More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

theregister.com

13 pointsdefrost34 comments

It's still baffling that the Threadripper 1950X isn't supported by Windows 11, not just because it's still a fast, modern CPU that supports all the newer Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 requirements, but because it's also identical in every important way to the supported 2950X. I'd really be interested in the specific technical reason the TR1950X is out.

It is quite perplexing. I have the 1950X and can't update, can't even do the updates of win10 (maybe for some other reason) but still...

Wasn't there some issue at one point with Windows being incapable of coping with the sheer number of threads? Seems like Windows and Threadrippers mix about as well as milk and orange juice.

Microsoft: we made it incompatible with CPUs manufactured before 2018 (except for the surface studio because it was designed more special-er, guys trust us)

Also Microsoft: why is nobody upgrading to Windows 10?

The cutoff should've been something like Haswell or Ivy Bridge.

I feel bad for anyone who bought a Gen 1 threadripper and got absolutely dicked on this, even if the restriction is trivial to bypass.

Large org here. We're not planning to move to Win11. We moved from Win7 to Win10 and consider this a short term release.

Are you planning to stick with Win10 after October, 2025?

I think that what they're saying is that Windows 11 would be like Windows 8 or Windows Vista - short-term and forgotten - and there would be Windows 12 that would be reasonably better than Windows 11. Heck, most devs that still support Windows 7 doesn't actively test against Windows 8(.1), so I wouldn't be shocked if Windows 12 exists in 2025 Windows 11 would be treated the same way.

ah, the good-ol 'Every other release is the good one' MSFT that we came to know and love!

Maybe we'll get Windows 11 Second Edition?

Yes. Microsoft's EOL dates are never actually enforced, and two years isn't long enough for all of our "unsupported" hardware to be lifecycled.

I can't see it ever becoming more expensive to stay on Win10 before everything unsupported is replaced.

The funny thing I bought a PC with Windows 11 and I genuinely don't know what is the difference between this and Windows 10 apart from some UI changes which doesn't seem to me like it should have been difficult to implement on Windows 10.

Here's one: it has way more bugs, and it's much less reliable.

Couldn't that be said about Windows 10 compared to its predecessors?

Maybe. I've always postponed upgrading, so I've never seen the early bugs (until now). The living room PC ran windows xp until 2016 (because it was only really used to play music, organize files and some photo editing).

No, when Windows 10 was released, it generally felt more stable than Windows 8 (which, on the other hand, felt worse than Windows 7 and was skipped by many organizations who went straight from 7 to 10).

That's an interesting perspective. Windows 8.1 felt much more stable than Windows 10. Even on a fresh Windows 10 install, I had to make sure to restart explorer.exe at least once a day, if not every couple of hours, to ensure I didn't start getting random "UI lag". Never had to do that before Windows 10.

Windows 10 also didn't solve the problem of half of the settings being in some sort of MetroUI and the other half being in traditional Win32 forms.

I'm curious, do you have sources on that?

I haven't upgraded my gaming PC to windows 11 yet, but I'll probably be forced to eventually so I'm interested in this.

Only empirical evidence. I did a fresh windows install to the (officially supported) living room PC and I have to deal with crap so often that I'll probably switch it back. Some examples:

- Bluetooth stops working once in about a week and only starts working again after ~3 reboots and some luck. Reinstalled drivers and fiddled with it many times.

- WiFi just stopped working altogether 3 weeks into the upgrade. It just refuses to work. Again, reinstalled (officially supported) drivers and messed with it a lot.

- The fans go louder and it's generally hotter.

- This may be a really weird bug that's possibly irrelevant, but the bootloader loves to erase itself from the efi boot options. If you go into the efi settings you have to manually add it, if you don't it'll work until you do.

- General UI bugs (lots of them)

- Subjective, but way more convoluted and annoying UI

I've heard the same kinds of things from other people too.

My advice is to skip upgrading for as long as you possibly can.

I built a new PC recently and installed Windows 11 on it. The bluetooth & sound UIs were completely broken. I had two headsets connected, one was displaying as "Default for audio" but sound was coming through on the other one, and for the life of me I could not figure out how to change sound to the other headset. I think it wasn't showing up in the Sound menu despite clearly showing as connected (disconnecting and reconnecting didn't help).

Definitely agree with the sentiment to hold off on the upgrade as long as possible.

since the person you asked is only providing a single anecdotal experience, I thought I would add mine. I find the UI to be more refined and more responsive than Windows 10. My laptop upgrade went smoothly, and I have had no issues with stability. It feels overall snappier, and my battery life is a little better.

Same here. Been on Windows 11 Pro for a few months now and have had absolutely no issues whatsoever. Definitely like the UI improvements.

I made the mistake of buying a Win 11 Pro laptop and despise the UI.

Taskbar icons are always combined and you can't change it. Also right click menu is mostly broken and/or changed for the worse. I hate it.

I can't believe a multi-billion dollar company can't just have a tickbox to keep the old UI that everyone knows?

Why have changes for no reason and more clicks needed?

Different strokes for different folks. I find the right click menu to be much better.

The right click menu is only a minor irritation, but it's the taskbar combining that I hate most. It's a massive step backwards.

Of course with the forced updates (that I also hate), they could change it at any time on a whim. Or change something else...

> Taskbar icons are always combined and you can't change it.

That's an immediate no-go for me, why in the world are they sliding backwards in functionality?

I have two functional PC's in this house with Windows 10, both are workhorse machines that easily handle everything required of them and are mainly used by non IT relatives who are comfortable with the OS.

Neither machine is Windows 11 capable and it seems a shame to have to cycle them out of use down the track.

There's easily another 10 10 15 7 home | office machines in the local neighbourhood that I casually maintain for friends and aquaintainces (semi rural area, people trade skills) that fall in the same boat.

I can see a number of machines going the *nix | cloud path once Win 10 support end.

"Upgrade". Not what I would call it. Thinking of removing my external TPM since I never use the thing anyway and maybe it will stop nagging me to upgrade to 11. I hate the cloud and this seemingly inevitable march towards Windows As A Serivce bullshit.

Thankfully on windows 10 pro you can set a bunch of registry keys aka gpos to block windows 11.

With the clear trajectory that Windows 10 started and has now been propagated to Windows 11, businesses still on Windows really have only themselves to blame.

With so much running in the browser and in the "cloud"--including Office365!--it's not even clear end users would notice being on Linux or a Chromebook.

I'm really surprised entrerprises with big IT departments haven't started pulling the plug on their Windows installations.

4 in 10 are lucky to avoid the tighter DRM requirements

Good. My laptop is too "shitty" to handle Windows 11 despite Microfart's dumpster fire of forced automatic updates, and I get a bit of satisfaction from knowing that it can't railroad itself into my life even if I were to purposely let it.

As a neighborhood IT guy, Please, send your old PCs my way.

I can always run Linux and FreeBSD on those.

Upgrade to Linux then? Most* people use browser-only workflow anyway.

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