Gamers from ordering it in record numbers.

We already see consoles doing quite well,so its not like Windows is really needed for competitive gaming systems.

I think it is fair to say that the iOS / Android devices now occupy the same market segment that used to be occupied by base model PC's bought for skype / MSN Messenger and "surfing" in the early naughties and this TPM 9th gen nonsense will push more consumers in that direciton. As for gamers etc, I'm a gamer, and I feel myself being forced to relive a moment when I needed to very reluctantly give up windows 2000pro and begrudgingly adopt XP because there weren't drivers for windows 2000 for my new graphics card. I can see me "holding the line" at 10, and being forced to move up when a new must-have game demands Win11, or a new motherboard chipset only has drivers for Win11 or an application I NEED withdraws support for previous versions of Windows. But no, I'm not enamoured with the direction this is taking the PC market in, I'm already considering poop-canning Windows, going to either linux and or android.

I sometimes , more often of late , yearn for the early days of mass computing ( 386 /486 ).
Computing was more fun for me then and you had control of what was on your PC and what it did. The way things are headed the only control we will have is the on and off switch , er , maybe. lol.

Linux is for you

Not for me. Playing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys, declaring what memory is available and the interrupts of your sound card, having graphics cards which aren't compatible with each other... I think that very few people will honestly miss that.

PCs these days largely work. Sure, sometimes they don't, and because they're a lot more complex it can be harder to understand why. But it's still way better than how they were in the old days, at least on the PC side, when you pretty much had to be an enthusiast to use them.

Now the Amiga, that was better.

Even back in those days I was running Linux on my work 386-20, so no I don't miss autoexec.bat and all the himem nonsense

Having fun with a Pi4 and a nice Amiga image on an ssd

Autoexec.bat? Yeh I had to configure that recently on my Windows 95 VM.

It now fills the screen with thousands of "ARF"s on boot.

Also, LH mscdex /d:mtmide01 is seared into my memory because it kept disappearing and Wing Commander wouldn't work.

MS went to a lot of trouble to promote W10 so its disappointing this philosophy has taken over. Fair enough any new PC will be OK or any from a few years ago can be made compatible if you know to go into BIOS.

But Ive just upgraded but want to use my older 6700K/Z170 with the same OS as my newer PC - not be stuck on W10 which has only a few years left. I enabled TPM OK but its rejected on CPU age alone.

A huge number of people wont be offered W11 when its rolled out and may be confused as to why not.

If they stick to the current criteria. There is a school of thought that MS are .... rethinking .... some of those criteria. Whether that is true or not I've no idea, but if they stick to current minimum spec, they are going to risk intensely irritating an awful lot of people.

Not sure how blocking people from upgrading is going to keep devices more productive, have a better experience, and better security than ever before so they can stay protected, in just over 3 years they won't be, they'll just be a mountain of e-waste.

Also i know companies want people to always buy the new thing they've just released but calling their own devices "capable but slightly out of date" when they're only 4 years old is a bit extreme, even Apple support their hardware longer than that.

And why all this long tooing and froying?

Oh,because I pointed MS screwing up all the time on the consumer side,has only meant iOS/Android has increasingly been the consumer OS of choice(just the numbers). See how a ton of them jumped in here the second I pointed it out. Interesting.

So all the MS supporters responses?? Oh,this is all part of a perfect plan by MS,everyone should just accept it,MS knows best,etc. Then something,something Office 365 business sales. The competition will all die off,because of their masterplan,etc. On how people should just keep quiet,and they don't care a damn about consumers,because Uncle MS knows best? Seriously,after 20 years of upsets,people have faith in MS?? Is this what tech Stockholm Syndrome looks like?

Not a single one of them can actually criticise what MS is doing,without a positive spin on it and then using "but business sales" to try and bury any negativity about their consumer decisions. Yet in the same breadth can criticise Apple,Google and all their competitors.Hmm. These companies never have your interests in mind,so its upto consumers to defend themselves. Plus don't gush too much for MS in enterprise,because its the competitors which keep them real!

The thing there is that the CPU used, other than perhaps an "Intel Inside" sticker, is utterly invisible to the average user. You just don't release a new OS for that. They could just stick the new scheduler on Windows 10, job done. I mean, they didn't bother with a version number shift when ARM support came in for Windows 10?

If they want to enforce secure boot, then that's a very visible step change because lots of existing hardware won't be able to update to it and the rolling Windows 10 train stops for some users. That's a situation that needs managing, and hence a narrative for upping the Windows version makes sense.

I think the mixed core handling is just something they threw in "while we are at it" to try and tempt people over with an improved performance. For consumers MS usually upgrade DIrectX and block installing on older OS versions to try and temp us over. They need to throw us some sort of bone or we won't play.

Didn't they try and fumble this with the first generation of microsoft surface devices "Surface RT" and Windows RT? One other thing tickles me, who else remembers microsoft proclaiming that windows 10 was going to be "the last version of windows" - perhaps they ran out of space to store that memo in their 640kb?

I sourced a 20 pin 1.2 TPM (before they shifted the goalposts to TPM 2) and also changed my boot drive to be secure boot using mbr2gpt but I still cannot get Windows 11 given my CPU is a Haswell 4790K. My system now is around 5 years old and I have no issues with anything on it and majority of games run just fine 1080 maxxed out or 1440 at med/high detail.

To be able to upgrade going to have to get a new board, CPU & DDR

I think MS are shooting themselves in the foot excluding a huge userbase from being able to upgrade to the new OS.

I imagine this will further push Valve to make all games work with SteamOS and work will ramp up on the Linux builds for gaming and Vulkan support will also ramp up so folk will be able to start ditching Windows as there will be viable alternatives.

Amen Brother... Pushing clued up people into linux is actually a good thing, its a better, more adaptable, cross platform operating system that "windows for toasters/kettles" could ever dream of being, and skills learned onPC Linux can transfer to other variants, liek Android is little more than a walled garden variant of linux...

I honestly get the feeling Microsoft can find there own bottom using both hands at the moment.

Many people are just going to say sod this and move to linux, loads of people are just going to stick with windows 10 like people did with xp.
and the only way microsoft are going to make money is on the sales of new dells etc.

The way it stands only people that are going to be using windows 11 are new users and people that can aford to upgrade perfectly decent computers just to run it.

I'm a former MCSE, and I'm more enthusiastic about tickling pengiuns than tricking Win11 to work on capable hardware that is objects to.

[Jay-Bruce]

Again I'll say it.... they are saying they CAN'T just change the scheduler for mixed core use. Win 10 basically the whole OS doesn't work that way and to keep compatibility it just doesn't work.
The insider rings are full of the "why does it change everything" and it's because put simply it's almost a total rewrite of the core way Windows works. Just changing the scheduler results in mixed cores being dire. But emulated Win 10 works well I hear you say - well yes it does on say an M1 chip. But that has a host of transistors designed to accelerate x86 stuff, uses inbuilt dram etc. and runs under a VM. Win 11 runs natively on a mixed core system nicely without extra transistors etc. Windows ARM is not getting anywhere near the traction expected, for many reasons, but as hardware moves towards lower power consumption cores like ARM then Win 10 really doesn't cut the mustard. It took a huge rewrite of Android for example as in a total rewrite to support big.little and was done years ago thus them getting it right now, and it's no surprise that Apple have gone with a kernel that was written for their ARM based devices rather than the OSX kernel for the same reasons. ARM have done years of work to get it right for the end user. No Win 11 means the latest chips from Intel and AMD would perform poorly, and that would have been a bigger issue and driven many people away from Windows, many more than the new requirements of Win 11 and a short cutoff point hardware wise. MS had a real problem looming, they have perhaps not handled it right, but then again when have they. Same as Apple et al have handled things badly before (I remember the powerpc>x86 switch on macs and how bad it was with software that just flatly ran like a dog or crashed constantly and how people had 6 months old hardware that was obsolete overnight)

First off I'm becoming aware that I've posted a heap of replies with quotes to this conversation, but I'm not a spam bot, just a techy who has returned from a long trip at sea and just getting caught up on the most informed discussion I've seen on the biggest news in tech this year...

But yeah, picking up on your comment about poorly optimized transitional software, I used to play Elite Dangerous very seriously, and realy looked forward to the new expansion, however their recent new expansion has basically borked the game, its realy negatively impacted the VR implemation, the game now runs like a dog, looks cack, and really only adds a third rate capture the flag shooter to the game instead of the whole RPG and depth to the galaxy that it should have contained. So, through poor design the new expansion necessitates cutting edge hardware to be even remotely playable with minimal benefit to the player which has pished many, including myself, out of Elite, and Win11 looks to be heading in that direction, unreasonable hardware requirements for a percieved minimal benefit, that pushes customers away.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Windows 8 was f#@+ing horrifically bad, 8.1 was little more than a patch to undo some of the damaging design decisions of 8, and it 10 that was the first "real" windows in ages. Although I still prefer 7 over all those other versions, were it not for VR gaming I'd be on 7 and only 7, as it it I dual boot.

I agree that Microsofts stance on Win11 hardware requirements is going to margianilise a large section oftheir fanbase, but I'd like to add that Linux Gaming is becoming a thing.... So maybe Win11 will become the "enterprise" platform, but really I think the two "one" characters could be tallie marks for Vista II another unloved and poorly recieved blemonge of an operating system that puts distance between microsoft and the market.

I think it is fair to say that the iOS / Android devices now occupy the same market segment that used to be occupied by base model PC's bought for skype / MSN Messenger and "surfing" in the early naughties and this TPM 9th gen nonsense will push more consumers in that direciton. As for gamers etc, I'm a gamer, and I feel myself being forced to relive a moment when I needed to very reluctantly give up windows 2000pro and begrudgingly adopt XP because there weren't drivers for windows 2000 for my new graphics card. I can see me "holding the line" at 10, and being forced to move up when a new must-have game demands Win11, or a new motherboard chipset only has drivers for Win11 or an application I NEED withdraws support for previous versions of Windows. But no, I'm not enamoured with the direction this is taking the PC market in, I'm already considering poop-canning Windows, going to either linux and or android.

The problem with all of this,is that they moving Windows closer and closer to iOS/Android as time progresses,and iOS/Android are increasingly moving away form their "limited" routes. Even the people here who think that Windows will be the only game in town for the next decade in the Enterprise,don't seem to realise as time progresses,as more and more younger people stop thinking as their "PC" as a Windows PC,the move towards other platforms will happen. Even before MS Windows,other OSes/interfaces held not only the consumer market,but the enterprise market and nobody expected the young upstart,MS,to get anywhere. In fact the same as Xerox and IBM underestimating Apple in the early 80s,and then Apple at the top of their game,underestimating MS.

MS increasingly being dependent on fewer revenue streams,does actually make it more vulnerable in the longterm(Apple,etc are trying to diversify more and more). People are trying to saying MS concentrating on a fewer areas in the "cloud" is sheer brilliance but that means realistically means if they ever drop the ball(like they have done so many times),then its going to disportionately affect them. MS has dropped the ball so many times,after being in commanding positions,and Windows has been their "safe space" to retreat to,because it was easy money. Now,they are bit by bit,attempting to find ways to muck about with that. I don't trust MS won't find a way to screw up other segments it is doing very well either.

I keep talking about companies like IBM as people don't seem appreciate the position IBM was in the 1970s(or even Apple was in the 1980s). Even Intel is in "decline" despite being very profitable and increasingly vulnerable to competitors - people have been saying this for years. The whole tech market has massively expanded in the last 20 years,and people need to look at how other competitors have taken more of that market than MS(IIRC,I listed the relative comparisons to Apple and Google).

People keep saying,but MS does not charge for Windows. That is also wrong - to buy an OEM copy,let alone a full copy of Windows is at least £100. People keep saying MS offers free upgrades - have they never asked why MS feels it can't charge for these upgrades?? The reason is because they keep not listening to customers,who would rather use older versions of Windows,way past their expiry dates and that it causes a headache to MS,having lots of unsupported Windows PCs. The free upgrades are for the benefit of MS to reduce support costs,and to stop them getting bad PR from older versions getting hammered by some new vulnerability they have ignored. If they listened to customers(and their own testers),then people will be more likely to pay for upgrades.

MS,repeatedly trying to screw around with the interface,when Google allows its own OEMs to customise Android(or even none for profit entities offering their own takes on the UI) so that Android customers have a choice(and a number of customers stick to an OEM due to the customisations). This means MS is pretty much not understanding one of the biggest strengths Windows had(customisation) - a standardised interface does not mean you can't have a more advanced mode available,for those who want to adapt the UI to their own habits. Plus repeatedly mucking around with the interface,will incur more costs for companies,as they need to put more money into training budgets WRT.

Tech forums naturally will have a selection bias towards Microsoft,because many on here game,or make their payday off their links to MS. MS dropped the ball not only on Apple and Google,but Amazon and plenty of other companies elsewhere.

I think the post Corky34 made highlights the problems:

Raymond Chen, a programmer who has been involved in Windows for more than 25 years, answered a question about it a while back.

Also a while back (2013) a developer made an anonymous post on hacker news, it's about why Windows is slower than many operating systems, but he touches on the reasons why when he says...

...

[Saracen999]

.... As for gamers etc, I'm a gamer, and I feel myself being forced to relive a moment when I needed to very reluctantly give up windows 2000pro and begrudgingly adopt XP because there weren't drivers for windows 2000 for my new graphics card. I can see me "holding the line" at 10, and being forced to move up when a new must-have game demands Win11, or a new motherboard chipset only has drivers for Win11 or an application I NEED withdraws support for previous versions of Windows. But no, I'm not enamoured with the direction this is taking the PC market in, I'm already considering poop-canning Windows, going to either linux and or android.
.

Unfortunately, I suspect that that "need" is going to be the problem.

For all W7's faults, there werea number of issues I detested about W8, notleast of which was the "direction" I could see MS moving in, so I resolved to not put up with it, and to stickwitha blend of legacy-OS machines on an air-gapped betwork, and Linux. It took a LONG time to research Linux enough to decide I could do enough of what I needed, and wanted, to get away with it. Oart of that was not onlysitching to Linux but to Open Office,then Libre and weening myself off several decades of MS Office apps that started with DOS versions of Word (and prviously, word\perfect and Wordstar. As, at that time,aslf-employed person, that created some serious issues and I had acouple of things (lack of drives or hardware, and some functional but very old bits of software that still required XP and I never did get running on even W7.

Wind forward to current times and first, I've retired, and second, as much of what I still need to do is already running on Linux (or, for example, Win versions of Libre). I find myself in asimilar position to you, in that I have lots of incompatible hardware and no wish to replace multiple machines just to get W11 running.

I'mnow in aposition where what I need to do is reduced due to retirement, and of what's left, a big chunk is already on Linux. There are, however, still some things I wanted to do for which finding and switching to compatible butdifferent software giving the same capability )for example, my genealogy software) was just too big a pain in the butt to contemplate. So, I ended up only about 18 months ago, vry reluctantly giving in and switching a couple of relatively new machines to Win 10. Now, I'm supplosed to buy more new hardware just to run W11? Not happening.

Here's the thing, and where I suspect we differ.

I'm retired, and of an age where I can decide at a whim what I'm going to do. I have finally sorted out all the issues related to both the forcd migration from W7 to, in my case, moatly Linux, and due to their subsription model, switching from Adobe to other software. That cover Photoshop, Premiere, Pagemaker (and later), Acrobat Pro, Audacity and so on. So eof the alternatives are free software, many I've bought (albeit it way, way cheaper than the Adobe offerings) and ended up with a range of options that do everything I need, in a way and to a performance that's .... adequate. I'm now looking to do one more hardware change to bring photo and especially video editing up to date, but with that existing software. Then, my plan is to just use that existing hardware and software indefinitely.

I don't see myself ever needing, or sufficiently badly wanting, anything that comes out in future to be prepared to go to W11 to do it but that's largely because :-

- age,
- retired, and
- health not great.

Much of what I currently do on W10 could either be done as it is now but off-net (i.e. behind that airgap), or done on something like an iMac or Androidtablet. That latter really isn't much more than email, a bit of online shopping, and a few forums, mainly this one.

But unless you're in a similar position, i.e. pretty much content with existing capabilities to get done what you want/need, I predict you'll hit exactly the problem you mention .... you want/need to do x (game, productivity, whatever) and W10 drivers won't exist for it, and/or software goes out of support and over time becomes an ever greater security risk.

It's only because of age/retirely/health that I feel confident in predicting I will continue to be satisfied with existing capabilities. It's like woodworking/DIY. No really, bearwith me. Over the years, I've built up a collection of drills, saws, routers, chisels, blah blah right down to hole punches, clamps and so on. If I was 30 years younger, I might be tempted by 3D printers, computerised CNC lathes, cutters etc but I'm wanting to do less and less. But if you're not, I'd suggest thinking carefully about dodging W11. If you can come up with alternatives, and plan for what you do in 2025 when W10 support stops and security risks start to grow, great. I have. But if not, beware of getting out of touch with W11 because I found switching from W7 to W10 downright jarring.

I still don't like10 and some things (like forced updates) drive me nuts, but I can cope as much of what I rely on is either already Linux, or still W7 or XP and air-gapped, or can be. I'm also ready for 2025 EOL. But be sure you're prepared because it's not entirely a comfortable ride switching.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

At the rate GPU prices are going,I think a lot of gamers might end up buying a console of some sort in the next 5~10 years ,or going the streaming route!

[Jonj1611]

At the rate GPU prices are going,I think a lot of gamers might end up buying a console of some sort in the next 5~10 years ,or going the streaming route!

I have done both, got rid of the gaming system as I needed the deskspace and for the mac etc and prices were high but then kind of ended up stuck where I wanted to play some games but not invest in a whole new system.

I tried the streaming route with geforce now which was ok but far from perfect and limited to what games I currently had obviously. In the end though I got an xbox series s with the game pass so have plenty of games to play and I know it will run them all without issue.

Only drawback is I am used to a keyboard and mouse and I can't hit a thing with a controller in a first person shooter. Playing Fallout 4 with VATS on the xbox is a godsend

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have done both, got rid of the gaming system as I needed the deskspace and for the mac etc and prices were high but then kind of ended up stuck where I wanted to play some games but not invest in a whole new system.

I tried the streaming route with geforce now which was ok but far from perfect and limited to what games I currently had obviously. In the end though I got an xbox series s with the game pass so have plenty of games to play and I know it will run them all without issue.

Only drawback is I am used to a keyboard and mouse and I can't hit a thing with a controller in a first person shooter. Playing Fallout 4 with VATS on the xbox is a godsend

Lack of decent keyboard and mouse support,and the worse mod support are my main problems with consoles ATM. However,there is only so much I really want to spend on modifying my PC to run games on,and if gets too expensive I will most likely ignore newer AAA games. That would certainly make me more open to trying a console,or seeing if game streaming by then has improved.

[Jonj1611]

Age of Empires 4 is coming out launch on gamepass so will see how that plays on the xbox.

Fallout 4 has mods in the menu so not sure which mods it can run.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Age of Empires 4 is coming out launch on gamepass so will see how that plays on the xbox.

Fallout 4 has mods in the menu so not sure which mods it can run.

It's more limited and Vortex/Mod Organiser are generally better ways to mod games. However,if GPU prices start go even more stupid,then it won't matter then!

[Jonj1611]

Must admit I hadn't tried the mods, was mainly giving it a go to see how it actually ran which to be fair has been pretty good