Microsoft cracking down people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-cracking-down-people-upgrading-windows-11-unsupported-hardware/

by belter • 1 year ago

54 95 1 year ago

I'm mainly a Mac guy these days but when the time comes for my Windows 10 machines, I'm sorely tempted to put a Linux distro on them. I don't really game and mainly use it for ham radio programs.

giancarlostoro4• 1 year ago

You can still game on Linux, Steam is phenomenal. ;) I havent gone back to Windows.

lenerdenator3• 1 year ago

What do you find yourself playing on there? Is it something that can be done with any distro, or is it something that some are more suited to?

Goronmon• 1 year ago

Playing PC games on Linux through Steam is pretty decent, if imperfect, setup these days.

But I still get tripped up when it comes to the non-PC game stuff. Such as mods, streaming from other platforms (playing my PS5 on my PC), or other community tools that have a tendency to be Windows-focused.

I still haven't been able to pull the trigger on running Linux on my main desktop.

archontes• 1 year ago

+1 Steam works wonderfully on my Ubuntu VM.

bluedino• 1 year ago

I'm on 7 for that kind of stuff because of Windows 11 not letting me change the display resolution, and 10 contains just enough extra crap...

aquir2• 1 year ago

I am using GeForce NOW for gaming on my MacBook, works like a charm if you have a decent internet connection

giancarlostoro4• 1 year ago

I switched to Linux, and when my Surface Book 2 stops being supported by Microsoft, I'll switch that over too. I'm done.

snozolli• 1 year ago

I'm surprised that anyone is upgrading older hardware to Windows 11 in the first place. It's shocking how many performance issues I've come across. Explorer bogs regularly. I can't game and stream a video anymore due to some rendering change that was made in Win 11 (I forget the details).

frognumber• 1 year ago

Older hardware isn't always slower hardware.

Intel 6950X is unsupported. That's 10 cores at 3.5GHz. It's about 10x faster multicore and 2x faster single-core than a modern, supported Intel Celeron N4500.

Moore-style scaling where chips are faster (rather than just denser) ran out a while back. Expensive computers from a decade back beat cheap computers of today. A modern 20-core PC is perhaps 1/10th the CPU cost as compared to when the 6950x came out, but not a lot faster.

If that 6950x was maxed out to 128GB RAM and set up with a decent GPU, it can be a very good system.

That's among the oldest processors not supported, but many computers with somewhat newer CPUs don't work either due to motherboard / BIOS issues.

caspper692• 1 year ago

In the same boat with one of my user's 6950x. Ridiculously fast machine over its lifetime, and still doesn't trip on much.

Unreal that a 64GB machine with plenty of love to go around is getting the shaft.

I could muck about with a TPM module because the mobo has a header, and there are supported chips on the market, but the 8th gen requirement is a dealbreaker.

I'm trying to get this user to just go Mac, but it's like pulling teeth.

If they insist on a new machine, then maybe I'll make it my BSD box.

yoyohello132• 1 year ago

File explorer take 2 seconds to load for me, FILE EXPLORER! It should be milliseconds. Microsoft engineers are asleep at the wheel.

Edit: This is on a brand-new workstation BTW

blibble• 1 year ago

just buy a new PC

one that just happens to come with another windows license...

caspper692• 1 year ago

Yes, it is slower (but it has gotten better), but now that I have a tabbed explorer, it's really hard to go back to the single-window per dir version.

I'm sure there's a performant 3rd party extension that would fit the bill, but I'm too lazy atm.

throwfgtpwd2347• 1 year ago

The reason Windows gets slower and slower is to continue selling PCs. It never gets faster.

robotnikman• 1 year ago

IIRC it's because when Windows 11 detects a game running, it basically deprioritizes other process (like web browsers running streams or videos) which causes the lag you see

fishgoesblub• 1 year ago

Not often a software company stops users from using the latest version of their product. Why does Microsoft not want more people to be running the latest version of Windows? Wouldn't it be best for them given the data collection in Windows 11?

krupan5• 1 year ago

Windows and Intel (Wintel) have had a symbiotic relationship from the dawn of time. Intel is struggling, which means Windows will struggle. I would guess they are working together on this plan to boost sales of both

pjc50• 1 year ago

As someone who owns a machine which gets reminders to update to Windows 11 despite not being allowed to, the whole thing is bizarre. There's no cited explanation for the TPM "requirement", and it's obviously not a requirement since you can turn it off. It makes me very suspicious that there's some ulterior motive.

wmf• 1 year ago

TPM is used for BitLocker.

dboreham• 1 year ago

Can be used?

Pooge2• 1 year ago

Which not everybody uses or has even heard of.

krupan5• 1 year ago

Lol! Of course there's an ulterior motive here! It's Microsoft! (and Intel, the age old Wintel duopoly)

superjan• 1 year ago

One explanation is that Microsoft is a collection of teams with different objectives. I suppose the security people would like something better than TPM to compete with Apple’s hardware security. OEM contacts will plead on behalf of their vendors to lower standards. And the sales people want to push end-users to buy a new PC that needs a new license. Ultimately everyone’s life at Microsoft will improve with users moving to Windows 11, to gain sales, improve the spying and to mitigate risks, and avoid bad publicity if problems arise with windows 10.

johnea• 1 year ago

Another explanation is that there is some kind of giant back room payola between MS and h/w manufacturers...

michaelmrose2• 1 year ago

One of the goals of "trusted computing" was supposed to be remote attestation. This was to be a secure unfalsifiable attestation to server that the client computer was running a secure environment that didn't allow bypassing restrictions.

EG in the best of all possible worlds for Microsoft your work, your bank, and Netflix would all refuse to run if you weren't running Microsoft. Realistically Mac is way to big to ignore but it would be awfully convenient if comparative small fries like Linux could be locked out especially if developers could be convinced that running Linux as a locked down service within windows was the only things they need.

On a less suspicious note the TPM enables a convenient way to secure client machines that are owned by your company in such a way as to make it very difficult to access the data therein without manually managing keys.

ginko• 1 year ago

EG in the best of all possible worlds for Microsoft your work, your bank, and Netflix would all refuse to run if you weren't running Microsoft

That would be the worst of all possible worlds. It's literally evil.

t1234s2• 1 year ago

W11 IoT does not require TPM https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise...

rideontime• 1 year ago

Is Windows 11 IoT a functional equivalent to the "real" Windows 11 for a PC?

tinnywoody4u• 1 year ago

It very much is, it just doesn't have the microsoft store installed by default.

TiredOfLife• 1 year ago

Yes Store and everything

t1234s2• 1 year ago

If you have to use windows W11 IoT is the best version of windows to use. Zero bloatware. Only downside is you can't update an existing machine to it you need to clean install.

sour-taste• 1 year ago

I built my own PC years ago and it came without a tpm so I can't upgrade. The motherboard does have the plug for a tpm so I bought a cheap one and tried plugging it in. Windows still doesn't recognize it. I did my best but the obsoleting Microsoft is doing here is heavy handed

poizan425• 1 year ago

How old is your PC? My 10 years old laptop has a TPM built into the CPU (Intel PTT), which Windows 11 is perfectly happy about once I figured out how to enable it in the boot options.

DanielHB• 1 year ago

My PC built around 2021 can't either, apparently (for ASUS motherboards at least) you need to manually update the bios and enable it:

https://www.asus.com/microsite/motherboard/ASUS-motherboards...

runjake• 1 year ago

What's your CPU? My math may be wrong, but the minimum Intel CPU supported is 8th gen, which started coming out about 8 years ago.

pixl97• 1 year ago

Intel PTT should support TPM 2.0. Not all boards/combinations support it correctly without a bios update, and not all boards have bios updates.

rtkwe• 1 year ago

Mine I built in 2020 with an R9 3900_ and it was able to upgrade by enabling a fTMP.

sebazzz• 1 year ago

You still need to enable the dTPM in the BIOS. It is not like a USB device which is plug-and-play.

throwfgtpwd2347• 1 year ago

That's on newer machines where it's likely built into the processor, not for older machines that had a TPM as an option that connected via a header.

throwfgtpwd2347• 1 year ago

It has to be a TPM 2.0, not 1.2.

jmclnx• 1 year ago

Nothing like alienating your most knowledgeable user base. In the early days (MS-DOS), these are the people who helped Microsoft get to where they are now.

So by alienating them, they are probably steering the "unwashed" masses to alternate environments, ie: Linux, MACs and even *BSD

Good job Microsoft in helping out your competitors.

AtlasBarfed• 1 year ago

Don't worry, desktop Linux is still going to drop the ball on this opportunity.

I see OSX is the bigger beneficiary.

yupyupyups• 1 year ago

I jumped ship when Windows 8 was introduced, never looked back.

AnotherGoodName3• 1 year ago

I really have no choice but to install Linux now. The nag screens in Windows 10 are already getting unbearable. The over 5 year old system is still running games at high detail just fine (3950x CPU, 2080 GPU, 32Gb ram running at 2k resolution).

TPM 2.0 was finalized in Nov 2019 after the above system was built. Hardware isn't progressing that quickly anymore which makes a hardware requirement like TPM 2.0 very arbitrary honestly.

Microsoft could have easily made Windows 11 work without TPM 2.0 as the workarounds attest to. It could have been "if you don't have this, you don't get some security features but otherwise it's fine".

My conspiracy sense is tingling at the hard requirement for TPM 2.0 that really doesn't need to be there. A bit like when MS bought Skype and moved it from peer to peer voice to a central server based system with no monetary gain from doing that, someone obviously decided that needed to be done. We don't need to be asking people to throw away perfectly performant hardware to upgrade. There's actually nothing in Windows 11 enabled by the requirement since Windows 10 also supported TPM 2.0 already, it just didn't require it. I've also never been subject to the attacks TPM 2.0 protects against. There may be cases where TPM 2.0 is wanted, i can imagine it's useful for servers, but i really don't need it.

toast0• 1 year ago

A bit like when MS bought Skype and moved it from peer to peer voice to a central server based system with no monetary gain from doing that, someone obviously decided that needed to be done.

This one is less nefarious, IMHO. Sure, a central server makes it easier to snoop. But, it also meant you could reliably get messages sent while you were offline. Skype had been built around desktops with consistent connections, but needed to adapt to intermittent connectivity of laptops and barely any connectivity of iPhone. Older smart phones like s60, blackberry, and windows mobile could support always on background apps, but iPhone only has very limited background execution, and it was originally much more limited... now you can do a voip push and do some communications before you post a notification, but around the the time of the change, notifications had to be composed on a server and sent fully formed --- there was no way to run code on push.

And supernodes had already been centralized.

ohm• 1 year ago

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/skype-surveillance-a-ti...

Mindwipe• 1 year ago

Sticking software you don't like on the malware list feels like a disaster waiting to happen during discovery in an anti-trust suit.

krupan5• 1 year ago

Microsoft has been there before, this is right out of their playbook. On the verge of being deemed a monopoly is right where they like to be

aquir2• 1 year ago

If they have to buy a new computer they will just buy a Macbook...what a stupid way to loose customers.

krupan5• 1 year ago

You seriously don't understand most computer users.

duxup• 1 year ago

Long ago I preferred Windows as a sort of "it's good enough and i can just minimize the UI and it runs". I didn't have to bother with it much.

After a while updates and prompts for upgrades and 20 kinds of UI/UX across ever changing control panels / file managers, and my cheese getting moved here and there .... I gave up and decided if I'm going to get my cheese moved I may as well try a mac.

I've been happy and never looked back.

jdoe1337halo• 1 year ago

SteamOS cannot come to PC soon enough

philipov• 1 year ago

If you want to use Arch, you can already do so.

malmz• 1 year ago

You can run SteamOS on a PC, it's just a linux distribution

bsimpson2• 1 year ago

You can run Steam Big Picture Mode on Linux, which gives you the UI of SteamOS. You can also run Bazzite, which does this by default and is close enough for many people.

The actual image that gets shipped on the Steam Deck is available in bits and pieces as git tags in Valve's clandestine repos, but isn't yet being distributed for other devices. That is changing this spring, when they start supporting other vendors.

bsimpson2• 1 year ago

I wonder what its install base will be like.

Tim Sweeney (of Epic/Unreal/Fortnite) is not a reliable narrator, but he's on record saying:

Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it.

Windows has never been my primary system, but there are times when I've had one because I wanted to do something (long ago 3D modeling, now PCVR) that wasn't supported on my main systems. If I could do that just as easily in e.g. SteamOS, Windows would once again exit my life.

alienchow• 1 year ago

Microsoft had been badgering me to upgrade my Windows 10, only it doesn't allow me to do so when I click on the link given. Then I recalled that I only needed Windows all this time to run a single application. Installed Ubuntu with Wine and I no longer boot into Microsoft nonsense. There was some 4K scaling issue with Wine that was annoying, but the very latest update fixed it.

Thanks Linux and Wine.

fafhnir• 1 year ago

install linux, get vmware pro for free and install win 11 in a VM. VMWare emulates TPM so it will run like a charm. Only thing you need is 8Gigs or so extra ram. plus you have the benefits of running windows in a VM. No backup problems, snapshot funcionality, etc etc. works absolute fine for me

wordglyph• 1 year ago

Does VS studio work fine too?

krupan5• 1 year ago

MS is treating you so badly that you want to switch to Linux, but you still want to use Visual Studio? Hmmm

jerhewet2• 1 year ago

I installed Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022 on my Mac Mini M2 and it works like a bloody charm. It's not as fast as my main Windows development machines, but it's 100% functional and operational.

Bonus: I'm running Little Snitch on the OSX side, and it does a brilliant job of stomping all over Microsoft's telemetry.

Edit: Running it under VMWare Fusion.

throwfgtpwd2347• 1 year ago

vTPM only works if there's a real TPM available.

stanac• 1 year ago

With recent developments (last 10ish years) of electron, proton, wine and everything moving to the web I don't need windows anymore. Installed ubuntu on 5 year old thinkpad and it works like a charm, even JetBrains IDEs are available from the app store. I tried windows 11 on that laptop but it was sluggish.

KeplerBoy• 1 year ago

Windows really is a quite horrible experience these days. Recently received a new workstation at work and it came with windows.

I just wanted to check if it worked and had the correct configuration before wiping the disks and installing linux. But theres no obvious way to even get to the Desktop without signing in with a MS account. Had to install Linux without properly booting Windows, oh well.

throwfgtpwd2347• 1 year ago

Microsoft sends telemetry and displays ads all over Windows unless it is 11 Enterprise.

LinuxBender• 1 year ago

So does this mean they are going to patch out the ability for Rufus to modify and burn images using the bog standard W11 ISO that do not require TPM checks or M$ accounts?

pllbnk• 1 year ago

At this point I no longer see significant reasons for majority of people to continue using Windows. Previous arguments such as gaming and exclusive Windows-only software have been largely resolved in Linux. Sure, there are some exclusives but they don't justify the massive differences in user share among operating systems.

Microsoft cracking down people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

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