Ask Paul: February 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This week’s Ask Paul comes to you from my temporary and sad lair in the basement, so let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with some great reader questions. So I can go back upstairs like a human being.
Windows 11 on low-end hardware
SherlockHolmes asks:

Over the weekend I did setup a low-end laptop  ( around 500 € ) for my girlfriends son. It was a Lenovo Ideapad 3 with an Intel Celeron N6305 with 4 GB Ram. Interestingly it did came with Windows 11 Home preinstalled. It works surprisingly well. So my question is: It is obvious that Microsoft did the restrictions mainly because of the needs of the PC makers. Do you see Microsoft to change this nonsense policy in the future?

No, I don’t see that changing. And I’m mixed on that.

Aside from the fact that, yes, Microsoft arbitrarily set a limit on which generations of PCs can upgrade to Windows 11, and that this was done largely to help the PC industry and not users, there are good reasons to not be overly concerned by these limitations.

The first is implicit in your question: technical people can easily workaround the hardware restrictions and install and use Windows 11 on PCs that don’t meet the requirements. (Whether that PC will work well with a web browser and just a few open tabs is another story, of course.)

Second, the fallback isn’t horrible because Windows 10 is still a modern OS and will be supported at least through October 2025 by which time many of the older PCs people might want to upgrade will be even that much more out of date. I did the math on this once, but off the top of my head, Intel released its 8th Gen Core CPUs in 2017, so mobile versions and PCs based on those chips first appeared in 2018 and were still being sold during the 2018 holiday season. So the most recent unsupported chipset, the 7th Gen Core series, will be 8 years old by October 2025. And that’s a reasonable upgrade cycle, honestly. (I know some may disagree. And whatever, we still see some Windows 7 PCs out in the world today. We’ll see some Windows 10 PCs out in the world in 2027/8 or whatever.)

Third, I sort of see the Windows 11 hardware requirements as an exaggerated response to the mistake Microsoft made with Windows 10, which was to keep it in the market some indeterminable amount of time and then claim, vaguely, that it would be supported for “the lifetime of the device” without explaining what that meant. There were corrections here and there midstream, as when Microsoft stopped supporting certain Intel chipset versions, but for the most part, there was no clarity on when things expired. We at least have that clarity now.

Finally, Windows 11 is free. Other than the end of support for Windows 10, which is still over two years away, I’m not sure Microsoft has any responsibility to do more than it is doing right now. Again, technical people can easily work around the limits. (And there’s a whole other story about Microsoft wanting to be...