The hardware requirements are the only thing stopping us upgrading. Our fleet is W10 and W11 has a few beneficial features, but we're not about to replace good hardware to do it.

"... Extended Security Updates to keep the lights on a little longer"

I'd be surprised if there's not almost immediately an "unofficial" way found to access them. I'd certainly use it if so. You won't get me onto a new version until they fix the fuckups in 11 (bring on 12?).

Probably will be, it was certainly a thing with Windoze eXtra Pitiful, just a registry entry so it would pretend to be a POS system. I mean, it was already a POS, so it's not like it was a lie.

I expect there will be, unless Microsoft tighten things up. For Windows 7, a simple script would do it. After all, Microsoft made the ESU updates freely downloadable to all via the Microsoft Update Catalogue, it's just that they'd fail to install if you didn't have an ESU key (the installation failed part way through then rolled-back). Didn't take long for people to work around that.

It also opened an interesting ethical question - is it wrong/illegal to use a 3rd party script to allow a freely downloadable file to install correctly on your PC? Certainly the ethics were a bit easier as MS refused to sell ESU keys to ordinary people. Not sure what approach they'll take with W10.

I have both Win10 and Win11 installed and can dual boot between them, giving me a choice.

I don't bother booting into Win11 beyond keeping it patched with MS's updates. There's just not enough incentive especially once you add in the continuing stability questions, never mind the continuing privacy questions.

Maybe one day I'll be forced into Win11, once MS stops updating Win10 and a serious security hole is left open. But, from here, I'm not in a rush for that day to ever come.

I really hope that's something I get offered to install ignore as an option and not something bundled with an update and installed by default and so needing specifically uninstalling

I disagree with the comment "precious little in Windows 11 to tempt users away from Windows 10", it is better than Win10, same way as Win7 was better than Vista, they fixed things, tweaked, cleaned up the UI and made a bigger effort to standardise, the task is still ongoing and it's a little quicker. Most people are grumbling due to the artificial hardware requirements, to help boost sales. If Microsoft dropped that, then uptake would jump dramatically and I wouldn't put it past them to do it and then give people advance warning of hardware changes for Win12 after learning the lesson the hard way again.

> give people advance warning of hardware changes for Win12

AI coprocessor to make CoPilot faster…

Just that the majority of W11 systems don’t have an AI coprocessor….

So I suggest advanced warning needs to be, like IBM announcements back in the day, 7 plus years in advance…

Standardize what ? They're the only game in town, no need to be inter-operable with other OS or systems.

Define little quicker please. Did you personally tried it on W10 hardware for comparison ?

You may find Win 11 better but for me there is absolutely no feature I want and I require the ability to customise the interface for my own needs.

@Tubz

Win 11 is worse in many ways, IMHO, but a key one is the context menu

When my work machine was forcibly upgraded to W11 (from W10)

Context menu was noticeably slower.

All the useful stuff was an extra click away (via the show more options item) - seems nothing but irritating and slows down activities when always needing an extra click to do anything useful.

I had to make tweaks to get "old style" context menu back

Had a lot more (in)stability issues with W11, especially with Teams - Teams was poor with mic, screen share, camera already, but with W11 it reached new depths, rare is the week when there's not at least one total loss of sound or image for no obvious reason (i.e. not bandwidth issues).

Most W11 updates seem to break at least one of wifi, microphone and sound settings. Whenever there's a forced update its the "fun" of what is broken this time.

.. not out of date drivers issues causinng teh problems as mandated we run various software to ensure drivers up to date (amongst a raft of other stuff).

.

It's certainly prettier and more consistent than Windows 10 (although that's not a high bar to overcome if we're honest). But I've not really seen any functional ways in which it is better - and I do dual-boot it here.

The start menu is worse, the task bar is worse (albeit a bit better with recent updates), the context menu is worse for power users, the forced requirement for a Microsoft account is worse, the adverts everywhere for OneDrive and Office 365 are worse, the system requirements are *way* worse.

I want to like Windows 11 (I've never really liked the ugly and inconsistent W10), and with a few simple tweaks MS could easily turn it into a well-liked OS. They just don't seem bothered and seem to prefer using W10's EOL as a stick to get people to move instead.

CoPilot, AI is likely tax older and more constrained hardware, .. expect W10 on such platforms to start performing like a dog…

Given MS don’t currently produce hardware in any real volume, I see little real value to MS shareholders of having users upgrade their (non-MS) hardware…

Make the hardware requirements optional, not mandatory. Continue supporting older CPUs perfectly capable of running the OS.

Provide an easy method of using all parts of the OS (except the Windows store) by using a local account

Stop including adverts, unless the Windows version is completely free, in which case have a small charge for removing adverts.

Enable granular news feed control so it's possible to switch everything off, or everything except a small selection of user choices

Stop the discontinuation of WMR - or at least continue SteamVR support. You're basically getting 10 years of support, and then it's completely dead. It's not as if open source is very effective there.

Enable the search facilities to easily disable sending queries to the Internet or AI - amazingly when you search for something, let it search locally

Allow easy per device driver auto update disabling, to account for vendors with awful drivers (*cough* AMD GPU *cough*)

it provides "the ability to uninstall Edge and web search via Bing" in all markets, not just the EU.

That would tempt me.

Microsoft has created a massive problem, and for no good reason. I'd go further than the article states and say that Windows 11 is a significant downgrade from (current) Windows 10, foisting a bunch of AI "features" which few people want and which make it harder to do simple things simply, together with ever more intrusive upselling and insistence on hooking you into their cloud services.

I help at a weekly session in my rural village trying to enable the mainly elderly population to exist in the digital world, with banking, health services, shopping and pretty much everything else dependent upon some level of IT competence and Internet access. Most of them have elderly Windows laptops, some still on Windows7 and a smartphone or iPad (usually donated by concerned children or grandchildren). NONE of these people will derive any benefit whatsoever from Windows 11 and I find it hard to believe that even more IT-literate users want any part of it. My advice to our "customers" happy with iPhones or iPads is to get a second-hand, not too old MacBook Air and to everyone else - buy a Chromebook.

On impulse I bought a cheap (£140) Chromebook in the Currys Black Friday sale and after a lifetime using IBM/370, MS-DOS, TPF, Windows, a bit of Linux and some OSX / MacOS I can honestly say that a cheap Chromebook is the by far the best option for most people to do the things they need to do on a computer - especially if navigating a tiny on-screen smartphone keyboard has become a problem. It doesn't do "gaming", video-editing or any of the minority pursuits which the friendly Currys salesperson will try to convince you are essential, but boy does it work well with the basics. It doesn't grind to a halt every time an update is applied, it's far less insistent on selling you new nonsense than recent Microsoft software and boots up / shuts down and renders websites in a flash - with a decent, offline-capable email, document and spreadsheet editor included.

I've seen a couple of references to Microsoft being in fear of the "Chromebook threat" and they certainly should be. Just like the old, brilliant spoof video showing how Microsoft would package an iPod they seem to have completely lost track of how 95% of the general population actually need (and want) to use IT in their daily lives, encumbering their products with so many useless and unwanted "features" that the basics have been forgotten and buried under bling. Hopefully the world will wake up, reject the nonsense and maybe get back to basics - and perhaps buy a cheap Chromebook!

I'll second that. Most people don't actually need Windows these days - it's heavy, bloated and a nightmare to secure. Chromebooks are great for general internet access, and if you have an old laptop kicking around, try ChromeOS Flex.

I'd upvote you twice if I could. Microsoft just don't seem to know what they're doing with Windows. They're so determined to foist things that interest themselves on their users that they don't want or care about that they have completely forgotten that there are things the users do want and do care about that they're completely ignoring. Windows is a mess, and an increasing mess with each version it seems. More adverts. More accounts. More "always online". More intrusions. More getting in the fucking way .

A wise man once said that it's impossible to get someone to understand something as long as their job depends on them not understanding it.

This appears to be very much the case at Microsoft right now, which seems to be being run entirely by a sales and marketing team determined to push constant changes so they have something to market beyond "This is an operating system. You need one. You should use this one." which is basically all that 99% of people actually want. Just run my applications please and get out of my face.

They just can't grasp that we don't want all this shit because if Windows was allowed to just fall quietly into the background and get on with being an OS they'd all be out of a job.

Win11 offers little or no benefits in the Enterprise. We may consider it when MS eventually release Win11 LTSC, but not before then. I'm assuming whatever happens, Win12 will probably be worse again and in reality only be an incremental .1 upgrade masked as an entirely new release.