News We tried to install Windows 11 on Raspberry Pi 5 - lack of internet connectivity left us stuck

[Admin]

The latest flagship Raspberry Pi 5 receives the traditional "Can I run Windows?" treatment, and this time it put us through the wringer

We tried to install Windows 11 on Raspberry Pi 5 - lack of internet connectivity left us stuck : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Things that make you go "why". You can get a low end laptop like the Lenovo Slim 3 with 8GB RAM, 2+4 core CPU, and 256GB SSD for $300 on sale right now. Even assuming Windows 11 worked perfectly on the Raspberry Pi, would you really recommend it for any purpose over a cheap laptop?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1762582-REG/lenovo_82x70005us_15_6_ideapad_slim_3.html

 

[artk2219]

Things that make you go "why". You can get a low end laptop like the Lenovo Slim 3 with 8GB RAM, 2+4 core CPU, and 256GB SSD for $300 on sale right now. Even assuming Windows 11 worked perfectly on the Raspberry Pi, would you really recommend it for any purpose over a cheap laptop?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1762582-REG/lenovo_82x70005us_15_6_ideapad_slim_3.html

They likely wouldn't, but its a fun experiment none the less, its more along the lines of "lets see if we can do this" as opposed to "you should totally do this".

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

They likely wouldn't, but its a fun experiment none the less, its more along the lines of "lets see if we can do this" as opposed to "you should totally do this".

I don't think so, going by what he said at the end:

Once the WoR project has updated firmware / drivers for the Raspberry Pi 5 we shall go back and see if we can make the Raspberry Pi 5 into a low-cost, Arm-based desktop PC.

It looks as if he is attempting to go beyond "let's see if we can do this" and into the realm of "Let's do this for a specific reason", namely "a low cost ARM based desktop PC".

 

[SonoraTechnical]

Things that make you go "why". You can get a low end laptop like the Lenovo Slim 3 with 8GB RAM, 2+4 core CPU, and 256GB SSD for $300 on sale right now. Even assuming Windows 11 worked perfectly on the Raspberry Pi, would you really recommend it for any purpose over a cheap laptop?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1762582-REG/lenovo_82x70005us_15_6_ideapad_slim_3.html

Umm.... 'because we can'.... or at least 'we think we can'. holy cow if you don't get that, I'm not sure why you hang around hardware/software forums... LOL..

 

[bit_user]

Things that make you go "why". You can get a low end laptop like the Lenovo Slim 3 with 8GB RAM, 2+4 core CPU, and 256GB SSD for $300 on sale right now. Even assuming Windows 11 worked perfectly on the Raspberry Pi, would you really recommend it for any purpose over a cheap laptop?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1762582-REG/lenovo_82x70005us_15_6_ideapad_slim_3.html

I priced out an 8 GB Pi 5 + case + heatsink + power supply + 256 GB SDXC card and it comes to about $130. Your $300 laptop is about 2.3 times as expensive. For someone of reasonable means, $300 is not a lot to spend on a computer. However, the mission of the Pi foundation was to create a widely-accessible computing platform.

Schools buy these which might lack the budgets to buy full-fledged PCs for every student, particularly if they're in developing countries. So, don't be too dismissive of the price difference. Granted, they'd need monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but if you've already got those or can get cheap used ones, then the price savings is potentially a big deal.

Secondly, I'm wary of citing the "on sale" price of computers. Sure, you can often find last year's models at a discount, but not always and particularly if you need to buy large quantities of the same exact thing. The sort of bulk discounts that institution can get on new equipment isn't as big as the sort of inventory liquidation deals like you cited there.

 

[abufrejoval]

I've been doing the same on both an RP5 and an Orange Pi 5 Plus over the last couple of days.

I used the latest Windows 23H2 Enterprise for ARM image, which I could also activate via my MAK.

The RP5 was easy: I simply used a RealTek based 2.5Gbit Ethernet USB3 adapter, which incidentally had the advantage of being faster than the onboard variant, too. I use it also on Linux for that reason. I've also tried older Asix based USB3 Gbit adapters, which work just as fine. WiFi USB dongles are just too much trouble pretty near everywhere and I have yet to find one that works with WiFi6 or better. These SBCs ares stationary, anyway, so why bother with wireless? RealTek 2.5Gbit USB NICs have become very cheap, low-power and come with matching drivers included pretty near everywhere, including Windows 11 for ARM or Linux.

For storage I used the same Kingston Data Traveller 10Gbit capable USB3.2 sticks, which I use on all RP5 OS variants: better than 330MByte/s throughput (660MB/s on a USB 3.2 port), quick, light, low-power and reasonably priced. NVMe on the RP5 is "fringe" and won't fit into my passive case, that works just fine with the 2.9GHz my RP5 tolerates.

Still at only 1080p and with fully software based renderer it's not exactly useful... Linux is just so much better even at 4k!

Now I tried the same with the Orange Pi 5 Plus which has dual RealTek 2.5 Gbit on board, using the UEFI loader on an SD-card. I've been able to install Proxmox that way, too, but the Windows ISO just freezes at boot shortly after the circle spins.

I've also tried other Windows ISOs, going as far back as 22H2, but to no avail. The ARM 8.2 instruction set issue shouldn't effect the more modern A76 cores in the OP5 and RP5 anyway.

On the OP5+ I prefer to use Samsung 979 Evo+ PCIe v3 devices that I have left over after PCe v4 based NMVes pushed them out of my desktops because that gives me better than 3GByte/s there.

(It's a bit hard to say if it's the NVMe storage or the far better GPU on the OP5 vs. the RP5, but the former just feels like a grown up 4k desktop with KDE Neon (although it unfortunately lacks Vulkan support), than the RP5 even with 2.5GBit Ethernet and the fast SATA-SSD class storage the Kingston sticks offer. And the OP5 cannot be overclocked (it actually only runs at 2.25GHz, too), while my RP5 handles 2.9 GHz with a good solid passive metal case without throttling, but only gains on synthetic CPU tests.)

But I also used the Kingston Data Travellers for the initial tests, because swapping storage is obviously so much easier with them.

µ-SD is just really painfully slow, and mostly useful for testing, because it's earlier in the boot order than USB or NVMe. I can't get better than 50MB/s out of Sandisk 32, 64 or 400GB units that carry A2 or A3 speed class lables.

 

[abufrejoval]

Are these SBCs reasonable Windows platforms?

Are they reasonable platforms at all?

In their current state, without GPU support, obviously not. And it's hard to say if GPU support will actually come for Windows, because it's a non-trivial effort for a market vendors simply don't see driving sales. A proper Windows license can cost more than the device, after all (which is an issue on its own).

For me the main interest is to see get an impression of the state of the ARM platform in general. And there I wasn't exactly encouraged by what I got. Firefox went easy and smoothly, including WASM, but LibreOffice and VLC (my other main staples everywhere), crashed and burned.

Chrome was only just released for Windows on ARM, but again, without Vulkan drivers it won't do WebGPU, which is where the WASM/WebGPU/ONNX stack starts running, that I am investigating currently.

Microsoft should have an interest in the availability of a really affordable ARM SBC platform for Windows, in order to get that platform off the ground. Will they seed the RK3588 or the PI5 to make that happen? Only the future can tell. The hardware as such is capable enough, the OP5+ with 16GB is already pretty good, I'm swapping it for a 32GB variant because it matches my x86 Atom farm I use to play with Proxmox and CEPH HCI clusters.

All attempts to get Windows running inside ARM KVM (directly or with Proxmox) so far have failed, because it also seems to be missing VirtIO drivers, something Microsoft really needs to fix: You need to have your OS run in VMs first thing, to onboard developers!

Are they reasonable platforms at all?

For most consumers, most likely not.

(the x86 emulation support might help overcome many of the current practical issues in the lack of AARCH64 Windows binaries, but only with the more powerful Qualcom SoCs currently in testing. The A76 CPUs on these lowly SBCs will obviously emulate functionally just as well, but they can ill afford the performance overhead that will take. As a native platform, they are on par with my Jasper Lake N6005 NUC, which is a rather resasonable productive desktop platform without any high compute workloads. With the overhead, I have my doubts, but without a working GPU it's hard to test and tell with confidence.)

For developers and tinkerers the unfortunate news is that so called ARM PCs are anything but personal computers. Instead they are locked down appliances to turn their users into ecosystem addicts modelled after Apple's iPods.

And the next rung up the ladder isn't much better, because very few more powerful ARM SoC are available for sale outside a cloud subscription. There is simply no comparision to the near infinate number of price points and choices offered on x86... which is a shame and a real obstacle, because we'd rather like to get ready for an environment where ARM and RISC-V will take over and put x86 in its place as simply one out of several ISAs and platforms.

It's a chicken and eggs game with white a few gorillas in the midst and the new nation state Softwar I around it all.

 

[abufrejoval]

I priced out an 8 GB Pi 5 + case + heatsink + power supply + 256 GB SDXC card and it comes to about $130. Your $300 laptop is about 2.3 times as expensive. For someone of reasonable means, $300 is not a lot to spend on a computer. However, the mission of the Pi foundation was to create a widely-accessible computing platform.

Schools buy these which might lack the budgets to buy full-fledged PCs for every student, particularly if they're in developing countries. So, don't be too dismissive of the price difference. Granted, they'd need monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but if you've already got those or can get cheap used ones, then the price savings is potentially a big deal.

Secondly, I'm wary of citing the "on sale" price of computers. Sure, you can often find last year's models at a discount, but not always and particularly if you need to buy large quantities of the same exact thing. The sort of bulk discounts that institution can get on new equipment isn't as big as the sort of inventory liquidation deals like you cited there.

On paper, I'd have to agree with Miles here.

In terms of hardware performance it would be a fair comparision only if the P-cores were missing: the A76 falls somewhere between a Jasper Lake and a current E-core at iso-clocks. But with two P-cores on top, it becomes a bloodbath, especially with a GPU and peripherals that fully work on all OS.

And yes, I agree it's an unfair fight because Lenovo, Intel and Microsoft have banded together to exercise scale and market dominance: if you could sell Microsoft license and the i3-1315U at list prices, you'd make money buying Lenovos and breaking them up.

That's why this Windows on SBC debate is so interesting and charged with politics, because Microsoft loves ARM for lowering the platform price (so they can retain a larger share), but hates it for the danger of PC prices going into a free fall, where they can a) no longer make money, b) risk customers not joining their Office 365 and Co-Plot indenture.

So on principle I'd lean your way because there is little I'd love more than governments, public education and near everybody else going with these SBC on Linux, LibreOffice and NextCloud and it's exactly the Internet giant's greatest fear that this might happen.

It's kind of funny to have everyone east of Ural in your boat, except that those guys abhor personal computers that they don't control perhaps even more than the US players.

Sometimes a non-working Internet almost seems a benefit these days...

 

[KraakBal]

As to "why", Microsoft needs to desperately get windows ready for Arm in general, ever since the Apple M1.

Apple has proven that Arm laptops are viable and can be performant, while giving unprecedented battery life. Mainly that.

Qualcomm is due to release the Snapdragon X Elite soon, and afaik that is the first serious attempt to create a working windows arm laptop that does not suck (finally)

But to me it will all depend on if they can make something like Rosetta 2 that will enable most old x86 and x64 software to work out of the box and not perform too badly.

I am not confident that that will work well initially and there are other problems like Win11 being still too bulky for Arm, drivers are terrible and doesn't look like they can be converted easily to arm, etc.

But if the snapdragon is actually good and Linux works well on it, I cannot wait for a 18-24 hour laptop for videos and typing.

 

[bit_user]

On paper, I'd have to agree with Miles here.

IMO, it's not a "what would you do?" sort of question. I already agreed that, for someone of means, the laptop is the better option. My point was that many people or institutions would be in a situation of not being able to afford even the $300 price tag.

 

[abufrejoval]

As to "why", Microsoft needs to desperately get windows ready for Arm in general, ever since the Apple M1.

The degree of desperation and just what they are willing to do there, is where I don't see SBC support coming. After some initial follies on low-end hardware, they seem to follow the fruity cult yet again and focus on high-end devices. And I don't see a high demand for yet another rotten Apple.

Apple has proven that Arm laptops are viable and can be performant, while giving unprecedented battery life. Mainly that.

Yes, but while there are plenty of people out there who'd like an attractive ARM alternative PC, nobody wants another rotten...

Qualcomm is due to release the Snapdragon X Elite soon, and afaik that is the first serious attempt to create a working windows arm laptop that does not suck (finally)

Attempts there have been several, but...

But to me it will all depend on if they can make something like Rosetta 2 that will enable most old x86 and x64 software to work out of the box and not perform too badly.

I am not confident that that will work well initially and there are other problems like Win11 being still too bulky for Arm, drivers are terrible and doesn't look like they can be converted easily to arm, etc.

Actually that emulation seems to work. Of course it won't support all those AI ISA extensions, Intel is pushing

I haven't really tried much, because it's too hard to measure or get a feel for when software rendering just slows everything down too much.

And the main issue with the drivers isn't ARM as an ISA or that they are 'terrible', but the fact that there is all these completely distinct SoCs that share nothing but an ISA for the CPU portion: the effort of writing a GPU driver for a Mali 610 or RP VPU isn't that much easier as writing one for an RTX 4090 as the sales price difference would indicate. And they don't sell in Intel iGPU volumes, either.

There are Nvidia drivers for ARM, I believe (and Power) and I'd be tempted to try them with the Orange PI, since it's got a PCIe v3 x4 M.2 slot for which I have PCIe adapters (usually used for 10Gbit NICs).

But again, that would be mostly a curiosity thing, unless I fall for a Graviton Ampere system one of these days.

But if the snapdragon is actually good and Linux works well on it, I cannot wait for a 18-24 hour laptop for videos and typing.

The funny thing there is that we already have these in our pockets. They are only missing a laptop chassis to put them into, some extensions to their OS to run a proper desktop and better I/O.

My OnePlus 11 with its Snapdragon 8 gen 3 SoC easily beats the RP5 and OP5 into a pulp with far less energy and bulk. Unfortunately they cheaped out on the I/O (USB 2!) and left out PCIe.

I just hate paying twice for essentially the same capabilities, when I really just want to be able to dock my smartphone into the touchpad area of a laptop shell for desktop work.

Some extra RAM for a bit of VMing, e.g.of Windows apps, and I'd be set. But that's a consumer's dream I've been chasing for a very long time now, nobody wants to sell you one device, when they can sell you an iPhone, an iPad, an iMac and an iUniverse!

Good thing they gave up on the iCar!

 

[bit_user]

But again, that would be mostly a curiosity thing, unless I fall for a Graviton system one of these days.

Where/how can you personally own one of those??

I just hate paying twice for essentially the same capabilities, when I really just want to be able to dock my smartphone into the touchpad area of a laptop shell for desktop work.

I once thought we would have such a thing, by now.

 

[abufrejoval]

Where/how can you personally own one of those??

Sorry, should have been Ampere.

 

[AlskiOnTheWeb]

I bought an 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Simodewa mini PC with an Intel N95 ... for $110!!!!! It came with Windows 11 ... runs perfectly. Why in the world would I ever pay for a RPi 5 to do that same thing? Price wise, the Pi won't stand up even ... nor performance wise ... so why oh why?

 

[bit_user]

I bought an 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Simodewa mini PC with an Intel N95 ... for $110!!!!! It came with Windows 11 ... runs perfectly.

I'd be skeptical about that Windows license. ...and about that SSD, too.

I also doubt that such deals aren't mostly due to products made for the internal Chinese market being liquidated because the economy there is worse than expected. I think it reflects a market that's not "normal".

Why in the world would I ever pay for a RPi 5 to do that same thing? Price wise, the Pi won't stand up even ... nor performance wise ... so why oh why?

Well, for one thing, there should be a Pi 5-grade compute module, at some point. Those are considerably cheaper. Also, some people might need or want Windows/ARM for testing or development.

 

[abufrejoval]

I bought an 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Simodewa mini PC with an Intel N95 ... for $110!!!!! It came with Windows 11 ... runs perfectly. Why in the world would I ever pay for a RPi 5 to do that same thing? Price wise, the Pi won't stand up even ... nor performance wise ... so why oh why?

Lucky you! And nobody is after your consumer bliss! Please enjoy!

And actually I do too, I've got much more invested in x86 (and I am getting most of my return from there as well), than any other architecture.

And we wouldn't even mind if x86 remained uncontested, as long as there was healthy competition and choices going forward.

Yet some of us are curious.

We try to evaluate the future of PCs and if we can see signs of ARM (or RISC-V) based systems tilting and changing the current ecosystem.

And we explore them. Out of curiosity and because we just love doing so.

Don't mind us, unless you share that passion, too.

 

[bit_user]

@abufrejoval , speaking of Alder Lake-N boards, here's the one I'm eying:

JMTX-ADN1

Mini-ITX SBC, N97, Alder Lake-N, 1 DDR5, 2 HDMI, 1 DP, 1 LVDS/eDP, 1 SATA, 1 M2M, 1 M2E, 1 M2B, 2.5 GbE, 8 USB, 6 COM, 1 GPIO, 1 PS/2

jetwayipc.com

I like that it's thin mini-ITX, offers the N97, and features DDR5. The dual 2.5 Gb Ethernet is also nice. As for NVMe, I wish it were x4, but at least it's not x1 like some of the other boards I've seen (including the Pi 5 NVMe hat).

It doesn't come cheap, since it's an industrial-marketed board. I found it selling for $230, here:

https://mitxpc.com/products/jmtx-adn1-n97000
​

The other one I see that's quite tempting is:

https://up-board.org/up-squared-pro-7000/?ADLNBoard
​

You can buy just the board, but it's 4x4 form factor, has soldered-down LPDDR5 (the max capacity of 16 GB seems available only with N305), and is significantly more expensive. On the plus side, if you're willing to scrape by with 8 GB, you can get it with the Atom x7425E, which presumably then enables in-band ECC (which they do list as a feature, but without any further details). The cost of that config is a whopping $350!

BTW, I do like their honest power spec, on the datasheet:

Power Consumption (Typical): 26W~35W
​

I'm sure that's under load. The range is probably to cover which peripherals are in use.

 

[abufrejoval]

I haven't found the Alder-Lake N series very compelling so far. Far too expensive and crippled by Intel.

I believe you actually found a die shot for me, but I think Alder Lake-N is really just a single die and everything not an i3-N305 isn't binned but castrated. I hate buying chips I know to have been crippled for market segementation, only.

Then the single DIMM socket. There have been two sockets per channel for ages. Even if Intel decided to go back to single channel, they could still allow for two sockets and DIMMs. Yet every design I've seen insists that a 2nd DIMM is impossible because the Alder-Lake Atoms have a "single channel design"...

Most Atoms didn't gain much performance from a 2nd channel, but they sure gained capacity. And Intel has been underquoting capacity on Atoms for ages, listing 4GB max on Bay Trail (which ran just fine with 16GB of DDR3-1600) or much less than the 64GB of DDR4 my Jasper Lake NUC will do. And that Jasper Lake actually gets a significant performance boost on the iGPU (32EU) and RAM bandwidth from the 2nd channel. With the current Gracemont Atoms being yet another big jump over the Jasper Lake Tremont, the single channel regression sounds very much like intentional crippling, even with DDR5.

There is every reason to believe that with dual channel the i3-N305 would have been a very competent replacement for the Xeon-D 1542 I was looking for. And in Intel's book nothing could be worse than people doing just that for $200 with an N305 instead something upward of $1000.

Of course you can now get higher capacity DIMMs for DDR5 but those carry a premium....

You've looked at premium industrial brands. Those are bound to be pricey, but if you run something mission critical, perhaps that's a good choice.

In my book Atoms are meant to be cheap and I've dared to buy stuff from Aliexpress. Topton offers just about every permutation of form-factor, extra ports and features and SoC variation you could think of at reasonable prices. It's a little hard to dig through the site, but I found N305 boards that offered both 6 2.5Gbit ports and SATA expansion, so you can run an all-in-one µ-server for both pfSense and NextCloud via Proxmox on it.

It may cost €100 more than the N95, but it I'd rather spend a little more and have something I can reuse for something else later. And I don't see the 8 core using more power than the 4 core on idle.

Then again the markup for another i3 with two P-cores and four E-cores isn't that big either, while the iGPU and the RAM expandability is in another class...