Well, we have yet another development in the saga of Windows 11
compatibility on older computers.
So you may have heard last month when I made the video talking about how Microsoft
supposedly would not block anyone from installing and upgrading to Windows 11,
even if you had and older CPU that wasn't supported, although there would still be
some hard requirements like TPM 1.2 and secure boot probably, but that they were
not going to advertise this in any way.
And officially it would not be supported.
But then shortly after that video at the time, Microsoft then immediately came
to say, oh, well actually, yeah, you technically won't be blocked from it,
but you're not going to be able to get any Windows updates if you do that, which
kind of defeats the purpose of updating.
I mean, if you can't even get like security updates, that is not
something you would want to do.
And at the time I decided, you know what, I'm not going to
make yet another update video.
I'm going to wait a little bit to see what happens because Microsoft
is releasing so many mixed signals.
It's like, they're, flip-flopping back and forth.
Yeah, you can, no, you can't, blah, blah.
I was like, all right, let's wait.
But recently, as of a few days ago, we do have some more significant
details and I specifically wanted to make it today because yes, Windows
11 is being released next week.
However, the actual release version that will be released is
now available to windows insiders.
Like the final version you can download the ISO run it yourself.
So we kind of already have the final version.
And really the main significant development that I want to talk
about is a new waiver, basically, that will come up if you try to
do an upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 on non-supported hardware.
I'll go over what it says in a second, but it's kind of interesting how
you get to this because if you just run the installer from the ISO on a
Windows 10 computer, normally it would just completely block the upgrade.
It'll say, yeah, it's not supported.
You can't continue at all.
However, what I found is that the way to get this to appear
apparently is to actually enroll that
Windows 10 computer into the Windows Insider program specifically, I did
the dev channel and then it came up after running the installer.
Now how this will play out on the final actual release day, I'm not sure.
If you tried to do an in-place upgrade on Windows 10 while
you're not in the insider program,
will it show you the block message?
Or the warning message?
And I have seen some people say that it blocks you unless you do a clean
install from like bootable drives or something, then it'll let you
install even if you're not like in the insider program, so we'll have to see.
On release date it might not even let you do an in-place upgrade,
you might have to do a clean install.
So anyway, going back to that warning message, you can see this one's kind of
unique because it has an accept button.
Almost like it is a terms of service, like yeah I accept the warnings, whatever.
And it says this PC doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for running
Windows 11, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the most significant part is: "If you proceed with installing Windows 11,
your PC will no longer be supported and won't be entitled to receive updates.
Damage to your PC due to lack of compatibility aren't covered
under the manufacturer warranty.
By selecting Accept, you're acknowledging that you read
and understand the statement."
But this is still kind of vague because it says your PC
won't be entitled to receiving
Windows 11 updates, but it doesn't explicitly say that you won't get them.
I really wish Microsoft would kind of stop with these mixed messages and
just be straight with everyone because this could be like one of two things.
It could mean that your computer is not going to be able to update
at all, getting Windows, updates, even security, updates, whatever.
It's like you install.
Yeah.
You can install windows 11, but then you're not going to be
able to do anything past that.
In that case, it would be extremely bad to install Windows 11.
In my opinion, the other possibility is that your computer still
technically will get updates.
However, they are not guaranteed to work or could potentially break something
because they're not anticipating it to be run on older hardware.
Now I'm kind of hoping and expecting that it might be the second one.
I think if they were going to completely block it, they probably would have used
stronger wording on it, but I don't know.
All that being said, though, based on what I've been reading, I
would probably personally strongly recommend against installing Windows
11 on any unsupported hardware.
And I won't be installing it on my main computer, which runs Windows
10 and doesn't support Windows 11.
And here's why.
At first Microsoft was really cagey and not clear about why the
required CPUs were what they were.
They kind of had this seemingly arbitrary cutoff.
And didn't say why, they're just like, "yeah your CPU's too old,
we're not going to tell you why!"
But later on they made some statements that basically revealed that what it
probably came down to is this type of technology for security called
Virtualization Based Security, VBS, and also a sub-feature of that,
which is called Memory Integrity.
And as Microsoft puts it, this is a feature that "prevents attacks
from inserting malicious code into high security processes".
But here's the point with all this.
Newer CPU's and suspiciously lining up exactly what the hardware requirements
of Windows 11, all the ones that are supported support a feature called
MBEC or *Mode Based Execution Control.
And you can basically think of this as a hardware feature built into
newer CPU's that lets the computer
do this memory integrity very quickly.
So it's not going to affect the performance of the computer.
Whereas on older CPU's that don't have this hardware accelerator built in,
they have to do it kind of manually, you can think of it as which has a
huge potential hit on performance.
So any CPU that is going to try and do memory integrity, but
doesn't have this MBEC feature is going to potentially have a
performance hit of up to 40%.
So you can understand why you probably don't want to be using this
security feature on an older computer.
And with it being such an important part of Windows 11 and its security, it
makes sense why they wouldn't support older CPUs that don't have this feature.
Because if they did, then people upgrading from older computers, not
only would their computers like start off being slower, cause they're older,
then they would potentially get a additional hit of 40%, people would
be furious upgrading to Windows 11.
Although the one thing that kind of throws a wrench in this theory is that even
though Microsoft requires all computers to be able to support VBS (Virtualization
Based Security), they're not going to require it to be on by default....
so why require it?
I have to assume that if Microsoft is doing all these super strict hardware
requirements, that there must be a reason for it, which I'm guessing might
be features or updates in the future that will actually require this ability.
And what this could mean is that because they have this assumption that all Windows
11 computers are going to overwhelmingly have these requirements or at least they
should, then they can start creating more drivers and better features and stuff that
don't necessarily have the restrictions of needing to be compatible with older stuff.
Which could potentially explain the wording they used in that warning.
So yeah, you might still be able to technically install the updates, they
won't explicitly say that you won't get them, but there is a chance that
they might decide to release features and drivers and stuff in the future
that do like physically require these kinds of features, and anyone who is
running hardware that isn't supported,
well, they're going to go and install an automatic update that's going to be
installed from Windows, and then it's going to potentially break some stuff.
Or maybe they are running a really old piece of hardware that has a old driver
that works on their older hardware, but maybe Windows, for example releases
a newer driver that works fine,
on a newer computer, but if you try to use the newer driver on the older
computer, it's going to not let that device work, if that makes sense.
So it could break a lot of stuff potentially, and this is all theoretical,
but it would kind of explain things.
Yeah, you could install the drivers, but you're going to start
getting updates eventually that are not going to be very good.
And of course you have to understand that yeah, it's your fault.
They kind of warranty that this could happen.
This is not a problem for people who do meet the requirements.
But again, all that is assuming that technically you still will be
able to get the updates until you come across one, that's physically
incompatible with your computer.
If Microsoft were to completely block updates, I think that
would be not a very good move.
I don't see the justification in that, but we'll have to see.
I kind of would be surprised if that was the case.
But either way based on what I was talking about, hopefully now you should kind of
understand why I definitely would not recommend installing Windows 11, if your
hardware is not supported because it might not be problem right now, but it
could in the future, and that's not a risk I'm going to take on my computer.
And I probably don't think you should on yours.
Anyway, hopefully this cleared some things up and hopefully didn't confuse even
more things, but if you did enjoy the video, be sure to give it a thumbs up.
And if you want to subscribe, be sure to also enable the bell because
I release videos twice a week.
You don't want it to get lost in your subscription feed.
If you guys want to keep watching, the next video I would recommend is
my previous video where I was talking about that update, where Microsoft
was talking about how they want block updates, but now you can watch it
again with the context of this video.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next video.