The last time I posted on updating to a new version of Windows was way back in 2014. Here's the link: Sigma 5: Windows 8.1 - try 1. Microsoft has a mixed record when it comes to Windows versions. Many of them are successful, but some of them are failures.
Windows 7 was a big success. Then Microsoft made a giant leap with Windows 8. It flopped. They tried to recover with Windows 8.1. It too flopped. As I noted in my long ago post, I ended up giving up on Windows 8.1. I test drove it briefly, then I went back to Windows 7. (I never even tried Windows 8.)
Windows 8 was supposed to be a "swings both ways" release. It was supposed to work well on desktops and laptops, machines that come with a keyboard and a "pointing device" (mouse or touchpad). Windows 7 worked very well on those kinds of machines. Windows 8/8.1 was supposed to work equally well on them.
But it was also supposed to work well on tablets, touch screen devices that lack a keyboard and use a the touch screen as a substitute for the pointing device. Windows 7 worked less well on those kinds of devices. The idea with 8/8.1 was to provide a common software environment that software developers could write to that would smoothly span both environments.
Windows 8/8.1 was a technical success but it was a commercial failure. Developers could now write to a common standard. But, since customers stayed away in droves, why bother? Microsoft eventually recovered with Windows 10. It dropped the annoying features of 8/8.1. It added some improvements, but, for the most part it was perceived as a refresh of Windows 7 that contained little new.
That was an accurate perception. Windows 10 was a popular success. I upgraded my machines to it, and so did lots of other people. That success left Microsoft wondering how to move to a version of Windows that would succeed where 8/8.1 had failed.
It would work well, both in a keyboard/mouse environment, and in a touch-screen environment. But what they came up with this time also had to be popular with customers. Microsoft has spent several years trying to come up with such a solution.
But before moving on to the solution that Microsoft has finally come up with, it is worth while looking at a very substantial change that Microsoft made with Windows 10. It wasn't a technical change. It was a change in the way they did business.
Previously, if you wanted to move to the new version of Windows, you had to pay an upgrade fee. For instance, if you were running Windows 7 and wanted to move to 8/8.1 you had to buy an "upgrade" license. The upgrade version, which was much cheaper than the regular version, included code that validated that you had an authentic Windows 7 license before permitting the installation to proceed.
This business of offering a full price "regular" version and a heavily discounted "upgrade" version of each new release had been the way Microsoft did business all the way back to the days of the DOS 1.1 upgrade to DOS 1.0. But with Windows 10, Microsoft decreed that if you had a license for Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 you could upgrade for free.
That's not what Microsoft initially said. They initially said, "if you upgrade within the first six months - it's free. But if you wait, it will cost you." But Microsoft never enforced the "it will cost you" part. Even if you performed the upgrade long after that original offer had expired, you were allowed to upgrade for free anyhow. Why would Microsoft do that? It turns out that there are sound business reasons for what they did.
Most people get their Windows license by buying a new computer. New PCs always come with one or another version of Windows pre-installed. You used to need to enter an "Activation Code" the first time you used the PC, but not any more. It is now preloaded into BIOS at the factory. Now, the installation process checks for it, finds it, validates it, and that's that.
You used to need to enter a special "upgrade" Activation Code as part of the process of upgrading to a new version of Windows. But no more. The Activation Code for the older version of Windows works for the newer version of Windows. That makes it easier (and cheaper) to upgrade Windows to a newer version. But most people don't bother.. And that leads to a lot of people running older versions of Windows. And that has financial implications for Microsoft.
This new way of doing business means that Microsoft is losing some revenue, the money brought in by selling upgrade licenses. But it also means that there are lots of customers out there that expect Microsoft to support two, three, or even more versions of Windows. That entailed substantial cost, likely considerably more than the revenue brought in by selling upgrade licenses.
But wait, there's more. Viruses and malware started out as a modest problem. But it has grown and grown and grown. And Window developed a reputation for being easy to hack. That was bad for Windows' (and Microsoft's) reputation.
And that hit to Microsoft's reputation had a detrimental effect on Microsoft's earnings over the long term. This has caused Microsoft has put more and more effort into making Windows harder to hack as the years have passed. Windows is now far harder to hack than it used to be. But, in many cases the "fix" to Windows involved a substantial rewrite. Microsoft had plenty of money, so cost wasn't the problem. But the necessary changes had a ripple effect.
No problem. Release a "new and improved" version of Windows. But what if lots of people stick with the old, flawed version? Eventually, the business case for giving the "upgrade" version of Windows away for free became compelling. Microsoft put the original version (1511) of Windows 10 out in 2015. Since then, if you had a PC that ran Windows 7, or anything newer, upgrades to Windows have been free.
That had not caused everyone to upgrade to the new version. But it has caused a lot more people to do so than otherwise would have. And Microsoft invested a lot of effort in making sure that old hardware could run the latest version of Windows 10. I recently did some work on a PC that was built in about 2007 and was originally loaded with Windows Vista. (That's the version that came after "XP" and before "7".) Windows 10 runs like a top on that machine.
And we can see this playing out all over the place. Hackers need a way in to, for instance, install Ransomware. Time after time their way in has involved exploiting a well known weakness in an older version of Windows. They wouldn't have been able to get in if the computer was running Windows 10, but it wasn't.
Many organizations (schools, hospitals) don't have the staff necessary to keep on top of upgrades. Profitable corporations, especially ones that use computers to control machinery, have the money and staff necessary to keep their PCs up to date.
But they use some of their PCs to run vendor supplied software that is used to control the vendor's hardware. And if the vendor doesn't update its software to work on the newest version of Windows, something that happens far too often (and here I can speak from personal experience), then the corporation is forced to run an old version of Windows on some of its PCs.
This is a widespread problem that no one talks about. The computers on the Deepwater Horizon, the oil drilling platform that blew up and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico more than a decade ago, was running a very old version of Windows out of necessity. That disaster spilled millions of gallons of nasty crude oil into the gulf of Mexico.
Hacking was not involved in that disaster. But computer problems did contributed to the disaster in a big way. The vendors who provided most of the machinery used on the platform didn't update their drivers. And that meant that key computers were running an old version of Windows that crashed regularly. When things started to go wrong the key computer was in the middle of crashing.
Ransomware attacks, not exploding oil drilling platforms, have been much in the news recently. But often the root cause is the same. Hackers need a way to get inside and install their malware. And old versions of Windows have often been their way in.
Once they are in, they can steal data and encrypt files, even if the data and files are located on servers running the latest version of Windows. Stolen data and encrypted files are the foundation of a successful Ransomware attack.
But back to the subject at hand. This problem of forcing corporations to sometimes run older versions of Windows on some of their computers has put Microsoft in a bind. The "the upgrade is free" change in busines practice has at least let Microsoft can say "we provided you with a free upgrade to a version that didn't have the vulnerability".
Unfortunately, although the statement is true, it that only goes so far. Microsoft does not want to badmouth their customer base any more than necessary. So, Microsoft ends up sometimes having to step in and help companies that get hit.
But their costs (and reputational hit) are still lower than they otherwise would be. Since the upgrade is free, many businesses have upgraded many computers that would otherwise still be running old versions of Windows. And that brings us to Windows 11.
Upgrading to Windows 11 is free to anyone who is currently running Windows 10. Eventually, all Windows 10 customers will be offered the free upgrade through Microsoft's "Windows Update" feature. If you don't see that option, and you don't want to wait, then click on this link: Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com). There, you will be given several options.
The simplest is to click the "Download Now" option in the "Windows 11 Installation Assistant" section. This will download a small "helper" program. If you run that program and select the correct options it will download Windows 11 from the Internet and use it to upgrade your computer. Warning: You will need Administrator privilege to do this. No intermediate steps will be required. (BTW, for thirty days Windows 11 will include a "Revert" option that will let you revert your machine back to Windows 10.)
However, there is a catch. A wide variety of hardware could be upgraded to Windows 10. On paper, it looked like the same would be true for Windows 11. The "specs" that were widely bruited about before Windows 11 was released were modest. A Windows 11 capable machine must have 4 GB of RAM and about 70 GB of free disk space on the "C:" drive. A CPU speed requirement was also listed, but it was so modest that any kind of PC would qualify.
But when Windows 11 became available on October 5, 2021, it turned out that there were additional, far more stringent requirements. One was easy enough to meet. From the start, hard disks could be divided into "partitions". Each partition functioned like an independent disk drive. This capability required a "Partition Table" to tell the software where things started and ended. The Partition Table had to be put somewhere.
The early version put it in a place called the MBR - Master Boot Record. The good news / bad news is that the MBR could hold software. For instance, this was a handy place to put "Device Driver" code that might be necessary to handle the particular make and model of the Hard Disk on your computer.
But hackers quickly figured out that the MBR was also a great place to put malware. Placing malware in the MBR let it load and put protections in place before the operating system (Windows) got loaded. For technical reasons I am not going to go into, that made the malware both harder to detect and harder to dislodge.
For that and other reasons, a new method was created called GPT - GUID Partition Table. It has better security and some other advantages. Windows 11 requires that a GPT be used instead of an MBR. If the Hard Disk on your computer currently uses an MBR then this sounds like a big problem, but it isn't.
First, for many years now the BIOS on PCs have supported both MBR and GPT (or just GPT). Second, there are utilities that will convert an MBR Hard Disk into a GPT Hard Disk. So, if your PC has an MBR Hard Disk, all you have to do is to run the utility and convert your Hard Disk from MBR to GPT. Your PC has to be pretty old for it to not support GPT.
A much bigger problem is that, for reasons I can't figure out (but I have a suspicion), Windows 11 requires that your PC have a relatively new CPU. If you have an Intel CPU it must be "Coffee Lake" or newer. Intel started shipping Coffee Lake CPUs in late 2017.
So, if your "Intel Inside" PC was built on or after 2018, you should be okay. If your PC was built on or before 2016, you are out of luck. If your PC was built in 2017 your chances are not good. (There are similar requirements for AMD and other brands of CPU, but I didn't dig into them.)
I think the third new requirement drives the processor requirement. Your PC must support TPM 2.0. To do so, a custom Crypto chip must be incorporated into the motherboard. The required chip supports onboard crypto and some other security related features. With Windows 10, TPM 2.0 was optional. With Windows 11, it is required.
I suspect that any PC that has a new enough processor also supports TPM 2.0. And it does it in such a way as to prevent hackers from interfering with its proper functioning.
Microsoft runs a WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) every year. That's where hardware issues are hashed out. The year's results are boiled down and incorporated into a document. Each annual document provides "new and improved" guidance to the hardware community regarding Windows and hardware requirements.
Microsoft can then shorthand the hardware requirements of a particular version of Windows as "WinHEC version nnnn". One of these versions laid out how TPM 2.0 was to be implemented. Windows 11 requires conformance to a much newer version of the WinHEC document than Windows 10 did.
Back in the day, Microsoft used to provide a "Compatibility" utility every time it released a new version of Windows. You ran the utility and it told you whether you had any hardware issues associated with running the new version of Windows on your hardware setup. Sadly, they stopped doing that several years ago. With Windows 11, it's back. The Windows11 Compatibility utility is called "PC Health Check".
To find out if your PC has any hardware issues that will prevent it from running Windows 11 go here: Upgrade to the New Windows 11 OS | Microsoft. Then scroll all the way down to a banner that says "Check for Compatibility". Then click on the text that says "DOWNLOAD PC HEALTH CHECK APP".
Once the download completes, open the file and install the application. Warning: You will need Administrator privileges to do this. (If you have trouble finding the file, it should be in your "Downloads" directory.) It will tell you if you're good to go or not.
If you decide to upgrade to Windows 11, what can you expect? I reviewed the "what's new" articles in the technical press prior to it becoming available and I was underwhelmed. Microsoft is characterizing it as a major upgrade. That's why they changed the name from "Windows 10" to "Windows 11". But, as far as I can tell, that's an exaggeration. But then I might not be in a position to judge.
I run desktop PCs. If you run a laptop with a built in keyboard and touch pad then your experience should be similar to mine. The changes are minor. But remember that the whole point of Windows 8/8.1 was to provide an operating system that worked well for people like myself, but also for people with touch screen machines.
Windows 11 takes another shot at doing just that. Since all my PCs have keyboards, and I like it that way, I have no experience with the touchscreen environment. So, maybe the touch screen crowd are seeing big differences that I am not aware of.
In any case, I was a bit leery of Windows 11 going in. But my opinion has completely turned around. Prior to experiencing Windows 11 for myself I grouped the changes into two groups. Group one consisted of all the changes that I didn't care about (i.e. touch screen changes).
Group two consisted of all the changes I cared about that looked like they replaced something I liked with something I would likely not like. But I'm a techie. I have a responsibility to try new things out. So, with some trepidation, I did.
And I find that I quite like Windows 11. It does look beautiful. And I find that they did what I expected. They changed some thing from something I liked to something I didn't. But I also found something they changed where the new version looks like an improvement to me. So, what did they change? It turns out, not as much as I thought.
One thing that often bedevils upgraders is drivers. As far as I can tell, Microsoft did not change the driver model. That means that Windows 10 drivers also work on Windows 11. So, if you have a Windows 10 PC where the drivers for all your hardware work fine, then the same will be true after you upgrade to Windows 11. Since driver issues are the source of most upgrade issues, for you, the update process should be a smooth one.
BTW, for planning purposes you should know that it took about 45 minutes to upgrade my machine. But it is a high-end PC with an SSD disk drive. If you are lacking in one or the other (or both) of these then the upgrade may take considerably longer on your PC. And all my non-Windows software came over without a hiccup. And all my data was all still there, just where I expected it to be. So, what did change?
The most obvious change is to the Task Bar. The stuff that was on the left end is now in the center. I don't know why they did it, but everybody's guess is that they wanted to move closer to how Apple does it. I wish they hadn't done it, but it is not a big deal.
The change they made to how the right end of the Task bar works is more problematic. Apparently Microsoft doesn't know what to call that part of the Taskbar, so they refer to this area as the "Taskbar corner". Lame. This is where, among other things, some Icons that belong to running applications and services reside. They are still in roughly the same place.
But there used to be a setting that caused them all to always display. Without the "all" setting being ON some of them may get hidden under a "^" Icon. The "all" setting is gone. And I miss it. Can I live with the new rules? Yes! But I liked the old rules better. Anyhow, this is a bigger deal but not that big of a deal.
Then there is "Settings". This has gotten completely reengineered. Settings seems to be something that Microsoft can't stop themselves from changing every chance they get. Back in the day there was the "Control Panel" (and something else before that). The default was groups. You could then drill down within a group and get to whatever you wanted to fiddle with. But they gave you a way to "show everything at the same time". I took advantage of that option.
With Windows 10 they hid (it's still around if you know where to look, even in Windows 11) the Control Panel and replaced it with the "Settings" gear. Was Settings a big improvement? No! It was just a different way of doing the same thing. It was functionally equivalent to the old Control Panel in the Groups configuration. Well, with Windows 11 they have now redone Settings to make it more like the old Control Panel with the "show everything" option turned on.
They have made a lot of changes here and there with specific settings. But the general idea is the same. It's another of those "change for change sake" things. But I have been though many generations of "change for change sake" in this area. So, I have become adaptable. It took me about fifteen minutes to get used to the new version. Is it an improvement? I wouldn't go so far as to say that.
You soon encounter the big change. What comes up when you click the "Start" button has been completely redone. With Windows 10 you had columns. The left-most column contained critical controls like "Power" and "Settings". Next over, you had a column with an alphabetical list of all the normal applications. Finally, to the right of these you had the "Wing". This layout has been changed completely.
The division into vertical columns has been replaced by a division into horizontal sections. The top section contains the "Search" box that used to be located next to the "Start" button on the Task Bar. I never used it much, so I don't much care where it is. But I do appreciate getting the real estate this used to take up on the Task Bar back.
The next section down is a box into which all the stuff that used to be on the Wing has been moved. The Icons on the Wing came in various sizes, which could be changed. Wing Icons could also be animated, if the application chose to do so. For instance, a weather report would continuously update within the "Weather" Icon. I never liked the Wing. I always got rid of it by deleting all the Icons on it.
Now all the Icons are small, standard sized squares that are not animated. I now find this to be a handy place to put links to Applications I frequently use. (You can still put shortcuts on the Task bar, and I do.) But, for instance, this is where I now go to find the Settings Icon. And there is now an "All Apps" link in this area that lets you get to the full alphabetical list of applications. That works for me.
Below that is another section. It lists all of the files that you have accessed recently. I might come to like this. So far, I just ignore it. And at the bottom is a section containing a "User" ("User" is replaced by the username you are logged into Windows with) Icon and a "Power" Icon. So, the three Icons, (Power, Settings, and User) that I used from that left-most column are still easily accessible. I am very happy with what they have done to the Start Button.
That's it for noticeable differences. I think that a not-so-noticeable difference will loom large over time. TPM 2.0 looks like the foundation of a big improvement in security. With Windows 10 applications developers had to allow for the possibility that it was there and also that it wasn't. With Windows 11, they can count on it always being there.
And, in this context, Microsoft is a developer. They develop applications like Office. Over time they can change Office so that, if it detects that it is running on Windows 11, then it does security a different and more effective way.
Other developers can do the same. And, in this context Windows itself is an application. Microsoft can rework more and more of Windows to depend on the presence of TPM 2.0. This release of Windows 11 was delivered on deadline, so they likely only made the change to a dependance on TPM 2.0 in a few critical places.
But over time Microsoft can update more and more components of Windows to use security based on TPM 2.0. These updates can be rolled out in an incremental fashion using the Windows Update process. In many cases, the change may not even be apparent to users. But let's hope that these changes make life more and more difficult for hackers.
I think that over time incremental updates to Windows 11 will make it much more secure than even Windows 10 was. If this is not what Microsoft was thinking, then it was stupid for them to obsolete so many computers by making TPM 2.0 required rather than optional. But, if that's the plan, then the new hardware requirement is one I applaud.
Finally, a note on versioning. Microsoft has been using a standard way of naming versions of Windows 10 for a couple of years now. The first two characters are a number. They represent the last two digits of the year in which the version is released. The third character is an "H". It stands for "Half", as in the half of the year the version was released in. The final character is another digit. "H1" stands for "first half of the year". "H2" stands for second half of the year.
The version name of the last Windows 10 release was 21H1 because it was released in the first half of 2021. The version number of this first release of Windows 11 is 21H2, the version name that would have been assigned to the next update of Windows 10. Windows 11 version 21H2 represents an incremental improvement to Windows 10 version 21H1, rather than a radical departure.
But that has been the announced plan for Windows for years. Instead of a big disruptive upgrade very few years Windows would evolve by taking small to medium steps twice per year. No one step would be a dramatic change from the previous one. The name change might suggest otherwise, but Microsoft is actually sticking to the incremental evolution plan. I, for one, am grateful.
