Windows 11 Slapping a Watermark on 'Unsupported' PCs | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 Slapping a Watermark on 'Unsupported' PCs

gizmodo.com

34 pointsbubblehack3r29 comments

If your Windows installation is working fine despite not meeting the "minimum" "requirements", then Microsoft was lying when they said those were the minimum requirements.

They are the minimum requirements to upgrade, be supported, and use all of the features not the minimum requirements for it to boot. Not using e.g. the Windows Hello login flow doesn't mean you were lied to about the requirements.

Why should the minimum requirements for the baseline OS include things that are only actually necessary if you want to use optional features like Hello?

Because the requirement defines what is supported not what subset works well enough for a particular individual to be happy enough using it today. As much as I think the minimum requirements are overbearing (particularly the CPU one, there are unsupported models with the same feature set as supported models) I have no problem with the concept of notifying me that I'm outside of the minimum requirements for support. If Microsoft wants to continue expanding the use of things like TPM for portions of the OS or doesn't want to guarantee old instruction set baselines will be used for the entire support lifecycle then I'd rather they be upfront about letting me know.

They want to make these things mandatory at some point. The frog must be boiled ever so slowly.

You are describing adhering to optimal requirements.

There are definitely optimal requirements outside of the minimum requirements but keep in mind what is optimal and what is minimal is going to be different between "supported" and "currently working" installs.

Minimum requirements don't work like that. If you buy a TV that requires minimum temperature of 40°F, and you find that yours work at 25°F, that doesn't mean the manufacturer was lying.

Different copies of the same software don't have random variations like different pieces of the same hardware do.

Considering how many different combinations of PC components and applications Windows is expected to support, you might as well call it random variation.

The TV analogy isn't really about random variation between devices. Running a device way outside its specified temperature range may appear to work fine at first but lead to premature failure or subtle problems that aren't as easy for an end user to spot.

By analogy, coercing Windows 11 to boot on unsupported hardware may work fine at the moment (for the subset of features you care about enough to test), but Microsoft makes no commitment that it will continue to run that well in the future. They may introduce new features that do not function on your unsupported hardware, or they may drop workarounds for known bugs or security vulnerabilities in your hardware. Or maybe Windows 11 will continue to work fine on that hardware for years to come, but Microsoft doesn't want to put any QA effort into guaranteeing that.

> Running a device way outside its specified temperature range may appear to work fine at first but lead to premature failure or subtle problems that aren't as easy for an end user to spot.

The point was that operating hardware outside of its limits might work for me but not for you, and it might suddenly break for seemingly no reason later. But with software, if I can run Windows 11 without a TPM, then you'll definitely be able to, and there's nothing to wear out or change over time that could break that other than an update.

That's obnoxious. Why does Microsoft constantly smear shit all over it's flagship product every release?

legal liability

What liability do you perceive Microsoft might have from an end user who bypassed software mechanisms to prevent installation on unsupported hardware?

This is a joke. At least in EU.

It seems windows 11 doesn't support my i5-7600k, so I'll have to build another computer or figure out an alternative to windows before windows 10 reaches end of life.

It will work just fine. I installed it on my old 6300K chip.

Windows 10 will receive patches and updates for many-many-many years to come. There are simple too many win 10 users making it practically impossible for Microsoft to end of life it anytime soon.

Windows 10 EOL is October 2025 unless you're paying for out of life support from msft, which I'm not.

i bet that deadline will be moved several years out into the future.

> Note that this has its downsides, like voiding the software warranty on your machine.

Yes. "Software warranty". On commercial, boxed software.

They could as well have warned "this will put you on Santa's naughty list".

Is it possible to find the binary that does this and nop out the offending function? How would you approach this with a debugger?

As weird as it sounds there are usually registry keys that control this kind of behavior. I haven't verified if this particular one works on the GA version but it worked in the Insider version: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\UnsupportedHardwareNotificationCache -> DWORD "SV2" with a value of 0.

If you go the "modify system files by hand" part you have to jump through hoops to disable security and signing features, not to mention it'll be overwritten via updates.

There’s an official group policy to control this messaging:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5017130-managing...

Thank you so much. I always struggle to find obscure registry settings

From the Gizmodo author:

>I am still holding off on installing Windows 11

Do we also have a journalistic opinion from someone who actually bothered to install Windows 11 on a non supported PC to actually verify this?

No defending Windows 11 but the whole article is just a lazy opinionated piece without any proper journalistic research. Gizmodo is as reliable as Buzzfeed. I'm wondering how such lazy journalism ends up on HN front page. I guess since Win 11 is the tech community's favorite punching bag, HN will upvote any realated FUD on this matter, just like the TPM FUD that was floating around here.

Anecdotally, I have installed Win 11 on my parents laptop which is officially not supported, and have not seen any watermark yet.

The linked source from this makes for a much better summary https://www.windowslatest.com/2023/02/14/windows-11-system-r... and mentions it seems to be on an A/B rollout.

That's a much better article than Gizmodo.

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