Windows 11: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time i'm going to give you my first take on windows 11. this was officially announced on june 24th and will probably be released in october although a specific date has yet to be revealed what microsoft have made clear is that windows 11 will have fairly restrictive hardware requirements which will prevent it from being installed on many current pcs in this video i'm going to discuss this issue along with some of the hacks that have already emerged and i'll also tell you what i think is good and what is bad about windows 11. but before all that let's take a quick tour of the new operating system so here we are booting into windows 11 which i've installed on the pentium gold pc and put together on the channel a few months ago specifically this is windows 11 home edition which during installation had to be linked to a microsoft account and i did try very hard indeed to find a way around this but failed to do so anyway here we are looking at a rather nice bear and it's got information on this screen that's rather nice but let's log in and there we are we'll just sign in to the system and here we are in windows 11 with its rather nice default desktop wallpaper and i do have to admit i do quite like the new look and feel of windows 11 with its new colors and icons as we can see the first thing to strike you probably is that the start menu is no longer over here on the left it's here in the middle of the screen with the rest of these icons and if we click the start menu like that we can see the default applications included here in windows 11 they include paint that's good to see so there's been a lot of discussion recently where the paint would disappear in windows it still seems to be there in windows 11 and i also saw we had solitaire indeed i've been playing with solitaire good to have solto included by default it wasn't included initially in windows 10 or indeed windows 8. there we are you can see i've been playing solitaire and who can spend hours now is your day playing solitaire i won't do that now we'll go and look at something else next to the start menu we have search functionality and it's worth noting that here in windows 11 we don't have the cortana virtual assistant included by default and then along from search we've got desktop functionality so we can add new desktops select existing desktops along again we have got wait for it a widget panel very exciting i'm sure if you like this type of thing we can have all sorts of widgets coming up here in windows 11 and then next to that probably more useful to most people we've got the file explorer which again shows a very nice quite calm look and feel here in windows 11. second last we've got the edge browser someone has to use it might as well be microsoft and then finally here on the end we've got an updated version of the microsoft store not least third-party publishers have now got better access to include their apps in the store so it might have more apps available and it's worth noting that in the final release of windows 11 there will be a new windows subsystem for android which will allow android applications to run here on the windows desktop this said android applications will have to come from the amazon app store rather than the google play store so we'll have to see just how running android applications here in windows actually works out in practice and personally i'm not holding my breath windows 11 requires at least a 1 gigahertz dual core 64-bit cpu 4 gigabytes of ram 64 gigabytes of storage a 720p display and a motherboard with a uafi bios and secure boot this does mean that windows 11 cannot be installed on a pc with a legacy bios however if these were the only hardware requirements most current pcs could quite happily run windows 11 but sadly this is not the case the reason is that microsoft have thrown two additional hardware hurdles into the mix firstly windows 11 will not run on just any one gigahertz dual core 64-bit cpu but only on one that microsoft deems compatible full lists of compatible intel and amd processors have been published and i'll provide links in the video description however the headline is that windows 11 will only support eighth generation intel processors or newer and second generation ryzen zen plus amd chips all later in practice this means that any pc with a cpu released before about 2017 for intel or 2018 for amd will not support windows 11. and in turn this means that a great many pcs sold in 2018 and 2019 will contain a processor that is not able to run the latest windows operating system this is at best an absolute disgrace and certainly an aspect of the ugly side of windows 11 that i'll return to later in the video even if your pc has a compatible processor windows 11 also requires it to have a trusted platform module or tpm and specifically a tpm meeting with 2.0 specification as i'll explain in another video tpms are crypto processors that help to keep a system safe by placing a hardware barrier around encryption keys and other sensitive data the tpm 2.0 standard was set in 2014 and most computers sold in the last few years either have a tpm 2.0 chip on the motherboard a slot on the motherboard or a tpm module can be inserted or a firmware tpm included in their cpu hence if microsoft lists your pc's processor as compatible with windows 11 it's likely you will have a tpm available note however that you might need to install a bios firmware update to access it or at the very least you might have to turn it on in your bios to allow people to check if their current pc can run windows 11. on june 24th microsoft launched a health check application however the results were so dire for so many users but after a few days it was withdrawn and at the time of making this video it's still listed as coming soon if you try to install windows 11 on non-supported hardware you'll soon arrive at this message since the pre-release versions of the operating system became available there have been many successful attempts to overcome this problem so for example you could start the installs we've done here and then press shift f10 to open up a command prompt and then type reg edit to enter the registry editor next we need to navigate to hkey local machine system and setup and then right click to create a new key which we'll call lab config next in lab config we need to create a new 32-bit dword which we're going to call bypass tpm check like that and then if we right click that we can set a value for it which is going to be one next back in lab config we want to set two more new d word values like this one for bypass ram check and again we'll set the value to one and finally bypass secure boot check and again we'll set the value to 1. having done this we can then close the registry editor and we can exit from the command prompt like that and then if we go back in the installer like that continue the install undoing install without a product key we should then find we can continue to install windows 11 on non-supported hardware now it's very important to stress that whilst implementing such registry hacks or any similar workaround can make you feel very smug indeed what we're actually experimenting with here is a pre-release version of windows 11. so far nobody maybe not even microsoft has got a final version of windows 11 to install and therefore nobody can reliably report that they found a way to install windows 11 on unsupported hardware hacks like those i've just shown you should therefore only be used to assist with temporary windows 11 installs for test purposes to be clear do not use registry hacks or similar workarounds to install windows 11 if you want to be certain that the operating system will continue to run on your system after the final release date as you may have noticed i've called this video windows 11 the good the bad and the ugly and so now i thought i'd give you my take on what comes under each of these headings under the good windows 11 is built on the same core architecture as windows 10 which will maximize software compatibility and ought to minimize bugs also on the positive side windows 11 will only get feature updates once a year this is a big improvement on windows 10 which likes to stop you working and mess up your pc every six months who knows in windows 12 microsoft may revert to providing only necessary security patches so we can all get on with just using our computers finally under the good i have to admit that windows 11 looks rather nice and to my eyes at least better than windows 10. over on the dark side like windows 10 and windows 8 before it windows 11 lacks the precise control of user interface elements that disappeared after windows 7 but which can still be found in some linux distros the requirement to use a microsoft account for the home edition is also not good news as it continues to take us down the path of an operating system being a service rather than a basic utility in my view the home and pro or business editions of windows 11 are also not widely enough differentiated with both trying to be all things to all users turning to the ugly the hardware constraints that microsoft plans to include in windows 11 are shameful microsoft claim that windows 11 is faster and more battery efficient than windows 10 and so it should run at least as well as windows 10 on existing hardware it is therefore a disgrace that microsoft are trying to force many users to purchase a new pc to run windows 11. windows 10 support ends on october 14th 2025 and clearly microsoft's policy is that beyond this date hundreds of millions of computers ought to end up in landfill microsoft would i'm sure argue that limiting windows 11 to pcs with tpm 2.0 and the latest cpus is good for security and the user experience but in the home market in particular it should be up to the user to decide what hardware they consider appropriate and indeed what they can afford over 20 years ago i remember being very excited when i purchased this copy of windows 98 and it was also a positive experience when i moved to windows xp and when i purchased windows 7. however since that time my enthusiasm for any new version of windows has waned and indeed i think that for many people windows is now something they tolerate rather than crave users of mac os or linux distro tend to speak very positively about their operating system because they made a positive choice to use it to deviate from the microsoft norm in contrast many windows users had or made no such choice they we are victims of monopoly now i suspect that due to the hardware requirements the rollout of windows 11 will be relatively slow it'll take quite a long time before lots and lots of people are using windows 11. and i suspect that by 2025 when support for windows 10 comes to an end still lots of people will be using windows 10 or more people will have migrated to linux but what do you think about microsoft's new operating system please let us all know what you think about windows 11 down in the comments section but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed you've seen it please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 363,405

Rating: 4.909276 out of 5

Keywords: Windows 11, Microsoft Windows 11, Windows 11 review, Windows 11 demo, Windows 11 TPM 2.0, TPM 2.0, Trusted Platform Module, supported CPUs, supported processors, Windows 11 supported CPUs, Windows 11 compatible CPUs, Windows 11 processors, Windows 11 compatible processors, Windows 11 unsupported hardware, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: CH0bAeEm1Jw

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/N0T8g81n]

Nothing like slow-talking Englishmen to exemplify patronizing.

Probably unfair, but I couldn't take more than 10 seconds.