Window 11 Upgrade?

Also, it mildly amuses me that 10 was meant to be the last ever major version of Windows. Didn’t they make a big deal of this at the time? That there’d never be another version and 10 would just receive updates forever? Then a couple of years later here’s 11 and hopefully everyone’s quietly forgotten about this.

I read that it was basically due to Covid and everyone and their mum wanting to go out and buy a PC/laptop for WFH, gaming, video calling relatives etc. So MS wanted to launch something new to catch buyers imagination.

Cougar

That wasn’t a Microsoft problem.  If anything it was the opposite.

It was the hardware co’s fault for writing bad drivers, and it was worth the pain long term to improve the architecture, but how the **** did microsoft release an OS primarily used in offices, where pretty much every printer/scanner is broken in one way or another? Surely you’d work with your main OEMs to ensure it’s working at day one? 🤷🏻‍♂️

You had this ludicrous situation where not only was your new laptop massively slower at some tasks than the one that was 3 years old, but also the GUI would randomly disappear and reappear several seconds later and your printer/scanner became just a printer and would no longer print double sided.

It was a ludicrous situation.

The reason for 11 is IIRC something to do with the security protocols used by newer processors after someone discovered Intel processors had a kernel level vulnerability since forever a few years back. Basically unless your processor has this vulnerability patched then you’re not allowed to play.

Of course if you’re like @nuke and I and have a computer with said processor then you would naturally want to get the most value from it. The good news is that you can actually bypass that check during the installation phase and although the OS will be grumpy about it you can still happily run Win 11. What’s not so clear is how long Microsoft will tolerate this disparity but given you have to do a little bit of work to get it running in the first place it might just be a competency barrier that’s to weed out the kind of people that turn security updates off by default.

WinGPT: AI Assistant for Windows 3.1