Tuesday, August 31st 2021

Windows 11 Releases October 5th, Free Upgrade from Windows 10

Previously thought to be delayed to 2022, the free upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 will now begin from October 5, 2021. Microsoft announced that from this day, Windows 10 PCs should receive the free upgrade to Windows 11. Desktops and notebooks with pre-installed Windows 11 will also be available from this day. Microsoft however put out this disclaimer: "The Windows 11 upgrade will start to be delivered to qualifying devices beginning on October 5, 2021 into 2022. Timing varies by device." Windows 11 introduces an overhaul to the user interface, with more of Modern UI replacing Win32. To gamers and PC enthusiasts, Windows 11 offers DirectX 12 Ultimate, DirectStorage, and Audio HDR, as well as optimization for the next breed of hybrid-core processors, such as the 12th Gen Intel "Alder Lake."
Source: Microsoft Windows Blog
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79 Comments on Windows 11 Releases October 5th, Free Upgrade from Windows 10

#26
zlobby
Darmok N JaladI bet MS got full persuasion from Intel to get Windows 11 out the door ahead of Adler Lake. Can’t have bad benchmarks on review day.
I can already imagine the headlines: Windows 11 brings the best of your Adler Lake; Widows 11 designed specifically to take advantage of latest intel processors; Microsoft works closely with intel to bring you the best possible experience...

Just slap an intel logo at the bottom and you get the entire marketing slide deck of intel's.
WirkoLike W10? For those who stay on 10, there will indeed be fewer reasons for update-o-phobia from now on. 11, however, will keep getting feature updates and UI changes for many years to come, each one with a lot of potential to break a thing or two.
Many years to come? Hmm...
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#27
outpt
MrDweezilUpgrade immediately, stability is for cowards. If my PC is always working properly I'd have nothing to tinker with.
QFT
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#28
MentalAcetylide
MrDweezilUpgrade immediately, stability is for cowards. If my PC is always working properly I'd have nothing to tinker with.
Agreed! Gluttons for punishment upgrade & unite! If you start losing too much hair from the stress, there's always Rogaine with Minoxidil, stool softeners, and a box of chocolates. :laugh:
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#29
freeagent
I thought vista was pretty good lol.. but I had a pretty good pc for it I guess. 7 was good, 10 is ok, a bit boring with its blandness. 11 looks good. One thing about 11 is they make you access a sub menu to paste something that you’ve copied. Or how it can get uppity when you change a piece of hardware, like a cpu.There are other annoyances I suppose. Will I switch? I don’t know.. maybe. Might try out Linux again, it’s been a long time since I ran it.
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#30
mechtech
I think the non-beta version will be 2022. ;)
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#31
zlobby
MentalAcetylideIf you start losing too much hair from the stress, there's always Rogaine with Minoxidil, stool softeners, and a box of chocolates. :laugh:
Oddly specific. :)
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#32
Darmok N Jalad
For those that really like to break stuff and tinker with the latest, Linux is pretty hard to beat. You could install a different distro every night for probably a month and then start all over again! :D
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#33
zlobby
Side question, does anyone know if we can stop updates entirely in Win 11?
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#34
Lycanwolfen
Wow Oct 5th this year. Great all the work I'm doing to get IE to work with Old Versions of java to make this whole thing I'm working on being erased by Windows 11 and Edge that supports nothing at all.

Ya I think Linux might be a option for all things down the road.
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#35
zlobby
Darmok N JaladFor those that really like to break stuff and tinker with the latest, Linux is pretty hard to beat. You could install a different distro every night for probably a month and then start all over again! :D
And if someone has time to lose and a screw loose, they can always start deploying Gentoo from Stage 1. :kookoo:
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#36
T_Zel
MentalAcetylideAgreed! Gluttons for punishment upgrade & unite! If you start losing too much hair from the stress, there's always Rogaine with Minoxidil, stool softeners, and a box of chocolates. :laugh:
I've been on Windows 11 since the dev-only builds, and there's been a disappointing lack of tinkering. File explorer was crash-happy in the early builds, it seems stable now if a bit slow, but it's improving every build. I'm guessing this is related to their storage stack changes for support of DirectStorage. Mainly there have been some UI bugs that are quickly squashed.

Apart from that, it's basically like using Windows 10 with a new theme. It's my daily driver and VR simracing system and I've not experienced an OS crash or really any major issue at all

I have had to update things like my registry key to disable Bing in Windows search though.
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#37
LordFarquaad
freeagentOne thing about 11 is they make you access a sub menu to paste something that you’ve copied.
No they don't, you will see a little clipboard icon at the top of the right click menu when you have copied something, that is the "paste" option, of course there is also the quicker CTRL+V method, though some options are only available through the "show more options" sub-menu which is an annoyance though seems to be more 3rd party options such as in my case, Winrar/AMD control panel when on the desktop etc, I have placed the AMD control panel on the taskbar now which works just as well, the winrar one, not so much and you still need to access the "show more options" menu to use that in some circumstances which is needless, I agree.
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#38
T_Zel
LordFarquaadNo they don't, you will see a little clipboard icon at the top of the right click menu when you have copied something, that is the "paste" option, of course there is also the quicker CTRL+V method, though some options are only available through the "show more options" sub-menu which is an annoyance though seems to be more 3rd party options such as in my case, Winrar/AMD control panel when on the desktop etc, I have placed the AMD control panel on the taskbar now which works just as well, the winrar one, not so much and you still need to access the "show more options" menu to use that in some circumstances which is needless, I agree.
Yeah, most people overlook the little pictograms for copy/paste/rename etc. at first (including myself). Microsoft is going to need to communicate properly to make it abundantly clear to users that this is what those options are, something they haven't been doing very well in general when it comes to W11.

The 'show more options' menu is the old Windows 10 context menu. They've changed it in Windows 11 to fix the horrific mess that it's become when third party apps add their own options, among other things. Third party apps like 7Zip, Winrar, Notepad++ etc. will need to update to support Windows 11 context menu options, until then the Windows 10 context menu is left accessible for compatibility.
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#39
R-T-B
btarunrAudio HDR
Auto? I pray HDR has audio...
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#40
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
awesomesaucetip of the day: do not upgrade until 6 months before release. wait for the bug to be fix :cool:
Fixed that for you

I'm enjoying 11 as my daily OS
Posted on Reply
#41
freeagent
T_ZelYeah, most people overlook the little pictograms for copy/paste/rename etc. at first (including myself).
Lol I didn't even see that until now. Ugh.

:laugh:
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#42
TheinsanegamerN
MusselsFixed that for you

I'm enjoying 10 with a new skin as my daily OS
FTFY
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#43
Flanker
My only worry is whether DirectX 9 games will be affected
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#44
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
TheinsanegamerNFTFY
nah theres genuinely a lot of small improvements, multi monitor works a lot better in general use, as an example. I can enable and disable the second screen with games running, and nothing crashes or glitches out, with a little animation as it happens.
Posted on Reply
#45
Easo
zlobbyWhat about the rest of us? Better luck with other Windows-compatible OS?
Generally? Aside from drivers (manufacturer's job, not MS one) I can hardly imagine anything other than some ultra specific really badly written software giving trouble. From my experience stuff starts to break when people use "bloat removers/decrapifiers" and otherwise mess with the OS because they think they know better than "M$"
WirkoLike W10? For those who stay on 10, there will indeed be fewer reasons for update-o-phobia from now on. 11, however, will keep getting feature updates and UI changes for many years to come, each one with a lot of potential to break a thing or two.
By like W10 I meant having little issues, if any. I can speak of ~1.5k computers running W10 at my work (various models/firmware/drivers/OS major build versions/etc.) with the added stuff like GPO's, BitLocker, DLP solution - things you expect from a workplace - "it just works".
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#46
MEC-777
This is WAAAAY too soon, IMO. Was running 11 Beta channel and it needed a lot more time in the oven. In fact I reverted back to 10 (with a clean install) because it was causing a number of issues with my laptop (which is only a year old - Lattitude 5505 with Ryzen 4500u). Needless to say, I will be holding off on upgrading to 11 for a long time yet.
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#47
Post Nut Clairvoyance
LordFarquaadFor those on the insider builds, would you just keep your current install or download the official release ISO?
I'll likely do a test run of official ISO to check for
-ability to actually install on unsupported device, tweaking registry during installation.
-added restrictions/bloat on consumer releases. no good if i can't change x setting, remove x app or giant fucking raid shadow genshin of duty banner on my screen.
-functionality, specifically as MS is disabling winupdate which I don't care, but one of the main point of 10/11 over 8.1 which I use, is the plug play driver for everything post 2015. If I cannot find driver for everything from my haswell macbook, well ill use 11 anyways. Desktop is new so no support issue there.

If above criteria is met, I would prefer the use of official iso compare to uupdump, because the former has no lengthy deployment phase on new install. and, I do not use win 10 + insider program because I don't like the idea of trace element of obsolete component in my system.
I am not daily driving 11 rn, even though in VM I deem it stable, they fixed the right click bug and group policy UI bug already. Its just preferring a consumer release so I won't encounter rarer bugs exclusive to insider release. That and some of the most funky changes (apks) still is completely missing. I reckon I could use something like that, so I wait.

TLDR official iso prefer, unless it sucks, then revert to last uupdump build
Posted on Reply
#48
lexluthermiester
zlobbySide question, does anyone know if we can stop updates entirely in Win 11?
Yes, updates can be shut off in ways the same or similar to Windows 10.
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#49
trparky
From what I've read, the reason why Microsoft is requiring newer CPUs is because of a technical reason. Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft included something called Virtualization-Based Security or VBS to isolate parts of system memory from the rest of the system. VBS includes an optional feature called Hypervisor-protected code integrity, or HVCI. HVCI can be enabled on any Windows 10 PC that doesn't have driver incompatibility issues, but older computers will incur a significant performance penalty because their processors don't support mode-based execution control, or MBEC. PCs without processors that support MBEC rely on software emulation called "Restricted User Mode," which does get you the security benefits but affects performance more (sometimes as much as 40% by some users).

Going forth, the optional security features of Windows 10 will be mandatory under Windows 11.

Why Windows 11 has such strict hardware requirements, according to Microsoft | Ars Technica
Posted on Reply
#50
lexluthermiester
trparkyFrom what I've read, the reason why Microsoft is requiring newer CPUs is because of a technical reason. Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft included something called Virtualization-Based Security or VBS to isolate parts of system memory from the rest of the system. VBS includes an optional feature called Hypervisor-protected code integrity, or HVCI. HVCI can be enabled on any Windows 10 PC that doesn't have driver incompatibility issues, but older computers will incur a significant performance penalty because their processors don't support mode-based execution control, or MBEC. PCs without processors that support MBEC rely on software emulation called "Restricted User Mode," which does get you the security benefits but affects performance more (sometimes as much as 40% by some users).

Going forth, the optional security features of Windows 10 will be mandatory under Windows 11.

Why Windows 11 has such strict hardware requirements, according to Microsoft | Ars Technica
The problem with those conclusions is that not one of those hardware functions can not be emulated in software and just as securely. The only down side to doing it all in software is a somewhat higher system resource cost. This cost is minimal on a CPU with 4 or more cores.

So effectively microsoft is once again blatantly lying in order to justify their position. This only re-enforces the idea that this is a money and control grab, little more.
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