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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

I bought my parents a Dell laptop in 2019/2020. It has 7th gen i3 so just below the Windows 11 threshold. The machine is in perfect shape as it's used a few times per month max for watching YouTube or some online banking, or occasional LibreOffice usage.

I don't want to generate electronic waste, what would you recommend? Installing Linux Mint?

Note: I'm far from my parents so can't do IT support.

Edit: also occasional HP scanner/printer usage.

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Don't fix what's not broken. Get a cheap Raspberry Pi and configure pihole to block ads/malware for their home network.

>I bought my parents a Dell laptop in 2019/2020. It has 7th gen i3

7th gen came out in 2016. Why did you buy your parents a system with a 3-4 old CPU? Nothing wrong with buying old stuff if that's what you're into or what you can afford, but then you have to take into account the risk of less SW support when buying old HW, since now that CPU is 9 years old and no HW gets supported forever. Hence the saying "you buy cheap, you buy twice". Just install Linux on it.

You made me double check, actually it's 8th gen (came out late 2017). It was 2y old at the time of buying (I wasn't really paying attention to the processor tbh). So actually, not sure which Windows 11 prerequisites are not met, I need to dig more.

8th gen supports Windows 11 but I would skip that and move directly to Linux

Install Win 11 anyway.

Bypass instructions are on YouTube, Reddit, Github, tech blogs, etc.

odds are they'll push out an update that requires a CPU feature not present on that CPU

then GP parents' machine will just bluescreen at boot with illegal instruction

They won't, Windows isn't even compiled with AVX2 extensions on, even though every CPU in the last 10y+ supports it, for the fear of it running on some machine that doesn't have AVX2. The whole "CPU unsupported" thing is from the marketing side, trying to push purchase of new hardware, not from the actual devs.

No, it’s not marketing. A big security feature is VBS which isn’t supported on older CPUs.

Completely baseless assumption. Who told you that?

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