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Comment by ihattendorf | Hacker News Reader

After 4 years they'll either not get security updates or have to switch to Linux. There are plenty of PCs running older hardware that'll most likely be perfectly fine after 2025 but no longer be able to run a supported version of Windows.

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>After 4 years they'll either not get security updates or have to switch to Linux.

To be fair, Windows 10 will be 10 years old at that time and their PC will be over 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time. 11 year old HW is not very energy efficient and is often vulnerable to various side channel attacks that need SW mitigations which make them even slower. Newer HW is more secure, while being more energy efficient to boot. Even if Microsoft would continue support for ancient hardware, the chances are Nvidia and AMD would drop driver support for what they consider to be legacy hardware, like they alwasy do.

I also keep my 15 year old PC (Core 2 Quad) going for my parents but I moved it to Linux as I can't expect Microsoft to keep supporting such old hardware for free forever and at some point, the SW and HW industry have to keep moving forward and that sometimes means removing support for legacy stuff even if that means cutting some users with old hardware off (they still can keep using their systems after all, just not run the latest and greatest SW).

Is Apple doing better officially supporting hardware overs 10 years old?

> 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time

No its not. For casual use, 15 year old PC is very much fine and works perfectly in many use cases ie for our parents. You may swap for SSD but that's it, it can be blazingly fast for the tasks required.

Forcing everybody to move into Linux when they can barely handle Windows is quite a stretch, there might be licences to software which won't work, same for hardware. Lets not forget whole world isn't on HN level of computer expertise to debug issues.

>Forcing everybody to move into Linux when they can barely handle Windows is quite a stretch

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You can keep using whatever HW and OS you have as long as you wish. What's your point?

11 years is a very long time in the personal computer industry. It’s a little under 20% of the time we’ve had such an industry.

PC hardware of recent years is much longer lived in terms of performance than in earlier years.

A PC from 11 years ago is likely running a spinning hard disk and running a 32-bit version of the OS, no?

Vista was released in 2007 and supported x86-64. The first x86-64 machines from AMD were released in 2003.

But did people typically run Vista 64-bit or the 32-bit version?

No data to back this us, but my intuition would be that other than government or big corporations, everyone buying a new machine with Windows installed would get the 64 bit version. And even then the uber-conservative government / corporate buyers wouldn't be rolling out Vista, they'd be sticking with XP.

I’ll ask some MS pals for some data.

I bought my first 64bit AMD CPU somewhere around 2001-2002 (at that time this premium turned out more or less useless). And as I mentioned, you may switch HDD to SSD to get very acceptable performance from even quite old computers.

> bought my first 64bit AMD CPU somewhere around 2001-2002

I doubt it. The first Athlon 64 was launched late 2003.

I meant slightly more recent, like when Windows 10 was released. But no, my relatives have PCs from 2010 running 64-bit Windows that I upgraded to SSDs in the mid-2010‘s and that are still running perfectly fine. I myself was running a 2012 PC (with SSDs from the start) until last year, and the replacement isn’t that much faster. I’m also running a second PC from 2016 that doesn’t meet the Windows 11 requirements but would surely be fast enough beyond 2025.

"Windows 10 is 10 years old"

It's a rolling release, so with 21H1 it's only half a year old.

And I don't care what they do. It will be the last Windows for me.

21H1 is a release which is half a year old, the OS itself was launched in 2015 which makes it 10 years old in 2025.

The issue is that hardware purchased last year and not supported by Windows 11 (like for example the Surface Studio 2 still sold by Microsoft, and other currently sold CPUs) has a much longer lifetime than five years.

> To be fair, Windows 10 will be 10 years old at that time and their PC will be over 11 years old which is an eternity in technology time.

To be fair, the PC won't be that old. Every single machine with Zen (1st gen Ryzen and Threadrippers), for example.

To be fair my 11 year old desktop CPU is faster than the cpu in my brand new work laptop.

Seriously. I’m working in a school. We have lots of computers from 2012. Maybe they will finally be replaced by 2025 (I kind of doubt it), but we’ll still have lots of machines from 2014/2015.

With how little my grandma uses her computer for and how confusing OS changes are, I almost wonder if I'd be better off installing ReactOS.

> have to switch to Linux

Come, now, we all know it's mostly hobbyists keeping 15+ year old PCs running with Linux

Assuming you could afford to upgrade, it's pretty bonkers keeping these old inefficient machines running from a power consumption standpoint.

I had a bunch of old Dell Precision workstations and I eventually got shot of them because my electric bills were becoming more and more eye-watering. I built a cheap PC that (with virtualisation) can carry out all these old machines workloads and more, and my power bills were a fraction of what they were previously. Quite an eye opener for me with regards to how energy efficient new stuff is.

IKR. My parents are still rocking my old gaming PC from 2006-2007 with a quad core Intel Core 2 Quad and Nvidia 6800GT and it serves them fine. However, by modern standards that PC is an absolute energy hog for what it does. The CPU alone has a declared TDP of 105W (in practice, maybe even more). A modern laptop-grade quad-core Intel Tiger Lake 1165g7 would absolutely destroy it in terms of performance, and at 15W TDP, consume only a fraction of the power.

I love fighting planned obsolescence and reducing e-waste by repairing and keeping stuff working as long as possible but at some point old hardware should be replaced if funds allow it for the sake of energy efficiency and the environment.

That is fair enough. But most of the boxes I bought are fairly efficient, being laptops (usually 45w max under load). Sandybridge was a pretty good platform for its time. It was not until recently that they have iterated out of it. If you had a desktop yeah I would recommend the upgrade. My use case was portability with some very light gaming, and a decent screen for programming. I had done that cutover from power hungry boxes to fairly efficient ones in about 2006. I dumped about 40 bucks off my power bill. My rub with this upgrade for win11 is it seems kind of arbitrary. Mostly TPM. A feature I do not want or have a need for.

> If you had a desktop yeah I would recommend the upgrade

Aye, I was thinking more about older desktop machines rather than laptops, which by their nature are designed to be as power efficient as possible to extend how long you can run off of just the battery.

And again just to restate to others, it's worth upgrading if you can afford it. After I dumped those old Dells, I reckon I saved the nearly the price of a whole PC each year after kitting out with newer gear (until the price of electric went up again).

Apropos Windows 11, it seems there may be ways around the TPM requirements, though not ideal:

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm...

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