Hacker News Reader

Comment by p_ing | Hacker News Reader

1. When has Microsoft cared (or have PCs been so abundant)?

2. ... I mean, that's every version of Windows. XP? Vista. Vista? 7, etc. The last time you had two choices of Windows was in the '90s.

3. It does support hardware in use 'at the time'. I upgraded from 10 to 11 on existing hardware.

If you mean older hardware, 98 and NT4 were the last to support the 486, yet 486s were still in use by the time of release of Me/2000 (I sadly had to interact with said 486s in a school lab). XP -> Vista made the jump from a Pentium 233Mhz minimum to 800Mhz minimum, /and/ caused many issues due to the introduction of WDDM causing a lot of graphics hardware to become incompatible.

This is nothing new. Those pulling the shocked pikachu face perhaps just haven't been around the Windows block enough to realize... this is nothing new.

View on HN

> I upgraded from 10 to 11 on existing hardware.

Good for you. There is plenty of hardware out there without TPM 2.0, that is not allowed to upgrade, even if they in every other aspect are more than capable enough.

And there are many windows insiders publishing ways to bypass secure boot checks in order to install (or create check free installers) Win 11 on Win 10 capable hardware that lacks secure boot or Trusted Platform Module 2.0

Starting with this in 2021 https://christitus.com/update-any-pc-to-windows11/ and likely (I'd have to check) integrated into Chris Titus's WinUtil by now.

Some combo of tweaking registry values or zero sizing a DLL has done the trick so far (but perhaps not into the future with upgrades and patches).

I think it's reasonable to say that for 99% of people this isn't a realistic solution. It's a time bomb that could go off at any patch. Related: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/existing-worka...

It also shows that these machines are going to be rendered obsolete for no particular technical reason, other than presumably to sell more machines. Line must go up.

Now let's have a long prattle about our environment stewardship: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sus...

I don't know what timeline you are looking at. Windows 98 went EOL in 2006. By then there were Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP. Windows 95 went EOL in 2002 so basically the same. Windows XP EOL: 2014. By then there were Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8. Windows 7 EOL: 2020. Obviously Windows 8 and 10 existed. And so on, up until 10 and 11.

> It does support hardware in use 'at the time'. I upgraded from 10 to 11 on existing hardware.

Of course it supports some hardware in use right now. But core requirements were generally just speed, now even if you have a fast processor, you're SOL if your system doesn't support TPM and specific models. Vista had more compatibility issues than usual with peripherals, but that's quite different from having to toss the whole machine. And even then: Vista was released in 2007. You had 7 more years to stay on XP.

Not only are we handwaving the obvious reality that hardware used to have a shorter effective life because it was advancing so rapidly, but the Pentium 233 came out in 1997. XP went EOL in 2014. That's almost 20 years of hardware support. My family has various machines from 2015, 2017, etc. that otherwise work perfectly fine but don't support W11. I have an older laptop with a 4 core (8 HT) 2.6 GHz CPU (3.6 Turbo) with a 1 TB SSD and 16 GB of RAM, amply powerful, but nope, no Windows 11.

> But core requirements were generally just speed

Not just speed but instructions.

> you're SOL if your system doesn't support TPM and specific models

TPM support at this point in time is very old, roughly 7 years or so, along with processor model. Newer processors lack the appropriate features to support the security features of Windows 11, i.e. VBS.

New OSes have new features which require new hardware; new being highly relative here as it's quite old hardware at this point.

That's great, now when in the past did Microsoft render obsolete hundreds of millions of machines for...what, exactly? VBS? When was the last time a Windows issue was a notable security threat? Is VBS going to keep people from getting phished?

In fact, let's compare this pointless consumer-hostile debacle with XP, where MS went out of their way to actually improve security by heavily revamping XP and keeping it alive longer than it would have been. Meanwhile, the obvious reality that's going to happen this time around is people are not going to throw out their machines, those machines are just going to stop getting security updates. Great work, Microsoft.

So really then, what is it you're trying to advocate, that this is all...good? Or is it just argument for argument's sake?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com