we're going to bring president growla in contributing editor for computer world and
we're just going to touch a little bit on you know his first impressions he's had his hands on it
what it looks like we do definitely want to talk about the hardware requirements and the security
requirements which can definitely be a little bit confusing and also importantly we will go
over some of the um the roll out and also whether or not you should upgrade which i know is kind of
the kind of the million dollar question right now um so preston thank you so much for joining
us i'm so glad you could be here so like i said you've had your hands on it what do you think
you know it's pretty good um i was expecting well i wasn't expecting more because i've been
following the development of it i guess what i was expecting more of is a jump of a from 10 to 11.
you would expect in a jump from 10 to 11 that you would get something really big especially because
it's been five years now and in the past when microsoft has done five years between operating
systems it's like a completely new operating system windows 3.0 to windows 95 for example
and um i was hoping at whatever point windows 11 came out the same thing would happen but it didn't
but you know that's not really a bad thing because remember
when microsoft does release a big new upgrade as often as not you're getting a real stinker
i mean you never know that's exactly right you might get a good one but you know then there's
also vista you know or what's wrong and that's exactly right and so um when i i think windows
10 is a good solid operating system i think windows 11 up improves it and if it makes it
easier for people one thing to think of is don't think of it if you are thinking a big upgrades
don't think of it as 11 think of it as 10.25 or maybe 10.5 but overall i'm really quite um
quite pleased with it and i would recommend that that when it's time to upgrade
it's going to be a free upgrade if your hardware supports it i think it's a good thing to do
preston look i just wanted to ask you know there was a lot of confusion when this rolled out
this summer about hardware requirements by the way hello good to see you again
um you know and and so i'm wondering if you know for people who may be considering an upgrade or
companies that may have some laptops that are a couple two or three years old they're ready
for an upgrade you know are they going to be needing to buy new hardware or if you know
let's say somebody's got an old computer they want to upgrade will windows 11 say you know
this hardware won't work or is there going to be you know is it going to be a pretty clean
uh bit of information that you know you can upgrade versus this thing's too old and don't try
no clean information um other than that if you have a pc that's five years old
or so it probably won't or older you can probably forget it that that's probably
you could pretty much count on that not always but it's a good general rule of thumb um now microsoft
has sort of implied that if you have a pc about three years old you should be able to do it and
i think that's generally the case and i'll go over the hardware specs in a minute but it's not always
the case in fact the laptop i'm using right now on for zoom i bought about a year ago and it will
not run windows 11. wow yeah and um so just be aware that it's not quite as rosy as microsoft
implies you know why your your current laptop will not upgrade what's what's holding it
back yeah so there's something called the pc health check app that you can run for microsoft
that will tell you whether you should whether you can upgrade to windows 11 if people can't find it
uh the app it's free downloadable just go to my review of windows 11. include a link in there
and so what it reported to me was that my processor um wasn't compatible which really
surprised me because it's you know only a year old so it really surprised me um
what could i say it's not going to run windows 11 which isn't a bad thing for me because i upgraded
another pc to windows 11 now i have 10 and 11 and so can continue to test both of them out um what
you'll need though is pretty basic hardware at this point really a gigahertz or better two cores
um 64-bit but it has to be on microsoft's list of supported processors i don't really understand
what separates some that meet those specs from others that don't other than that it also has to
have what's called a tpn trusted platform module 2.0 and it needs that for security microsoft
decided that for windows 11 security is above all the most important thing not really a bad idea
with the increased successful increase in attacks everywhere and so with tpn 2.0 what it does
is it offers hardware-based security so it's hardware-based encryption of your hard disk
hardware-based encryption of passwords those kinds of things it's not a bad thing at all but in the
other hand it is a gating factor and that's why run the health app first is for free it only takes
a couple of minutes and you'll find out ahead of time whether or not you're eligible to upgrade
yeah you know we were talking earlier when michael simon was on sort of comparing
windows 11 and mac os and one of the points that i'd made and i may be echoing something
you said earlier is that you know the move from windows 10 to 11 because it is it's it
really is a an incremental excuse me upgrade more than a radical we doing and i wondered if
that was because of the security things that you're talking about that basically this is
microsoft's sort of subtle way of convincing people that this is all new and therefore
worthy of an upgrade and you know the security things that they've built in you know in and
of themselves should encourage people to upgrade but you know maybe that explains it
i never thought about it about the numbering because you know if you do say windows
10.25 windows 10.5 people uh so what they do right you say windows 11 and even if somebody
so if somebody doesn't know anything about it windows 11 it's free upgrade wow that's great
i'll get it no that sounds good to me and you know you're slipping in what's really important
which is the um which is the security underneath and espec it's especially for enterprises i mean
it's less important this the tpm 2.0 is really less important for individuals it's really
enterprises that are targeted by this stuff because let's face it i don't know what your
your bank account is like but mine isn't worth hacking into and so um yeah well they could hack
in they just wouldn't get anything yeah that's right that's what i mean though it's not worth
their time and their efforts so um so that's i i really think that the security stuff is primarily
for enterprises and it's nice consumers gotta go along for the ride i mean that's sort of a
great place to um transition and talk a little bit about um what and whether um i guess obviously no
it team is going to roll this out immediately but i do want to talk a little bit about any specific
other features that you can pull out that are enterprise focused but notably teens is not
well yeah why don't we start with teams sure yeah um it's odd um teams is right there on the task
bar there's an idea click teams it pops up a list of all your contacts click your contact
and you know message gets sent you know preston guala wants to talk to you and you can chat or do
video it's clean it's simple it's easy it's really really very nice but it's not for businesses it
doesn't include all the enterprise level things it doesn't include channels which is absolutely vital
because otherwise it's not worth using it doesn't include the ability to search through all your
messages and it doesn't include all all the things an enterprise would want none of them except
chatting is inside this version of teams um i'm trying to figure this out and the only thing i
can think of is that you know we live in a world where increasingly products don't come in through
i.t increasingly products come in through people who start using them at home for personal purposes
and then they say you know what i want this at work and sometimes they'll use it at work
and then eventually it gets into the enterprise itself through the back door um you know tablets
everything the list is long and getting longer all the time so the only thing i can guess is i
kind of wonder whether microsoft is trying to get people hooked on it for personal use and at that
point that way they'll be able to sneak it in and want to um you know ask the i.t people why don't
we have teams because not a lot of people are really using slack which is the team's competitor
and teams there's not a lot of companies that are really using that yet so i'm guessing that this is
where microsoft's way of slipping it into the vast number of businesses that right now aren't using
any kind of collaboration tool who don't even you ask them what slack they'll say what you ask them
what teams is they'll say never heard of it but oh you mean that thing that i use on windows 11
i like that you know i wanted to talk to my best friend the other day he's in san francisco and you
know so that's my that's the only thing i could figure out because otherwise it logically makes
absolutely no sense it's a good theory yeah it's a theory who knows if it's true i think
that makes a lot of sense preston because you're absolutely right that a lot of technology gets
into the business now from people using it at home that's how the iphone suddenly you know arrived
and you know 15 years ago and it makes sense that i mean microsoft is clearly pushing teams
and wants it to be part of you know your software suite at work where you get stuff done so if they
have a version that you start using at home and then you go to work and ask your i.t guy hey can
i put teams on my computer here can you do it so i can communicate with my co-workers elsewhere
in the world or in different time zones then you know that's a win for microsoft and then they get
the subscription and it's a double win you know that's right and i can imagine in the long term
even an upsell directly inside windows 11 i can imagine at some point that they do have enterprise
features just waiting to be unleashed um but you can't get to them unless you start paying for it i
can imagine that happening at some point too yeah aside from that there's really not much here for
it security and i and like i said teams isn't really for it one of the things for it though will
be really happy about is that it's only a once a year upgrade nice twice a year yes which to all of
us may not be a big deal but i t for them having to do it once a year rather than twice a year
is a really really really good thing um and they i guess maybe because windows 10 and
windows 11 really are so similar no new tools for deployment for it whatever tools you're using now
to deploy to maintain all that kind of stuff to match to upgrade just keep using the same thing
that is that actually must be a huge relief that's a really good point um because that i mean it's
going to be a challenge and it's going to be a slightly painstaking process to upgrade people
no matter who you are no i don't have any people you've got um that you need to manage
so i guess um as we're sort of wrapping up here i'm i guess i want to know a little bit
about the rollout itself so this is like you said ken like a sort of um a slow a slow um
long exit ramp and a long entry long exit ram for when does tim yeah yeah that's a much better
way of phrasing it so i guess the remaining question is who is eligible for the upgrade
when if you have the correct hardware and you're a consumer you know you don't have it looking
over your shoulder to make sure that you don't upgrade or can't upgrade before you're supposed to
can i upgrade today as a consumer no no you can't it's very odd and confusing this microsoft says
that uh new eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first what's a new eligible device
something i bought six months ago something i bought yesterday right something they bought
two months ago i don't know and microsoft's not saying so they obviously have some plan
but they're not telling us what that plan is and then the only other thing they'll say is that um
everybody should be eligible to upgrade by the middle of 2022 um and it'll be available
via windows uh upgrade that's the way people will be notified but there's no clear there's a clear
plan in microsoft's mind but not in my mind or not in people who follow this mind i don't even
know the numbers i don't even know are they is it one percent by tomorrow 10 by tomorrow sure next
month what percent i don't know except 10 is right on target slow slow slow uptake and slow outtake
for windows 10 which will probably be around you know a lot of times old versions of windows live
on for a really long time i think windows will live on longer than any because of the hardware
issue so i think windows 10 is going to be with you with us incredibly long time that is certainly
what we have gathered so i feel like we've gotten um over this this last um you know let's say
30ish minute period of really robust understanding of what windows 11 looks like what it is who can
use it um so before i let you guys go is there anything else that you're absolutely dying to talk
about about windows 11. it's okay if the answer's no because i'm sure in the comments people will
let us know i've got a question for preston preston do we think he'll be a windows 12 someday
well uh one time we talked han i said i didn't
think there was going to be windows 11 so i don't know um
you know i i guess there will be and the reason i'm guessing there will be is because of something
you said which is the idea that microsoft wants people to upgrade their hardware to be more secure
so even though this is does not really rate as a true point upgrade from 10 to 11 they're calling
it that so i wouldn't be surprised if this sort of microsoft's on strategy for the future that when
it wants for whatever reason when it wants people to get new hardware whatever those capabilities
might be maybe it's voice input you know i don't know brain implants i don't know whenever
i do not want a microsoft plane implant please no no exactly but it could be that whenever they want
people to do that they're going to call it a point upgrade and give it just enough because there are
nice new features in windows 11 giving people just enough reason to upgrade to that new one
fantastic well ken preston thank you both so much for calling in and talking about windows 11.
ken thanks for hanging in there with us really appreciate it and thank you all so much for
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