Microsoft cracking down people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft cracking down people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

xda-developers.com

54 pointsbelter95 comments

As someone who owns a machine which gets reminders to update to Windows 11 despite not being allowed to, the whole thing is bizarre. There's no cited explanation for the TPM "requirement", and it's obviously not a requirement since you can turn it off. It makes me very suspicious that there's some ulterior motive.

TPM is used for BitLocker.

Can be used?

Which not everybody uses or has even heard of.

There's a fun thing Windows has started doing where if you sign in with your Microsoft account (instead of an increasingly hard to create local account), Bitlocker is silently set up on your behalf and you don't know until something changes with your system configuration

Lol! Of course there's an ulterior motive here! It's Microsoft! (and Intel, the age old Wintel duopoly)

One explanation is that Microsoft is a collection of teams with different objectives. I suppose the security people would like something better than TPM to compete with Apple’s hardware security. OEM contacts will plead on behalf of their vendors to lower standards. And the sales people want to push end-users to buy a new PC that needs a new license. Ultimately everyone’s life at Microsoft will improve with users moving to Windows 11, to gain sales, improve the spying and to mitigate risks, and avoid bad publicity if problems arise with windows 10.

Another explanation is that there is some kind of giant back room payola between MS and h/w manufacturers...

One of the goals of "trusted computing" was supposed to be remote attestation. This was to be a secure unfalsifiable attestation to server that the client computer was running a secure environment that didn't allow bypassing restrictions.

EG in the best of all possible worlds for Microsoft your work, your bank, and Netflix would all refuse to run if you weren't running Microsoft. Realistically Mac is way to big to ignore but it would be awfully convenient if comparative small fries like Linux could be locked out especially if developers could be convinced that running Linux as a locked down service within windows was the only things they need.

On a less suspicious note the TPM enables a convenient way to secure client machines that are owned by your company in such a way as to make it very difficult to access the data therein without manually managing keys.

>EG in the best of all possible worlds for Microsoft your work, your bank, and Netflix would all refuse to run if you weren't running Microsoft

That would be the worst of all possible worlds. It's literally evil.

> for Microsoft

Key point, there.

See their previous attempt at making the web windows only. Even if you accept that its greed not malice it creates a single point of failure to be abused in case you know the US is ever taken over by fascists. Not that that you know could ever happen.

Microsoft had been badgering me to upgrade my Windows 10, only it doesn't allow me to do so when I click on the link given. Then I recalled that I only needed Windows all this time to run a single application. Installed Ubuntu with Wine and I no longer boot into Microsoft nonsense. There was some 4K scaling issue with Wine that was annoying, but the very latest update fixed it.

Thanks Linux and Wine.

Long ago I preferred Windows as a sort of "it's good enough and i can just minimize the UI and it runs". I didn't have to bother with it much.

After a while updates and prompts for upgrades and 20 kinds of UI/UX across ever changing control panels / file managers, and my cheese getting moved here and there .... I gave up and decided if I'm going to get my cheese moved I may as well try a mac.

I've been happy and never looked back.

I built my own PC years ago and it came without a tpm so I can't upgrade. The motherboard does have the plug for a tpm so I bought a cheap one and tried plugging it in. Windows still doesn't recognize it. I did my best but the obsoleting Microsoft is doing here is heavy handed

How old is your PC? My 10 years old laptop has a TPM built into the CPU (Intel PTT), which Windows 11 is perfectly happy about once I figured out how to enable it in the boot options.

My PC built around 2021 can't either, apparently (for ASUS motherboards at least) you need to manually update the bios and enable it:

https://www.asus.com/microsite/motherboard/ASUS-motherboards...

What's your CPU? My math may be wrong, but the minimum Intel CPU supported is 8th gen, which started coming out about 8 years ago.

+1 to being really really sceptical of anyone claiming to have a 10 year old system that supports it. Skylake is literally well known for not supporting TPM 2.0 and the i7-6700K is still considered reasonably high end by todays standards (tech hasn't moved fast in the past decade and the 14nm Skylakes aren't that far off the 14nm+++++ high end variants Intel sells today).

The first draft of TPM 2.0 was 2015. The finalized version was Nov 2019. Intel 8th gen and above do have the option to upgrade to TPM 2.0 via a firmware update but as you point out those CPUs are not 10 years old.

That's one of the problems with this TPM 2.0 requirement. Tech has not moved fast in the past decade and the requirement is asking people to throw away 10 year old systems that can still easily beat today's midrange lineup.

I think what OP may be experiencing is that Windows 11 does install on older TPM 1.x hardware. It just nags to upgrade the hardware to TPM 2.0.

Intel PTT was introduced in some 4th generation CPUs in 2013, I don't know where people get 8th generation from.

And yes, it does not support TPM 2.0. Luckily Windows 11 only actually requires TPM version 1.2 (even if Microsoft claims that it's not recommended): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ways-to-install-...

(I'm not seeing any "nags" anywhere, I don't know where that would be?)

Edit: I just noticed that that page is the same that was linked from the article. Yet it still contains the block that the article claims has been removed. Did they put it back in again?

Edit 2: Or I do have TPM 2.0? It seems to think that I do:

* https://i.imgur.com/03hTtsd.png

* https://i.imgur.com/gA7q7xf.png

That looks consistent with an unsupported version of TPM (it states 1.16) and many others have reported that cpu doesn’t support TPM 2.0.

Qq do you actually have windows 11 installed. Your original post implied you had yet TPM 1.16 is below even the TPM 1.2 version allowed.

Look at the screenshots again. It states Specification version: 2.0. And the PC Health check app agrees that I have a TPM 2.0.

And yes, I have Windows 11 installed

I can't tell you why it seems to think that it is a valid TPM 2.0 module, but a lot of people have reported seeing similar things, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/rrta2r/tpm_que...

(Btw. I'm pretty sure 16 is larger than 2. It's not saying 1.1.6. It's a version string, not a decimal number)

Edit: The name of the specification is: Trusted Platform Module Library Family “2.0”, Revision 1.16. This was released in 2014: https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/resource/tpm-library-speci...

So yes, this is TPM 2.0. And TPM 2.0 was released in a non-draft version at the time my CPU was made. And the "1.16" is the revision number of the TPM 2.0 specification that it supports.

I went and checked now, and your timeline seems way off. According to https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/resource/tpm-library-speci... the first draft of TPM 2.0 was in 2013 not 2015, and the first "non-draft" version was in 2014 not 2019. It does make sense, revision 1.16 of TPM 2.0 does predate my CPU.

It says it's an Intel Core i7-6700HQ

* https://i.imgur.com/03hTtsd.png

* https://i.imgur.com/gA7q7xf.png

The PC Health check app says it's not supported, but the installer doesn't complain. I don't know if it would have allowed me to update automatically, but it works when using the ISO.

Intel PTT should support TPM 2.0. Not all boards/combinations support it correctly without a bios update, and not all boards have bios updates.

Mine I built in 2020 with an R9 3900_ and it was able to upgrade by enabling a fTMP.

You still need to enable the dTPM in the BIOS. It is not like a USB device which is plug-and-play.

That's on newer machines where it's likely built into the processor, not for older machines that had a TPM as an option that connected via a header.

It has to be a TPM 2.0, not 1.2.

Not often a software company stops users from using the latest version of their product. Why does Microsoft not want more people to be running the latest version of Windows? Wouldn't it be best for them given the data collection in Windows 11?

Windows and Intel (Wintel) have had a symbiotic relationship from the dawn of time. Intel is struggling, which means Windows will struggle. I would guess they are working together on this plan to boost sales of both

I switched to Linux, and when my Surface Book 2 stops being supported by Microsoft, I'll switch that over too. I'm done.

With recent developments (last 10ish years) of electron, proton, wine and everything moving to the web I don't need windows anymore. Installed ubuntu on 5 year old thinkpad and it works like a charm, even JetBrains IDEs are available from the app store. I tried windows 11 on that laptop but it was sluggish.

Nothing like alienating your most knowledgeable user base. In the early days (MS-DOS), these are the people who helped Microsoft get to where they are now.

So by alienating them, they are probably steering the "unwashed" masses to alternate environments, ie: Linux, MACs and even *BSD

Good job Microsoft in helping out your competitors.

Don't worry, desktop Linux is still going to drop the ball on this opportunity.

I see OSX is the bigger beneficiary.

I jumped ship when Windows 8 was introduced, never looked back.

Windows really is a quite horrible experience these days. Recently received a new workstation at work and it came with windows.

I just wanted to check if it worked and had the correct configuration before wiping the disks and installing linux. But theres no obvious way to even get to the Desktop without signing in with a MS account. Had to install Linux without properly booting Windows, oh well.

Microsoft sends telemetry and displays ads all over Windows unless it is 11 Enterprise.

I'm surprised that anyone is upgrading older hardware to Windows 11 in the first place. It's shocking how many performance issues I've come across. Explorer bogs regularly. I can't game and stream a video anymore due to some rendering change that was made in Win 11 (I forget the details).

Older hardware isn't always slower hardware.

Intel 6950X is unsupported. That's 10 cores at 3.5GHz. It's about 10x faster multicore and 2x faster single-core than a modern, supported Intel Celeron N4500.

Moore-style scaling where chips are faster (rather than just denser) ran out a while back. Expensive computers from a decade back beat cheap computers of today. A modern 20-core PC is perhaps 1/10th the CPU cost as compared to when the 6950x came out, but not a lot faster.

If that 6950x was maxed out to 128GB RAM and set up with a decent GPU, it can be a very good system.

That's among the oldest processors not supported, but many computers with somewhat newer CPUs don't work either due to motherboard / BIOS issues.

In the same boat with one of my user's 6950x. Ridiculously fast machine over its lifetime, and still doesn't trip on much.

Unreal that a 64GB machine with plenty of love to go around is getting the shaft.

I could muck about with a TPM module because the mobo has a header, and there are supported chips on the market, but the 8th gen requirement is a dealbreaker.

I'm trying to get this user to just go Mac, but it's like pulling teeth.

If they insist on a new machine, then maybe I'll make it my BSD box.

File explorer take 2 seconds to load for me, FILE EXPLORER! It should be milliseconds. Microsoft engineers are asleep at the wheel.

Edit: This is on a brand-new workstation BTW

just buy a new PC

one that just happens to come with another windows license...

This is a brand-new workstation provided by my job. Apparently, it's a known issue because it does some async network calls that block startup.

Yes, it is slower (but it has gotten better), but now that I have a tabbed explorer, it's really hard to go back to the single-window per dir version.

I'm sure there's a performant 3rd party extension that would fit the bill, but I'm too lazy atm.

The reason Windows gets slower and slower is to continue selling PCs. It never gets faster.

IIRC it's because when Windows 11 detects a game running, it basically deprioritizes other process (like web browsers running streams or videos) which causes the lag you see

install linux, get vmware pro for free and install win 11 in a VM. VMWare emulates TPM so it will run like a charm. Only thing you need is 8Gigs or so extra ram. plus you have the benefits of running windows in a VM. No backup problems, snapshot funcionality, etc etc. works absolute fine for me

Does VS studio work fine too?

MS is treating you so badly that you want to switch to Linux, but you still want to use Visual Studio? Hmmm

Perhaps the OP needs it for work?

I installed Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022 on my Mac Mini M2 and it works like a bloody charm. It's not as fast as my main Windows development machines, but it's 100% functional and operational.

Bonus: I'm running Little Snitch on the OSX side, and it does a brilliant job of stomping all over Microsoft's telemetry.

Edit: Running it under VMWare Fusion.

That's an Arm version of Windows though. The main reasons to install Windows revolve around the need to use Windows only x86/x64 versions of drivers or software.

There is no M2 version of Visual Studio. The version of Visual Studio 2022 I installed was x64. I have some other x64 software installed as well (Notepad++, AWS CLI, git, etc.) and all of them work just fine under the ARM version of Windows 11 running under VMWare Fusion.

vTPM only works if there's a real TPM available.

I really have no choice but to install Linux now. The nag screens in Windows 10 are already getting unbearable. The over 5 year old system is still running games at high detail just fine (3950x CPU, 2080 GPU, 32Gb ram running at 2k resolution).

TPM 2.0 was finalized in Nov 2019 after the above system was built. Hardware isn't progressing that quickly anymore which makes a hardware requirement like TPM 2.0 very arbitrary honestly.

Microsoft could have easily made Windows 11 work without TPM 2.0 as the workarounds attest to. It could have been "if you don't have this, you don't get some security features but otherwise it's fine".

My conspiracy sense is tingling at the hard requirement for TPM 2.0 that really doesn't need to be there. A bit like when MS bought Skype and moved it from peer to peer voice to a central server based system with no monetary gain from doing that, someone obviously decided that needed to be done. We don't need to be asking people to throw away perfectly performant hardware to upgrade. There's actually nothing in Windows 11 enabled by the requirement since Windows 10 also supported TPM 2.0 already, it just didn't require it. I've also never been subject to the attacks TPM 2.0 protects against. There may be cases where TPM 2.0 is wanted, i can imagine it's useful for servers, but i really don't need it.

> A bit like when MS bought Skype and moved it from peer to peer voice to a central server based system with no monetary gain from doing that, someone obviously decided that needed to be done.

This one is less nefarious, IMHO. Sure, a central server makes it easier to snoop. But, it also meant you could reliably get messages sent while you were offline. Skype had been built around desktops with consistent connections, but needed to adapt to intermittent connectivity of laptops and barely any connectivity of iPhone. Older smart phones like s60, blackberry, and windows mobile could support always on background apps, but iPhone only has very limited background execution, and it was originally much more limited... now you can do a voip push and do some communications before you post a notification, but around the the time of the change, notifications had to be composed on a server and sent fully formed --- there was no way to run code on push.

And supernodes had already been centralized.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/skype-surveillance-a-ti...

I'm mainly a Mac guy these days but when the time comes for my Windows 10 machines, I'm sorely tempted to put a Linux distro on them. I don't really game and mainly use it for ham radio programs.

You can still game on Linux, Steam is phenomenal. ;) I havent gone back to Windows.

What do you find yourself playing on there? Is it something that can be done with any distro, or is it something that some are more suited to?

Most games "just work" at this point because of how well Proton works: https://www.protondb.com/

The biggest issue is certain DRMs aren't supported in Linux yet, but others are, so it's just game dependent. I mostly play single-player, but the multiplayer games I do play work fine.

I don't have Windows on any machines at this point. I've converted everything to Fedora Silverblue and it's fantastic.

Perhaps you included this in your DRM comment, but I think the biggest issue is anti-cheat. Most online games with a sufficiently large 'competitive' element require a kernel-level anti-cheat which won't work on Linux.

EAC works. Not sure about BattlEye.

Vanguard doesn't work, and perhaps that's for the best.

My understanding was that EAC works in userspace mode on Linux, instead of at the kernel level. So, you can enable it, and it'll block the most easily detectable of cheats, but it's not very hard to bypass.

Then again, kernel-level anti-cheat is not that hard to bypass with special hardware, either. I guess someone ran the numbers and decided that blocking some percentage of cheaters at the cost of blocking 100% of Linux users was a worthwhile trade.

Hmmmmm. More than a few titles from my Steam library in there.

What do you do graphics card-wise?

I have a Steam Deck for my main gaming machine (SteamOS), my laptop is a Framework 13 (AMD), and I have a gaming VM (connected to the TV in my living room) that's running an old GTX 1070 (both Fedora Silverblue).

https://www.protondb.com/

This lists the compatibility of most games on steam with Linux - you just need to enable proton in steam and you're good to go.

Any distro should work - distros really don't matter (or if they actually do for you, you're computer-literate enough to not need to ask)

https://protondb.com is a community run database of game support on Linux. Nearly everything modern is supported, and with older games I have found Proton to actually work better than modern windows with some games. Furthermore, games like OpenTTD and OpenRA bring classic games natively to Linux for free. Distro wise, pretty much any of the major ones will work fine for gaming, though it seems Pop_OS is trendy for Vidya. Valve is about to (maybe they already have) release it's modified version of Arch called SteamOS for public use.

Haven't played in ages, but I used to play Dirt Rally, torchlight, victor vran and about 20 other games.

A few of the far cry games worked as well.

I have been gaming on Linux for many years, nearly anything I played worked really well, even modern games like cyberpunk or elden ring, for the distro I am using an immutable distro based on atomic fedora called bazzite but I tried fedora and arch and they work as well. I don't think anyone needs windows for gaming.

I've played on Ubuntu / POP_OS! and I've played on Arch, I haven't tried other distros, but anyone else who has Linux and Steam has shared a similar experience with me.

I play all the Bethesda RPG games (TES, Fallout, and now Starfield) I even play online games with friends. Proton does a fantastic job, I think Rust, which I don't play anyway is one game you can't play on Linux due to them not adding support, which its not even an immense effort to support Linux with Proton, you include a DLL if I'm not mistaken.

I've played CyberPunk and other key games as well. Some games on launch are iffy, but after a few updates, they work flawlessly. Like Starfield was almost non-functional on Linux for me, then after a few updates it played flawlessly.

Playing PC games on Linux through Steam is pretty decent, if imperfect, setup these days.

But I still get tripped up when it comes to the non-PC game stuff. Such as mods, streaming from other platforms (playing my PS5 on my PC), or other community tools that have a tendency to be Windows-focused.

I still haven't been able to pull the trigger on running Linux on my main desktop.

> Such as mods, streaming from other platforms (playing my PS5 on my PC), or other community tools that have a tendency to be Windows-focused.

I have not done mods in a while, but I could have sworn it was as easy as adding it to Steam too, and it detected the game in its "wine" directory. Or something like that? I'm not too sure...

The games themselves run perfectly fine in Wine (Proton), with or without mods. Unfortunately, the fan-made tools to support mods are less reliable.

The most notable example is probably Wabbajack, a tool that manages modpacks for many games but is best known for TES games, where modlists consist of hundreds of mods and are a pain to manually install. Ironically it is a WPF app written in modern C#, so in principle _could_ run under Wine just fine, and could even be ported to a native GUI app via Avalonia UI or similar.

Unfortunately, it is apparently quite fragile in its path management and relies on both Edge WebView to download mods and Windows Steam to install them, so the maintainers think it's not viable to make it run under Wine [0], although of course someone has bashed together a script to work around it [1]. That last one is quite recent so I just discovered it while writing this post!

[0] https://github.com/wabbajack-tools/wabbajack/issues/2521

[1] https://github.com/Omni-guides/Wabbajack-Modlist-Linux/blob/...

+1 Steam works wonderfully on my Ubuntu VM.

I'm on 7 for that kind of stuff because of Windows 11 not letting me change the display resolution, and 10 contains just enough extra crap...

I am using GeForce NOW for gaming on my MacBook, works like a charm if you have a decent internet connection

At this point I no longer see significant reasons for majority of people to continue using Windows. Previous arguments such as gaming and exclusive Windows-only software have been largely resolved in Linux. Sure, there are some exclusives but they don't justify the massive differences in user share among operating systems.

W11 IoT does not require TPM https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise...

Is Windows 11 IoT a functional equivalent to the "real" Windows 11 for a PC?

It very much is, it just doesn't have the microsoft store installed by default.

And the LTSC version won't keep trying to upgrade itself. LTSC enterprise version of Windows or bust.

Yes Store and everything

If you have to use windows W11 IoT is the best version of windows to use. Zero bloatware. Only downside is you can't update an existing machine to it you need to clean install.

Sticking software you don't like on the malware list feels like a disaster waiting to happen during discovery in an anti-trust suit.

Microsoft has been there before, this is right out of their playbook. On the verge of being deemed a monopoly is right where they like to be

If they have to buy a new computer they will just buy a Macbook...what a stupid way to loose customers.

You seriously don't understand most computer users.

SteamOS cannot come to PC soon enough

If you want to use Arch, you can already do so.

You can run SteamOS on a PC, it's just a linux distribution

You can run Steam Big Picture Mode on Linux, which gives you the UI of SteamOS. You can also run Bazzite, which does this by default and is close enough for many people.

The actual image that gets shipped on the Steam Deck is available in bits and pieces as git tags in Valve's clandestine repos, but isn't yet being distributed for other devices. That is changing this spring, when they start supporting other vendors.

I wonder what its install base will be like.

Tim Sweeney (of Epic/Unreal/Fortnite) is not a reliable narrator, but he's on record saying:

> Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it.

Windows has never been my primary system, but there are times when I've had one because I wanted to do something (long ago 3D modeling, now PCVR) that wasn't supported on my main systems. If I could do that just as easily in e.g. SteamOS, Windows would once again exit my life.

So does this mean they are going to patch out the ability for Rufus to modify and burn images using the bog standard W11 ISO that do not require TPM checks or M$ accounts?

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