Well, we have yet another
development in the saga of Windows 11 compatibility on older computers. So you may have heard last month when I
made the video talking about how Microsoft supposedly would not block anyone from
installing and upgrading to Windows 11, even if you had and older CPU that wasn't
supported, although there would still be some hard requirements like TPM 1.2 and
secure boot probably, but that they were not going to advertise this in any way. And officially it would not be supported. But then shortly after that video at the
time, Microsoft then immediately came to say, oh, well actually, yeah, you
technically won't be blocked from it, but you're not going to be able to get
any Windows updates if you do that, which kind of defeats the purpose of updating. I mean, if you can't even get
like security updates, that is not something you would want to do. And at the time I decided, you
know what, I'm not going to make yet another update video. I'm going to wait a little bit to
see what happens because Microsoft is releasing so many mixed signals. It's like, they're,
flip-flopping back and forth. Yeah, you can, no, you can't, blah, blah. I was like, all right, let's wait. But recently, as of a few days ago,
we do have some more significant details and I specifically wanted to
make it today because yes, Windows 11 is being released next week. However, the actual release
version that will be released is now available to windows insiders. Like the final version you can
download the ISO run it yourself. So we kind of already
have the final version. And really the main significant
development that I want to talk about is a new waiver, basically,
that will come up if you try to do an upgrade from Windows 10 to
Windows 11 on non-supported hardware. I'll go over what it says in a second,
but it's kind of interesting how you get to this because if you just
run the installer from the ISO on a Windows 10 computer, normally it would
just completely block the upgrade. It'll say, yeah, it's not supported. You can't continue at all. However, what I found is that
the way to get this to appear apparently is to actually enroll that Windows 10 computer into the Windows
Insider program specifically, I did the dev channel and then it came
up after running the installer. Now how this will play out on the
final actual release day, I'm not sure. If you tried to do an in-place
upgrade on Windows 10 while you're not in the insider program, will it show you the block message? Or the warning message? And I have seen some people say that
it blocks you unless you do a clean install from like bootable drives
or something, then it'll let you install even if you're not like in the
insider program, so we'll have to see. On release date it might not even
let you do an in-place upgrade, you might have to do a clean install. So anyway, going back to that warning
message, you can see this one's kind of unique because it has an accept button. Almost like it is a terms of service,
like yeah I accept the warnings, whatever. And it says this PC doesn't meet the
minimum system requirements for running Windows 11, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the most significant part is: "If
you proceed with installing Windows 11, your PC will no longer be supported and
won't be entitled to receive updates. Damage to your PC due to lack
of compatibility aren't covered under the manufacturer warranty. By selecting Accept, you're
acknowledging that you read and understand the statement." But this is still kind of
vague because it says your PC won't be entitled to receiving Windows 11 updates, but it doesn't
explicitly say that you won't get them. I really wish Microsoft would kind
of stop with these mixed messages and just be straight with everyone because
this could be like one of two things. It could mean that your computer
is not going to be able to update at all, getting Windows, updates,
even security, updates, whatever. It's like you install. Yeah. You can install windows 11,
but then you're not going to be able to do anything past that. In that case, it would be extremely
bad to install Windows 11. In my opinion, the other possibility
is that your computer still technically will get updates. However, they are not guaranteed to work
or could potentially break something because they're not anticipating
it to be run on older hardware. Now I'm kind of hoping and expecting
that it might be the second one. I think if they were going to completely
block it, they probably would have used stronger wording on it, but I don't know. All that being said, though,
based on what I've been reading, I would probably personally strongly
recommend against installing Windows 11 on any unsupported hardware. And I won't be installing it on my
main computer, which runs Windows 10 and doesn't support Windows 11. And here's why. At first Microsoft was really
cagey and not clear about why the required CPUs were what they were. They kind of had this
seemingly arbitrary cutoff. And didn't say why, they're just
like, "yeah your CPU's too old, we're not going to tell you why!" But later on they made some statements
that basically revealed that what it probably came down to is this type
of technology for security called Virtualization Based Security, VBS,
and also a sub-feature of that, which is called Memory Integrity. And as Microsoft puts it, this is
a feature that "prevents attacks from inserting malicious code
into high security processes". But here's the point with all this. Newer CPU's and suspiciously lining up
exactly what the hardware requirements of Windows 11, all the ones that are
supported support a feature called MBEC or *Mode Based Execution Control. And you can basically think of this
as a hardware feature built into newer CPU's that lets the computer do this memory integrity very quickly. So it's not going to affect the
performance of the computer. Whereas on older CPU's that don't have
this hardware accelerator built in, they have to do it kind of manually,
you can think of it as which has a huge potential hit on performance. So any CPU that is going to try
and do memory integrity, but doesn't have this MBEC feature
is going to potentially have a performance hit of up to 40%. So you can understand why you
probably don't want to be using this security feature on an older computer. And with it being such an important
part of Windows 11 and its security, it makes sense why they wouldn't support
older CPUs that don't have this feature. Because if they did, then people
upgrading from older computers, not only would their computers like start
off being slower, cause they're older, then they would potentially get a
additional hit of 40%, people would be furious upgrading to Windows 11. Although the one thing that kind of throws
a wrench in this theory is that even though Microsoft requires all computers
to be able to support VBS (Virtualization Based Security), they're not going
to require it to be on by default.... so why require it? I have to assume that if Microsoft is
doing all these super strict hardware requirements, that there must be a
reason for it, which I'm guessing might be features or updates in the future
that will actually require this ability. And what this could mean is that because
they have this assumption that all Windows 11 computers are going to overwhelmingly
have these requirements or at least they should, then they can start creating more
drivers and better features and stuff that don't necessarily have the restrictions of
needing to be compatible with older stuff. Which could potentially explain the
wording they used in that warning. So yeah, you might still be able to
technically install the updates, they won't explicitly say that you won't
get them, but there is a chance that they might decide to release features
and drivers and stuff in the future that do like physically require these
kinds of features, and anyone who is running hardware that isn't supported, well, they're going to go and install
an automatic update that's going to be installed from Windows, and then it's
going to potentially break some stuff. Or maybe they are running a really old
piece of hardware that has a old driver that works on their older hardware,
but maybe Windows, for example releases a newer driver that works fine, on a newer computer, but if you try
to use the newer driver on the older computer, it's going to not let that
device work, if that makes sense. So it could break a lot of stuff
potentially, and this is all theoretical, but it would kind of explain things. Yeah, you could install the
drivers, but you're going to start getting updates eventually that
are not going to be very good. And of course you have to understand
that yeah, it's your fault. They kind of warranty
that this could happen. This is not a problem for people
who do meet the requirements. But again, all that is assuming
that technically you still will be able to get the updates until you
come across one, that's physically incompatible with your computer. If Microsoft were to completely
block updates, I think that would be not a very good move. I don't see the justification
in that, but we'll have to see. I kind of would be surprised
if that was the case. But either way based on what I was talking
about, hopefully now you should kind of understand why I definitely would not
recommend installing Windows 11, if your hardware is not supported because it
might not be problem right now, but it could in the future, and that's not a
risk I'm going to take on my computer. And I probably don't
think you should on yours. Anyway, hopefully this cleared some things
up and hopefully didn't confuse even more things, but if you did enjoy the
video, be sure to give it a thumbs up. And if you want to subscribe, be
sure to also enable the bell because I release videos twice a week. You don't want it to get lost
in your subscription feed. If you guys want to keep watching,
the next video I would recommend is my previous video where I was talking
about that update, where Microsoft was talking about how they want block
updates, but now you can watch it again with the context of this video. So thanks so much for watching guys,
and I'll see you in the next video.
