I had a bit of fun yesterday running this PC-Health app on various physical and virtual systems: It would invariably report that the systems failed the test...
while they were actually running Windows 11, including the latest 22458.1000 release.
It just proves beyond any doubt, how arbitary Microsoft's decision is, and that it lacks any technical base.
In some cases the hosts didn't have UEFI, secure boot or a TPM, but any decent hypervisor has no issue simulating them. Any half decent hypervisor may also soon contain the ability to fake CPUID results to make Windows 11 happy.
And that is obviously a good thing, just like with those darn Nvidia consumer card drivers, which refused to work otherwise with PCIe pass-through.
But the only right thing to do is to leave the choice to those who bought the hardware and the software and who did not subscribe to be prodded, goaded or handycapped at will by anyone who just happens to provide a minor part to their workstation. If I wanted to be an iSlave, I wouldn't have bought Personal Computers for the last 40 years (had an Apple ][ before).
Microsoft's latest move, to say they will not try to fix bugs reported from systems that are "too old", IMHO would be acceptable, even fair. Unlimited support is unreasonable, even Linux did stop supporting 80386 CPUs when the maintainers ran out of functioning hardware to validate against. But Microsoft was threatening to sabotage perfectly functioning hardware and that is a different matter.
Even keeping non-qualifying systems from updating
automatically would be appreciated as a bonus by all those who never really saw that as a feature (can't say how often I've had VMs crashing from automated reboots on automated updates even on Server 2019).
But the older systems do need to be offered the security updates and the ability for owners to accept them--yes, at the risk of breaking things on older hardware--but with the usual recovery options, which may not be perfect (for which you have backups that are easy to do if you don't have TPM in place).
Just like Windows 11 should be runnable on TPM-less systems, when the owner accepts the risks to himself and others in his vicinity.
I believe Microsoft needs to be given a proper choice:
- Either make sure not to sabotage existing systems
- or enable the community to take over support of older hardware (open source)
Now we all just need to make sure our congresspeople make M$ understand there is no third option.
And they may also want to make sure M$ understands, that forcing a Windows 11 upgrade on Windows 10 users with qualifiying hardware is not an option either (remember the final days of Windows 7?). Not just on principle (owners chose, not vendors), but because people are working with a mix of devices and will want to keep consistency between them.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram