AK6DN said:
Upgrading Win 10 to Win 11 is not free if your Win 10 system is not Win 11 'hardware compliant' ... buying a new system to get a 'free' upgrade is not 'free'.
Yeah I know about all the bypasses and shenanigans you can do to get around M$'s hardware compatibility checks, but most users out there are not technically savvy to do that.
They aren't on this forum or have the expertise to work out how to fake out an install of Win 11 on incompatible hardware.
Back in the Win 7 to Win 8 to Win 10 days it was just get a new O/S install CD from your local retail computer install and run it. Not so much with Win 11 on legacy hardware.
So Win 11 is only 'free' to some people. Not all.
Wrong since I recently forced an update to Windows 11 from Windows 10 for free for my non-compliant 10 year old Dell laptop. The fix is simple.
Steve C said:
Wrong since I recently forced an update to Windows 11 from Windows 10 for free for my non-compliant 10 year old Dell laptop. The fix is simple.
I am not wrong, read what I said.
If you have access to the magic incantation required it is possible to upgrade Win 10 to Win 11 on non-compliant hardware
(at least Win 11 prior to 24H2 which has additional CPU requirements).
My sister uses Win 10 on a non-compliant to Win 11 piece of hardware. She is not technically savvy.
M$ system info tells her that her PC is not able to upgrade to Win 11. So the 'free' Win 10 to Win 11 upgrade is not available to her.
She has to buy a new PC to get Win 11 without jumping thru hoops that she does not know how to do.
So maybe 10% (who knows, really) of existing Win 10 users know how to find a way to upgrade their OS to Win 11
on non compliant hardware. The other 90% don't.
And the fact that there is a magic bypass mechanism to allow non-compliant Win 11 hardware to upgrade to and run
Win 11 means the M$ Win 11 system requirement is basically a bunch of B*S*.
M$ does not make any money off of free Win 10 to Win 11 upgrades. But they do make $ when new systems are sold
than are delivered with Win 11 preinstalled.
Plus, I put my search bar on the left side of the screen. I don't "pin" anything, I still use the Quick Launch bar - my 24 most used Programs / Folders are a mouse click away.
I don't know one thing Windows 11 does that Windows 10 can't. I know a few things Windows 11 can't do that Windows 10 can. Even the "new features" in Windows 11 aren't really "new features". There's CoPilot, which is basically Cortana, that I have turned off. There is "sync your phone", which is just the Phone Link app that runs on Windows 10 and doesn't even work well. There is Windows Defender/Firewall. There's some "Window Snap" thing, but I have to monitors, so I can just move a Window to my second monitor and maximize it, and then there's like Game Pass which you have to pay for, and I already have a PS5 that lets me download hundreds of games for one monthly fee.
To be fair, I don't really know what more I want my OS to do. It'd be nice if there was a UI for key binding. PowerToys does this, and Windows 10 does it in the registry, but making a ScanCode Map takes a program like KeyTweak. I wouldn't change my whole OS for that. It'd be nice too if you could defragment solid state drives, which you might have to do if you need to increase / decrease the size of a partition.
If Microsoft still made Phones, I think an OS that could transform from Phone Mode to desktop mode would be really cool. I wish instead of the Windows Phone just being a new OS like Android and iPhone, it had actually been Windows that ran on a phone. So like, you could put your phone in your pocket, and it's be a phone, but then you could dock it, and it'd be like a Windows PC that supported a mouse / keyboard / monitor plus all your phone apps. So you could keep a spreadsheet on your phone, and open it, but if you docked your phone you could use a keyboard and mouse and monitor and actual Excel to edit it.
But that's really the only thing I'd upgrade for, and it wouldn't be my PC id be upgrading, it'd be my phone. What I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't done, is step on the toes of someone like Adobe, and bundle a really good image / video editor. If MSPaint was suddenly as good as Photoshop, and Windows Movie maker was like as good as Premier or DaVinchi resolve, I could see a lot of people upgrading just because it'd be cheaper than buying those programs. But you also have to make sure you haven't made the new version WORSE. If I can't put the toolbar on the left size of the screen, and I can in Windows 10, it's objectively worse than it was before. It's like, "we've added font colors to Notepad, but we've removed capital letters and the ability to right click." umm... that's not an upgrade. I'm not "upgrading" to something that's almost the same except it does less.