Windows 10 end of life could prompt torrent of e-waste | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10 end of life could prompt torrent of e-waste

itpro.com

12 pointsCHB040308548233 comments

Just because it's "unsupported" doesn't mean it won't continue working.

The realisation of that fact is the key to avoiding planned obsolescence and rejecting the mainstream narrative of corporate authoritarianism.

They force you by not issuing any security updates for the unsupported versions (for free).

It's probably ok to continue using win10 even if this is the case for an individual, but for a corporate IT system, this won't fly.

Corporate has been replacing systems even without this anyways, most large companies lease the machines for their warranty life.

Which is why Windows XP is still in use in various places today.

Ideas of how to intercept "scrapped" machines of this nature? I'd love to have a hobby of installing newbie-friendly Linux distros on machines like this and giving them away.

Come to think of it, I know some folks who run IT departments I could probably ask.

There's also a charity called Free Geek that does exactly this: https://freegeek.org

They're local to Portland, OR, so if that's not your stomping grounds maybe ask them for advice?

There are a few of these around the US. We lost our big one in NYC, Gowanus E-Waste Warehouse, a few years ago. I wish there was another one here I could volunteer with.

Thanks for the idea. There's something similar in my city that I was thinking of getting in touch with as well.

The law should be that if you end support for hardware you have to open source all its software including any services needed for it to run.

Linux exists. The law need not impose on this.

> Minimum system requirements for installing Windows 11 on a PC mean users must have a processor of at least 1 GHz or faster along with a minimum of 4GB RAM. Storage requirements are also set to a minimum of 64GB.

That will barely run Vista. People are not going to chucking Windows 10 PCs in the trash because of these requirements.

Windows 11 requires an Intel 8th gen chip or later and TPM 2.0 support. My i7-7700k I'm using at the moment doesn't support it, for instance. It's plenty powerful and can be hacked to install it, but Microsoft could drop support at any point and lock it out.

My i7 7700k been running windows 11 happily for over a year. People who want windows 11 will get it installed by passing the requirements and those who don't are also the ones who don't even know windows 11 exist or care about upgrading.

>those who don't are also the ones who don't even know windows 11 exist or care about upgrading.

until their computer isnt supported, and stops getting security updates, and they hop onto a network and

And?

And join a bot net that attacks you and me.

> That will barely run Vista

Eh, not really. I'm still running Windows 8.1 on my oldest PC (pentium dual core, 2GB RAM).

But I see your point.

Apple does the same thing with its Macintosh series, newer versions of MacOS don't support some older Macs. Been like this with MacOS for a long time now and nobody seems to care that Apple does it. Install Linux on the old Macs to keep them alive, the same with old PCs.

From 55 days ago:

Do not go gentle into that overflowing landfill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38036151

The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has delivered a petition to Microsoft calling on the company to rethink the impending abandonment of Windows 10 in the face of millions of PCs potentially being rendered eligible for landfill overnight.

The Register link: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/27/microsoft_petitioned_...

    There are now less than two years until Microsoft is due to cut support for Windows 10, and at current estimates, 400 million PCs can't make the jump to Windows 11.

    The petition, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, criticizes its plans and states that customers expect their devices to last rather than be rendered obsolete by an arbitrary decision. PIRG warns that tipping that much hardware into landfills is somewhat at odds with the company's stance on the environment.

https://pirg.org/media-center/20000-call-on-microsoft-to-sav...

https://pirg.org/take-action/tell-microsoft-dont-leave-milli...

---

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150186

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/10/windows_11_adoption/

It made me think that Microsoft's Certified Refurbishers actually take a large hit on these, they are the most likely to have inventory that all of a sudden take a sharp loss of value, just because those didn't make the cutoff.

Is there a way to speed up the Windows 11 UI on unsupported hardware? It works fine, but the responsiveness is much worse than 10.

You can turn off features you don't really need/use. Search indexing, Windows Defender real-time scans, Microsoft compatibility telemetry, weather, ads, Cortana, etc.

Ten and a half years of support is quite decent, no?

Thats not how to look at it. Its dropping all computers from working that were purchased before 2018. So someone who bought a computer 5 years ago is being told to upgrade again in 2.

Ah yeah, only three months of 110°F weather a year is quite decent, no?

Huh?

Buying new computers contribute to the climate crisis, Microsoft forcing you to buy them is a giant "fuck you" to our slim chance of survival on this planet...

Meh, it's not like the computers won't be produced anyway, whether we buy them or not...

Good chance to remind everyone how easy it is to install Chrome OS Flex (https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/) on a huge variety of different "obsolete" hardware and quickly have a simple, secure, evergreen setup.

It's pretty hard to be mad at Microsoft here. They supported Win 10 for a full decade, and anything newer than Coffee Lake CPUs (2016-2017) likely had the option to upgrade, for free, to Win 11. The biggest roadblock is usually lack of a TPM 2.0, which Windows requires to improve security for boot, bitlocker, and passwordless auth.

It's really a testament to how speedy computers have gotten now that a 10 year old device is still usable: I type this on my circa 2013 Thinkpad which failed a forced upgrade to W11 due to unsupported hardware drivers, while a Skylake SFF machine runs Proxmox and almost a dozen containers/VMs in my basement.

> The biggest roadblock is usually lack of a TPM 2.0, which Windows requires to improve security for boot, bitlocker, and passwordless auth.

We're mad at Microsoft because Windows is still perfectly usable (well, as usable as Windows ever is) without those things, but they refuse to let you install it without one.

You can use Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/

To modify the ISO to turn off hardware check and TPM support for Windows 11 to install it on an unsupported PC.

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#user-content-Help_...

Besides Linux and BSD Unix there is: https://reactos.org/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ and https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/

I know some third-world nations still use DOS and the BORLAND DOS compilers because people donate old computers to their nations.

With the right OS, old computers are still usable. Please don't throw them away, e-cycle them so they get used by poor nations that cannot afford new PCs.

We are not required to buy a new car if there is a manufacturing issue with the brakes and we should not be required to buy a new laptop to get patches for security issues in paid software.

Difference is that if the breaks of your 10 year old car break down you pay to change them either with official parts or after market alternatives (which in the case of a pc those are hundreds of Linux distributions)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com