Q: What are you folks doing with your PCs and Win 10?

[gunn]

It's clear that MSFT wants to generate a mountain of ewaste and move the majority of users of Win 10 to Win 11. The problem is that a lot of CPUS don't have TPM2.0 support. The two PCs I have which need to be upgraded are (1) an old AMD A10 running Windows 10 which acts as my media server with Windows Storage Spaces to mirror data across 2-3 HDDs and (2) a HTPC with plenty of RAM, a 1080TI GPU, and 64GB of RAM (Plenty of RAM leftover from another project).

Both are connected to the internet (the AMD device is occasionalyl used to lookup recipes) and the HTPC runs Steam/Epic/GOG/Amazon/WindowsStore launchers plus we use it to watch streaming shows. My biggest concern is that the game licensing companies (like STEAM) will shutdown support for Win10 vs Win7. I don't think this will be a 2025 or 2026 issue but STEAM DID shutdown support for Win 7/8/8.1 which happened after they dropped to a small amount of the player base. That probably won't happen in the next year or so.

My wife/kid/I all use laptops/tablets for most of our other work and these are all on Win11/android/MacOS already.

Choice #1: Leave everything alone for another year. Over 58% of Steam users are still on Win 10 and that number isn't going to drop off a wall. This might also make MSFT blink if most people don't just throw away their old devices.

Choice #2: Upgrade to Linux. I could more easily do this with my media server (just need to copy the data over to a new box) and I have plenty of experience with lightweight distributions like Lubuntu. This is my most likely path when I finally tire of it. I'm less likely to upgrade my HTPC to SteamOS or Linux though. While a LOT of games are available with support for linux under STEAM, it's not 100%. I'm not likely to buy new hardware anytime soon (no desire).

Choice #3: Bypass the TPM checks and install Win11 for my HTPC at least. I'm most curious about this path. I'm sure it will work (plenty have done so), but will it work indefinitely OR will one of the launchers (esp the Windows Store b/c my kid still plays minecraft) complain that the machine has been compromised. I remember one issue with this where Minecraft wouldn't launch because all of the latest Windows OS updates hadn't been installed yet or something stupid like that.

Choice #4: Another idea just occured to me. I think there are TPM2.0 modules so I just need to figure out if there's one compatible with my existing HTPC's motherboard. THAT might be the easiest solution.

Q: What are you folks planning to do?

 

[Kenz]

I took it as a sign that it was time to upgrade. My desktop was an old Phenom X4 with 16GB ram it ran 10 fine and did everything sufficiently without issues. I was reluctant to upgrade because I really had no need to, but decided it was time since support for 10 is being dropped soon.
Ended up just upgrading the motherboard/ram/cpu to a modern age AMD. Surprisingly I was able to keep the same license key when installing windows 11, after a clean install I was able to choose an option that I upgraded my hardware. It was my expectation that I was going to need to pay for a copy of Windows 11 so getting a free upgrade was a nice surprise.

Just replaced my laptop for the same reason, I bought an Asus with a Ryzen 7. My kids also use it for school and some light games, so I figured I may keep them on an up-to-date system.

I messed around with installing 11 on my old laptop, a Thinkpad T420s i7 with maxed out hardware. Windows 11 is noticeably slower than 10 was even on a clean install. I haven't tried activating it yet but I expect I should be able to since it was running a valid copy of 10 that was activated from 7 . Who knows how long that will work though since it's kind of a work around installing it on unapproved hardware.

Unfortunately, it seems like this move to 11 is going to be the end of life for a lot of older systems that were perfectly capable. Maybe this will give Linux distributions a boost in popularity. The GUIs Linux has now are very easy to use even for less knowledgeable users.

 

[Grog6]

I'm using win 7. I quit playing steam games, built a dos 6.22 server into a gaming machine. I have 20 years of dos games. I may eventually try linux. I hated win 10; the sct software wouldn't work, so this laptop stays win 7.

 

[Irv]

I haven't looked into this in any great depth, but I would go with a TPM bypass. People have found workarounds for all of Microsoft's BS over the years. I only have an old ThinkPad W520 that I may still consider using going forward. My hardware is otherwise all relatively new, but I'd probably still do a TPM bypass anyway, even on my Ryzen 9 7950X and B650E build.

I'm on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 which has extended support until 2032, so I don't care about any of that right now and won't care until an application I use absolutely requires 11.

 

[Derphound01]

My Early 2015 MBP Retina is still chugging along just fine. If I need Windows, I have both XP and 10 virtual machines on it, so I'm not changing anything.

The problem is that a lot of CPUS don't have TPM2.0 support.

This is why. They know that the majority of people aren't smart enough to know or care. They'll hear the word "obsolete", complain for a few minutes that their budget system is only 3-5 years old, and then repeat the process by visiting Amazon or Best Buy to "upgrade" to the latest budget system.

 

[Generalee0527]

I have a couple of Asus laptops w/ Ryzen 5's and I've downloaded the w10 &w11 iso's so I can get the w11 to install w/o tpm check (use the win10 installer). I'm not ready to buy new machines as I have 2 kids in college w/newer machines that are updateable. I am more pissed about being forced onto annual MS office subscription since I had started w/ a purchase several years ago. I also looked at a reverse engineered OS called reactOS that is basically open source XP. I always like XP so I'll always piss on MS for not keeping it.