Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh' Microsoft is continuing its push for users to adopt its new software paradigm, declaring 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh" and reminding everyone that Windows 10's end-of-support date is just around the corner. That declaration was made in a blog post today by Microsoft EVP and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf …
"We believe that Windows 11 is available at a time when the world needs it most"
...and indeed, by definition, at a time when the world needs it least. Because there is currently zero need, there never has been a need, and there never will be a need.
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"know and tolerate" would probably be closer to my own thoughts.
We have W11 at work as compliance requires in support OSs.
I have W11 on one machine at home to stay in the loop. I don't like it, yet more enshittification from MS with removal or degradation of features I did use and the addition of multiple features I don't want or need all with the aim of scavenging my data.
And all done in a massively disrespectful way. Steal my data in order to produce data to sell for adverts yet can't be bothered to check for a 365 license and bombard me with adverts for it anyway. Plug in an iPhone and get ads to download MS app for android constantly.
My time is limited so I don't hate it enough to upgrade back to W10 but I dislike it enough to reject the idea of replacing functional W10 hardware just to get W11. If I'm investing time it will be to rebuild the W10 desktop as a 'nix box.
I didn't loathe it though not until recently.
W95, W98SE, W2000, XP, Win7. Even Winphone 8. I liked them. They did what I needed and largely did what they were told.
ME and Vista might have been shit but they felt like mistakes. Ever since Win 8 the shittification seems ever more absurd and deliberately so. Like it's some silly game to see how far they can push their customers to keep buy junk. Or like an immature teenager acting like an ass rather then breaking up with their girlfriend properly.
If they don't want us to use Windows maybe they should just say so.
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I don't. The average home user is unlikely to care or be able to install an alternative. The average office user probably has a support guru who does, so the existing workarounds for installing 11 on older kit may continue to work for another year or two, but offices don't sweat their kit like home users so eventually those workarounds will be blocked.
You're being downvoted, but I mostly agree. Have 11 on my work laptop, and 10 on home PC. With some very minor tweaks they are essentially the same user experience.
What I don't trust is MS's ability to update my 10 machine withour royally fucking it up, so I'm holding out to the bitter end before trying that.
Yes it’s worked fine for me too.
It worked (in a sense) even when trying to upgrade a very old machine from 10 to 11 with a Rufus’ed 11 installer set to disable the hardware check. All went well until the first boot which crashed. The CPU was too old and lacked a opcode Windows 11 is compiled to use (pop count?) so it crashed on with an illegal instruction error. Oh dear.
However the machine rebooted, the installer automatically rewound the upgrade and returned me a machine with Win 10 as was on it originally and a note of apology that something had gone wrong. And it was as clean as a whistle, no errors had occurred in the rewind.
Ok it was a pity that it wouldn’t run on that CPU, but I was impressed at how it handled a situation way outside the norm.
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Have W11 on work machine.
Slower (work laptop was originally on W10 & "upgraded" to W11 - so all the performance sapping / resource hogging stuff such as telemetry, AV & other security stuff, VPN etc was already there). Post upgrade performance was noticeably worse - this was noticeable immediately post "upgrade", so not down to applications getting updated & slowing things..
Teams even worse on W11 than W10 - though that could of course just be down to updates to Teams and unrelated to OS change, as with it being a work machine no control over updates to software as centrally controlled. so cannot hold off updates that have a bad rep
Dumbing down of configuration, trying to hide all the most useful stuff and instead only exposing config "apps" with limited functionality
Most "useful" (to me, YMMV) options on W10 right click menu options are not present on W11 right click, you have to drill down an extra layer to get to them.
This may seem trivial but PITA when you have "muscle memory" of how to do stuff, over course of a day lots of extra time wasted.
I hacked reg settings to get around this - the small stuff like that is the most annoying in daily use.
"tiggity" wrote "hacked reg settings to get around this", so he already put it in place... I was about to post the same, but I learned to read the full post. Else some smart-a comes along and tells me that I should read the full post first, and damn he/she is right. Guess how I learned...
Yep that was/is very annoying. I don't have rights to change it so I'll have to live with it.
That sort of farce has been extended into Office software as well.
The toolbar locks also very annoying. Using an ultrawide monitor I have lots of horizontal real estate so used to throw the toolbar to left or right. Not an option in W11.
And as said these changes only add up to a couple of seconds each time but if you do it dozens or hundreds of times a day it makes a difference.
I really have no idea what UX designers think these days the decisions make no sense, have no obvious basis in actual use of the tools.
Do they all work on Macs or tablet with no context button to click?
Why do you change the location and design of critical functions from places they have been for decades? If you works on cars would you replace the indicator stalk with a couple of toggle switches located in the passenger footwell just to be disruptive?
Actually you probably would because you are shit at your job.
Wow, ok
Just a few of the massive annoyances.
The task bar has gone fron configurable to almost fixed. Single height? Check. Stacking my apps in the most annoying way and adding them to a drop "up" menu at the end instead of fitting it onto my taskbar? Check. Hiding options in the most ridiculously obscure places and placing useless, pointless settings and information no one cares about? Check (here's looking at you network config particularly). Local search doing Internet searches sometimes in preference to local searches? Check. The fact it hoses your information on masse to MS unless you run massive scripts to block it and remove it all? Check. The forcing of an online Microsoft account to install the OS unless you force the damn thing to not do it. Check
Don't get me started on the right click context menu removing "copy, paste, delete" for those awful icons. The fact that "create directory" doesn't appear now under certain right click scenarios as the menu is tailored to what MS THINKS you want to do. The fact that programs that used to show up on a right click now need 2 clicks to appear (like bloody REFRESH!!!).
I could go on and on. It's just an endless stream of enshitification features that objectively make the computer more difficult to use that require you to perform more clicks to do the same thing you used to do in less.
There are massive differences between 10 and 11 and I absolutely hate what they've done with 11. Can I use it? Of course I can. I'm an IT pro I've been adapting to the "new new" for 30 years. I embrace change and love new technology as a whole. But Microsoft just has Windows 11 so wrong. It's a horrible evolution in a direction I think most IT pro's can either stand and definitely don't want.
to unique selling points that made your product so much better than the competition that people would buy your product over the competition?
And the competition would respond with something that was better again?
I mean look at cars.... phones.... industrial production cells (just had a demo of a new machine with a software upgrade over our current stuff that makes producing widgets so much easier and better), every product out there from a chair to an aircraft, everyone tries to outdo each other
Not so m$
You will buy our product because we're scrapping our previous product and will refuse to support it (try that with cars and you'll be drowning in aftermarket parts before the end of the day), and it doesn't matter if our new product is any better than our previous efforts.
There are two types of marketing department. One works to find out what potential customers want and then goes to the designers to commission it. The other sits around in isolation, decides what it wants to sell, commissions it and then tells potential customers what they want. We're looking at the latter, resorting increasingly to FUD.
..." unique selling points that made your product so much better than the competition that people would buy your product over the competition?"
What competition? Microsoft are dominant*. They have the market sewn up. Businesses will go the Microsoft route because they always have and businesses are too risk averse to do otherwise. Go into a consumer shop and it's Microsoft everywhere because Microsoft and the PC manufacturers make deals that make it so. The only way a consumer would choose anything other than Microsoft is because they already know what they want (probably what they are already using and they just want a legitimate hardware upgrade). OS choice isn't majoritively made on the basis of a healthy competition and the ability to compare and contrast and make an informed decision, it's on the basis of what the dominant player pushes. I'm surprised authorities haven't chased Microsoft on the basis of having an unfair monopoly on PC OSes. They control the consumer OS market and through that drive the hardware industry in a way that isn't in the consumer's interest - ie forced hardware updates because of corporate decisions to prevent security updates being available to users of older (but still perfectly functional) hardware.
...and relax.
*73% dominance of desktops/laptops according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
> I'm surprised authorities haven't chased Microsoft on the basis of having an unfair monopoly on PC OSes.
There are only two organisations I can think of who might be interested in doing this and have the funds to attempt it and neither of them wants their own monopoly to come under the same spotlight they'd be shining on Microsoft's.
I'm surprised authorities haven't chased Microsoft on the basis of having an unfair monopoly on PC OSes.
I assume you're not old enough to remember the 90's, when the Feds were this close (pinches fingers together) to breaking Micros~1 up, for myriad Sherman violations. That changed the millisecond GW stole the election in 2000, and Micros~1, being emboldened by this "victory", have continued in their monopolistic ways ever since.
Something about remembering the past, and being doomed...
Steve didn't 'ask' Bill a damn thing. Apple won a court case and got $150 million from Bill, the suit was launched while Steve was still exiled into the Outer Darkness that was NeXT and Pixar, Steve inherited the settlement when he Returned To Apple In Wrath And Glory. Mostly Wrath. Other consequences were a commitment to have Office on Mac for 5 years. Apple made MSIE their default browser... and started work on Safari. And kicked MSIE to the curb pretty much instantly when Safari was ready. (I used OmniWeb. For a while OmniWeb was superior to both MSIE and Safari.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp.
Monopoly happened. Monopoly and the fact that the US government was too chickenshit to do anything about it.
When you've sewn up a market so tight — like office productivity suites — so tight that abandoning Microsoft is outside the realm of practicality for any business, what else would they do other than force products down your throat?
Markets with competition require intervention at times, as demonstrated repeatedly in the past 40 years. Otherwise you get roll-ups like this and any pretense of competition becomes a joke.
> When you've sewn up a market so tight — like office productivity suites — so tight that abandoning Microsoft is outside the realm of practicality for any business
On the bright side, businesses may soon realise that they are getting all their documents created by LLMs, and those are all only read by LLMs (probably the same one). Ditto Power Point presentations (the LLMs are the only things still awake and paying attention), the spreadsheets created by GitHub Copilot, the C-Suite Dashboard graphics generated by Stable Diffusion being fed those spreadsheet results...
So they aren't actually using any "office productivity tools" at all! And can announce their freedom from Microsoft (and the fees for O365).
The ground is being prepared to prevent the rise of unwanted competition by producing hardware that can't be manipulated or bypassed by third parties without falling foul of laws like the DMCA. John Deere's agricultural equipment is a notorious example but cars are increasingly being made like iPhones with 'dark' diagnostics and parts tied to encrypted serial numbers. We're pushing back with 'Right to Repair' legislation but this alone can't counter mandated 'would someone think of the children/environment' planned obsolescence.
Microsoft is just another of the crowd. They're going to do what it takes to force you to purchase their stuff (and if you dare to bypass them by purchasing inexpensive imported (i.e. Chinese) systems that run Linux expect them to have enough lobby power that our legislators will all be blathering on about 'security risks').
I think they're actually on a road to nowhere but we're going to have to hang on for a fairly rough ride until enough of them figure it out.
"Empires rise... become complacent, corrupt, senescent... And empires crumble and fall."
But unfortunately (according to archaeologist Flinders Petrie[1]) the cycle takes on average about a thousand years. So, sadly, M$ has a lot of life left yet.
[1] W. M. Flinders Petrie, Revolutions of Civilisation, Harper & Brothers, 1922
.
unique selling points that made your product so much better than the competition that people would buy your product over the competition?
At one time, Microsoft was the OS supplied with the IBM PC. Which *technically* made the above statement true. That was a long time ago. Since then, they brought (with difficulty) a windowing system to the Intel platform, it was inexpensive, and a step forward. Soon, they offered an office suite, which again was worth buying. Various improvements and releases continued until around the 2000 mark.
Since then, I would propose, there has been very little in the line of "unique", "better", or "improved" in Microsoft's offerings. I'm sure people will debate this, but from an individual user's perspective, Windows 11 isn't much better than Windows 10, or Windows 7, or Windows 2K, for that matter. But, apparently, we "need" these annual "improvements", almost as much as Microsoft's bottom line does.
Because it moves all the users one step closer to the subscription model for apps and support.
Over time, with enforced updates that you can't turn off, those installed copies of MS Office et. al. that you bought years ago will stop working, or become severely non-functional, and your only option will be Office365.
And I'm not discounting future Windows service packs/enhancements becoming subscription only, with unpatched systems becoming more and more difficult to use as things like entitlement and security certificates expire or are invalidated.
Microsoft are in this for the long-game.
...(hypothetically) contracts, laws and regulations were different, such that:
+ everyone's "obsolete" non-Win11-compliant hardware ended up at M$ offices globally
+ M$ were to foot the bill for all replacement "refresh" hardware
+ invoices for remediation costs and lost time caused by software "upgrades" were sent to Redmond.
Purely hypothetical speculation of course, since accountability is old hat. But the mental exercise is somewhat satisfying.
I will happily accept some* of these "useless", "obsolete" systems. They'll have a good home and run** Linux.
*not a dumpster/skip-load but a few will be welcomed with open arms
**from my experience, a SSD and a Mint install will make them young again :-)
Linux is good..but apparently still not good enough.
Not good enough for what, exactly?
The only thing linux is not good enough for is overcoming decades of unrelenting Micros~1 marketing propaganda, and unwashing the brains of the illiterati
Like the song says: "You know that the hypnotized never lie. (Do you?)"
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"and the familiar Windows experience they know and love."
Buuuuullll crap.
I don't love being a full time beta tester.
I don't love dumping perfectly serviceable hardware 'cos Win11 is somehow imaginarily special.
I don't love AI being shoved down my throat.
I don't love Edge being shoved down my throat.
I don't love MSN
I don't love Recall
I don't love OneDrive
I don't love Outlook mail
I don't love "Settings"
Should I go on?
A good time to announce that my long-planned full migration to desktop Linux (Kubuntu 24.04) is complete. Some minor adjustments (using Office 365 online where needed, otherwise LibreOffice has been surprising me, with how much it covers of my use cases). Dev tools had always been in a Linux VM anyway.
The big concern, games, has been almost entirely been a non-issue: thanks to Steam/Proton/Wine, at least all the games I play are on Gold and up lists and have been working flawlessly. In some cases with astonishing FPS increases!
There's one non-activated Win10 VM for the 2 required apps that I haven't yet found a replacement for (yet). It will remain at 10 until the heat death of the universe.
There is now only one Windows machine left in the entire house, the missuseses desktop. That's a bridge I'll burn when I come to it.
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The only ones I've found to be irreplaceable are my very legal copies of Adobe Photoshop (CS6) and games .exe's. Oh and MS Office too, though offline WPS is pretty good for that except Excel's VBA.
I've yet to try Bottles or Lutris, but I'm unsure if they can create profiles that fit the dependencies of those.
One is ASDM for my aged EOL Cisco ASA firewall. It still uses hopelessly outdated webstart technology based on ancient versions of Java. I tried all kinds of weird incantations (old JRE version, IcedTea), but couldn't get it to work reliably yet. I'll keep fiddling with it, but needed access now (and I'm not a Cisco guru comfortable with CLI and IOS).
The other is, sadly, that dinosaur of a noughts app, iTunes. I just haven't found anything that organises music, audiobooks, e-books, podcasts as a one-stop-shop for all my iDevices, like it does.
Rhythmbox and Clementine didn't cut the mustard, and it seems like I'd have to use several different apps for each kind of media. Tried running iTunes with Wine, but apparently a recent Apple update broke it. I'll keep plugging at that as well, but for now I just took the path of least resistance.
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Yep, I found those results - and indeed the issue is that they are hopelessly out of date.
iTunes broke a couple versions or three ago. It now produces black-on-black screens (but you can blind grope about and then bring up menus that are normally readable!).
Similar for ASDM. I managed with a black-magic incantation of JRE from around the time of the Byzantinian empire and IcedTea that was so wobbly it needed its own moon for stabilisation, but that didn't seem worth it. A lot of the issue also seemed to stem from Cisco being utterly sloppy on package signatures - and Linux enforcing those, whereas Windows just goes "meh, you cool with a security hole like that? ok, then"
As I said, it's on the todo list, but not a high enough priority. My real priority now is getting flightsim up and running with all my various addons and kit, from yokes and throttles, to muilti-screen and Navigraph and TrackIR and what-not.
As for reflashing the whole Cisco unit: that may come in time. I may extend support for another year or so and see how I go. It's fairly cheap and has been worth every penny, as this is already the second replacement. The first was due to the Cisco bricking issue in the first gen of the units where they had a recall and RMA if you had support; the second was when one of my cats managed cause a freak chain of Rube Goldberg events that ended up with wated pouring into the running unit and frying it.
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>>There's one non-activated Win10 VM
Why non-activated? Rumour has it that there are freely available powershell scripts that can help with that "problem". Using the scripts apparently results in a completely properly activated Windows/Office installation.
I can't possilby comment on the veracity of those rumours...
This was the year I abandoned Windows 11 Pro in favour of Ubuntu 24.04.1 and updates because of Microsoft's insistence on shoveling this AI crapfest into anything and everything on the system and then having the gall to set up a screen history snapshotting tool tailor made for answering to law enforcement inquiries and snooping managers.
"1984" ring a bell?
The book is a warning, not a guide!
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Microsoft are pushing junk features too hard. Had it been a straightforward OS like Windows 7 (mostly) was - they may have won more users.
MacOS mostly manages to stick to being an operating system.
Windows 11 is an advertising platform for Bing. Every few months, they find another deceptive way to drive traffic to Edge and Bing. Always at the expense of the user experience.
I quite like the Windows 11 once I've tamed it. But it shouldn't need to take 20+ tweaks to achieve it.
I haven't met anyone who likes ads/MSN in the start menu, ads in explorer, tricks to move files into 5GB OneDrive, a sign-out replaced with a Microsoft Account ad, large Bing search bars, Bing icons on the desktop, widgets that open on hover (with poor quality articles), pestering to add M365, and desperate "don't leave me for Chrome" messages... urgh. I also have my suspicions when Chrome mysteriously disappears back into the depths of the start menu, and convenient shortcuts vanish.
Progress in Windows, Mail/Outlook, Teams etc always feels forced and desperate, somehow... and integration with a Microsoft Account somehow seems to be more confusing / sprawling to the average user than beneficial.
It’s also far from unheard of for this progression to occur over successive Windows updates:
-feature you don’t like can be turned off or bypassed with a button click
-> nope, but now it’s buried somewhere in Settings
-> no longer exposed in Settings but can be configured via Registry or GPOs
-> no known Registry keys; disabling the feature now requires arcane keypresses during setup and obscure & undocumented commands/switches
I’m thinking here primarily of the “set up Windows with a local account” functionality, but there are soooo many more examples.
A normal company, confronted with telemetry or anecdotal feedback that customers are turning off a feature, would re-think that feature, or at least make it better. Microsoft’s approach when confronted with such feedback, frustratingly, is to think of ways to stymie and block their customers from avoiding the feature.
Completely agree and I am immensely frustrated with having to tweak W11/Edge when updates are applied (e.g. new, spurious CoPilot "features"/interference, tracking etc.).
However, isn't the flip-side to turning off the telemetry on feature usage that they don't know what is used and what isn't (assuming that feature usage information is not covered by the unskippable "basic" telemetry that you can't disable)?
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I was absolutely gobsmacked when I had to delete "X-Box bar" (or whatever it was) from my work laptop. Time was, none of that consumer stuff was present in my work lappy. Either removed by IT or not installed in the Enterprise releases, I don't know, but seeing it and other useless (to me) stuff was a shock.
Does anyone actually use Microsoft's Media Player? Every time I have tried, it would complain about not having the right codec or need me to download some (for a fee) DVD player software. Our IT just told us to use VLC. We discovered PDF X-change on our own after one too many interruptions of a presentation by a screen blocking invitation to download a new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader
> Does anyone actually use Microsoft's Media Player?
Version 5.x and 6.x were very good. Straight down interface and usability. There is a reason why one of the best current players is exactly that user interface. With version 7 it started to go down since it tried to be "cool with features".
Serif Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher are all great - I've been a happy professional user for a number of years: they are good enough for my design / origination / artworking / printing work. However, I've not had any success in getting them to run on Wine / Crossover, so I still have to use a win10 VM for them. If you've figured out how to use any of the Affinity products under Linux, I'd be seriously interested to know how.
In the meantime, for anyone looking for Adobe CS6 replacements to run on Linux, i can recommend photoshop+illustrator CS6 be replaced with the usual combo of gimp (not ideal, but it does the job) + inkscape (better than Illustrator for what I need)
The big issue I see repeatedly for people who wish to move off CS6 is a replacement for InDesign. Until last year, I couldn’t find a decent viable alternative.
I spend most of my working time in InDesign, so finding a Linux alternative has been critical. And after 15 years of looking I've finally found one: VivaDesigner - the UI might not be as polished as one might like, but the support team are very responsive, and VivaDesigner can produce large documents as PDF files preflighted to PDF-X/4, and that’s definitely good enough for me. Now all I have to do is finish moving client projects from InDesign to VivaDesigner (the .IDML import in VivaDesigner is helping massively with that).
If anyone needs an InDesign replacement, take a good look at VivaDesigner.
Inkskape is great (barring it's "quirky" interface), and it does everything I need of Illustrator. On a similar theme, not being willing to (continuously) stump up for a subscription version of Lightroom, I recently took the plunge with Darktable. Both have fairly steep learning curves, but the payoff is greater versatility and complete freedom from Adobe. I say go for it.
I think it is pushing the envelope of capitalism a bit, demanding that people buy their stuff, when we really don't need or want the AI bollocks or Recall spyware, and have no desire to subsidise the fat bonuses of PC makers' executives when current spec machines work fine.
You can only polish a turd so much before you get rumbled. Windows 11 is malware.
I'll pay the extra 20% so I don't have to put up with Microsoft's bullshit. I don't like it, but if that's the choice then that's the choice.
...I mean, I won't - not me personally - because I'll just keep using Ubuntu, but if maintaining our in-house Linux distro wasn't literally my job and I was someone who just went to a store to be presented with "Mac or Windows" I'd chose Apple every time given what Windows has become.
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The Windows shop is going to keep hyping Windows 11 and trying to sell the public on its AI OS vision, whether customers like it or not.
A lot of customers don't have a choice. Some of the tools I need for work are only available on Windows, which is why my work PC is new enough to run Windows 11. However, it lives on my desk next to my Linux machine which does pretty much everything I need it to for my use.
Went through the trouble late last year to set up my email, configure my printer/scanner/fax combo (not yet done because of laziness concerns). Now my Ubuntu installation is "go" and we can pull the curtain on Windows after ±34 years.
That said, Linux is most definitely not for everyone: the printer installation was anything but straightforward, and multi-monitor support is abysmal beyond the very basic use case – at least in Xfce.
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They do though. Last week a mate asked me about the Win10 EOL; his laptop is getting on a bit (as is he, at 70 now) and he basically only uses a browser and Thunderbird. I told him he could either buy a new laptop or we could move the thing to Linux Mint, which would of course require some getting used to. He chose Mint.
The thing is, while this is true, MS don't care. Both my parents use Ubuntu with Mate now because they find it to be more like the Windows they remember than the new Windows is, and it gives them less problems along the way. Good-o. Job done.
But MS makes basically no money from end users like them. Windows is what it is because of corporate market share, and getting Linux to stick as an option in the office requires paperwork. Oh god so much paperwork. And meetings. The endless meetings. It doesn't matter than 99% of the office staff do everything in a browser these days, trying to convince a corporate IT department to try and run their estate on Linux is basically impossible - and I say this as someone who has, in fact, run an entire corporate IT department on Linux.
As long as MS can rely on forced upgrades in the business sphere, they can bully the end user as much as they like.
I can't wait for win 10 to stop updating. Maybe then I can get back to using it again, rather than waiting for the latest update to stop kicking the shit out of my hard drive.
Oh BTW marketing drone... Skype has started lobbing spam at me. Not only is Skype dog slow crap but I had to waste time locking the bloody thing down yesterday.
I am pissed off with ms and am walking.
Interestringly enough, from let's say a realistic OS user point of view, I have tried to find the features that would be an improvement over my win10 experience.
Alas I have found none for me personally that I would use, or want. Lots of "oh look we broke scanners" "oh look we broke this" "oh look more ads" and that kind of stuff.
Sadly though I do game on win10, but am looking at older apple M chips with crossover I think it's called that can run most games.
The Great Orange One has stated that he wants to impose some pretty aggressive tariffs on various imports - I imagine just the threat of that has already depressed the market for foreseeable ('Shall we commit to that hardware upgrade now?' 'Hold fire: let's see what happens with these rates first'). One of two things will probably happen: there will be huge pressure applied via the usual back doors in the hope that Trump can be convinced otherwise or MS might have to rethink their support policy for W10 in light of pressure from industry.
Assuming those 99.9% of users already have a PC that is Win11 ready and upgrading will simply be a matter of waiting for the update to come good then, yes, agreed: that's certainly the path of least resistance.
However, there's plenty of evidence to suggest way less than 99.9% of current users have suitable hardware and won't be able to switch to W11. The same apathy with then count against MS: rather than buy a new PC and go through a complete change of system, I'd wager most users will just remain on W10 until they feel they can justify buying a new computer.
All this assumes the user had budget authority of course. In a business-use case, it'll be down to IT/finance to decide if the switch is technically possible (legacy code, support issues, et al) and fiscally in scope.
I have three PC's around 5 to 6 years old that can't be upgraded due to no TPM chip.
But they all have a TPM 2 sockets!
However I can not find the chips needed for sale anywhere.
They are perfectly good PC's being high end when purchased so don't want to replace them when the chip would be such a simple fix. (From memory: two gigabyte x99 series m/b and an hp dl120p).
Anyone know of sources?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/156138021184?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110018%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.COMPLISTINGS%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20210609144404%26meid%3De1f04d2a427840be95bd5ce93e031d58%26pid%3D101196%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D385345968286%26itm%3D156138021184%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2332490%26algv%3DCompVIDesktopATF2V6%26brand%3DUnbranded&_trksid=p2332490.c101196.m2219&itmprp=cksum%3A156138021184e1f04d2a427840be95bd5ce93e031d58%7Cenc%3AAQAJAAABELx1mZQ2L9jLv%252BUPTFTna8XcGfl2wNJcn022gtZb5sDizxTFTVxe9aC0PKLEY%252FHw6KLg6sdLk21QkTwNyPIIsB0h5aTKXEUdjVLHM53fD6whXCKin7CesalbD4ZaGA3OW5GhcJZGc8LSjnQ%252BZKMDh6hD%252B6omBDwr04aSMeJfrZ65PKpgMVIL18tmFUel%252FQ5HT%252BuY0CFhwNk%252B9lRXo2i6gMIkQdJruGKfeXhWhoErEUTRxh30DBPrEmHdOahfsR%252BTZNciRPzhnLZykkPlyoK1E5rYSAB1AsI6C6hzQFg7485WuAj6rX4jDcON%252B53aBphWFi9UfUvY1T8ZXK2nAYF7GuSm5UVOXJBVO0E3wa1QhBFF%7Campid%3APL_CLK%7Cclp%3A2332490&itmmeta=01JH0N6DWQKY6DAFC5V5A60D4P
Buyer beware.
Quote: "...Microsoft ... is prepared to consign lots of PCs to the recycling pile come October..."
Funny that.....In 1998 Microsoft REALLY P***ED ME OFF....so that in January 1999 I moved COMPLETELY to RedHat v5!
Still...to the present day....every machine at Linux Mansions is running Fedora41.
So...if you are reading this and feeling fearful about the a**holes in Redmond....take heart....do a bare metal install of Linux (any Linux)......
....and Redmond Fear-Uncertainty-And-Doubt (aka FUD) will never darken your door again!
As Microsoft has damaged its relationship with customers by Windows 11. I have one Windows 11 machine used as contractor to the organisation owning it, so have some 'experience on Win11 system. It was enough for me to fully move all house stuff to Linux to avoid Win11 'upgrade'. Now work from home on my machines.
With Windows 10 entering the final stretch I finally decided to retire my first generation Core i5 750 and get an off lease Core i5 10500. I'm moving up from a 16 year old computer to a 5 year old one. I recently got a drone and 4K h.264 encoding is painful, and it can't handle h.265 encoding at all. Also the USB has been getting flakey dropping devices during large file transfers. Getting videos off my drone I've started using robocopy for the resume feature.
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I might actually do that as I've used Linux before and most of the few apps I use have Linux versions. The only Windows specific app I use regularly is Office 2007 to open a spreadsheet with a bunch of formulas and a few charts. I've also got a few batch files that I'd need to convert to shell scripts.
I have seen multiple machines with Vanilla installs hit 25% CPU load on the first boot up, due to Task Manager.
Then there's Microsoft Anti-malware also taking up 25% CPU resources on a regular basis, even though under Virus and threat protection, it shows your third party is running everything and under MS Defender AV options, it has the slider showing it is off. Because MS obviously knows better and therefore nothing of theirs should ever be turned off.
Straw poll in the office. >90% had no plans to "refresh" their PC. A lot of new phones, though. The ones that did want a new PC were all going for the Mac laptops.
MS for sure will get everyone off Windows 10 ... but they are only going to get them to an iPhone or Mac laptop. (Actually said "iPhone", not "phone")
Most of the Mac people were creative types. Mostly from Marketing and one or two techs.
The company made the move last autumn & the actual transition appeared painless, until you looked under the hood & saw the kind of sleight of hand enshittification that had been pulled, then had to unpick all the poisoned darts that had been stuck in your machine.
Making W11 vaguely useable now takes almost as much keyboard bashing as a Linux install ..... so this year is when I move everything windows to Linux at home.
I use Linux at work ok where necessary (it's good for systems that back in the day used to have a dedicated lump of hardware & need to chug along doing their simple work without being tripped up)
My main objection to doing it at home before was I couldn't be arsed as I have a life to live.
But now MS have made the whole effort seem equivalent, it's probably worth setting aside a weekend to get one of the older machines moved over & all the alternative apps installed as a pilot demo for the missus to assess.
It's time I will no longer begrudge given the dystopian future that MS seem to have looming for me if I don't jump.
"We believe that Windows 11 is available at a time when the world needs it most"
Fuck off. Stop forcing the TPM requirement and more people might move to it. You've essentially put loads of kit in landfil. Yes, those devices can and should then run Linux, but the average user isn't going to know that or how to do it.
And NO ONE WANTS RECALL! And few want CoPilot. But you're issue is forcing yourself on people. If you made these options a choice, maybe people would move. But no, and you keep, regularly fucking up default settings so Edge becomes the default browser again. And recently, you haven't been testing updates fully so managed to break printing at work.
Windows 11 is god awful
They are actually going to find it will be the year of Linux and/or people moving over to the Mac. I hate Apple, they are just as bad with their lack of backwards compatibility but still, I still see lots of people moving over to their overpriced shit.
I have the misfortune to be running Windows on a touch device (Surface Go2) from a company called Microsoft. The touch experience got worse with every release from Win8.1 onwards. Taskbar untouchable at the bottom? Tablet mode only if you disconnect your keyboard? Clearly no-one talks to each other in MS...
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