Switched on one of my laptops this morning, took ages to boot up and apply upodates.

It installed Windows 11 and I didn’t ask it to?

It wasn’t the fastest machine running W10, should I roll it back or is it less resource hungry than 10?

I didn’t notice any difference.

Googling suggested there were issues with bleeding-edge hardware like the efficiency cored intel stuff, or workstation AMD CPU’s not working as fast as they should but run-of-the-mill stuff was no different.

Depends how you define “not the fastest”, my old laptop ran W10 and didn’t qualify for W11. If it’s running slowly then it might be worth working out why (see what software and applications are running on startup and in the background).

One way to find out.

As above, “not the fastest” could be a myriad of things.

Will the compatibility be increased to older chipsets or if it was “no” will it always be “no”?

Mine has been nagging me for weeks, let it update a few days ago. With modern wide-screens I like the taskbar vertically on the left side of the screen. How do I get it back there?!

With modern wide-screens I like the taskbar vertically on the left side of the screen. How do I get it back there?!

At the moment, task bar repositioning is one of the things missing from W11. I like my taskbar at the top – where any other menu bar is usually presented – but it won’t let me for now so I just get on with it being at the bottom whilst being mildly annoyed.

There’s a registry hack to reposition the toolbar which is readily googlable (I have mine at the top also). I haven’t tried it myself yet though.

@jimmy

I can’t say for sure, but on my friends older machine there was a BIOS setting called TPM that wasn’t enabled by default, enabling it allowed the upgrade to 11 in the normal way.

Some more info here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-on-your-pc-1fd5a332-360d-4f46-a1e7-ae6b0c90645c

EDIT, I think having TPM is the deal maker/breaker with upgrading as it’s a ‘required’ security feature for win11.

EDIT 2, Im not sure when TPM really became a thing, but if your PC is of a certain vintage, you might be out of luck – which makes buying on old office refurb machine a bit more complicated as it’s something else to consider.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-on-your-pc-1fd5a332-360d-4f46-a1e7-ae6b0c90645c

Sorry, wrong link https://hothardware.com/news/biostar-gigabyte-msi-motherboards-ready-windows-11-tpm-2

works fine. Let ’em get on with it.

@mattyfez thanks, checked my settings and TPM 2 is already enabled but still not “upgrade ready”, so possibly not th deal breaker.

@jimmy

Diffucult to say then without checking your specifications against the windows 11 requirements list.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-11-specifications

It’s bit confusing, you may be able to force an update (not reccomended) as windows update may not be ready to give it to your particualr machine spec yet.

I wouldn’t rush to upgrade or worry though, by the time win10 no longer gets updates, you’ll be wanting a new machine anyway, possibly, presumably.

And you’re really not missing much, win11 looks a bit more modern and some stuff has been moved about/removed for no particular reason that’s obvious to me, it doesn’t actually function any better or worse from what I can tell.

I’ve upgraded my laptop out of curiosity, but I’ll be leaving my main PC on win10 for the forseable future… i.e until my hand is forced when they eventualy stop doing security updates for windows 10.