There are workarounds for installing Windows 11 anyway, but proceed with those at your own risk. If you want to check, use the Microsoft PC Health Check app. If you've got a CPU older than a seventh-gen Intel Core series (we're up to 11th-gen now), you might be in trouble. It's that last one that gets tricky for some people, especially on cheaper laptops.
The base requirements are a 64-bit processor, 4GB of memory, 64GB of storage, UEFI secure boot and TPM (trusted platform module) 2.0. The list of compatible PCs is frankly a little narrower than I would have expected. That's a big change from when you had to hand over $120 to Microsoft for the privilege of upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Except for system builders, the idea of paying separately for a computer operating system is basically extinct. Apple's OS X moved to a similar free-to-upgrade model around the same time.
Read more: Surface Pro 8 review: a familiar flagship for Windows 11īefore 2015, Windows upgrades either cost some money, or if you bought a new laptop or desktop, the latest OS just came preinstalled. They're not, and that's OK: I work on a Windows machine, I do plenty of PC gaming on one, but when I flip through news headlines in bed at night, it's on an iPad. That generation was all about righting a ship that had gone somewhat off-course, leaning too far into tablet territory, trying to convince everyone that Windows laptops and tablets were as cool as iPads. Big enough for Microsoft to skip an entire version number, even.
Maybe the shift from Windows 10 to Windows 11 feels subtle because the jump from Windows 8 to Windows 10 was so gigantic. That's mostly because Windows 11 feels more like Windows 10.5 than a generational leap - not that there's really anything wrong with that.
So sorry, no Spinal Tap "goes to 11" puns here. And that user is you, sitting in front of a laptop keyboard or tapping on a phone screen.
Before you decide whether or not to install the new OS, let's talk about what we like and don't like about the upgrade.Īn operating system, whether it's MacOS on your MacBook or Google's Wear OS on your smartwatch, gets better the more transparent it is to the user.
If you have Windows 8, you'll have to get the free upgrade to Windows 10 first, then download Windows 11. 5 on a rolling basis as a free upgrade to most Windows 10 users. But, there's a rationale as well that can be acknowledged.Microsoft made Windows 11 available on Oct. So there are certainly downsides to locking down the application files in this manner. And even if they do build such support, it disallows types of mods that may go beyond what was anticipated by the developer. should be stored-the ideal is a clean separation between user files and system/application files.) Of course, this requires the application developer to build this support in the first place, which they often won't for cost-benefit reasons. (This is also where save files, user config settings, etc. Ideally, applications can support modding and lower-level configuration overrides (e.g.ini files in C:\Users\\AppData, etc.) through supported hooks/mechanisms involving files in the user directory rather than direct modification of the application package. Is this a DRM thing, or more a general system integrity and security thing? (It's probably some of both.) I know it flies in the face of years of tradition in PC gaming, and there are definite downsides to this approach, and the implementation of this in Windows could certainly be better-but preventing users from modifying application files is both good for reliability (users can't break things as easily), and good for security (making it harder for a user to modify application files also makes it harder for malicious code acting as that user to modify application files).