Microsoft Ending Support For Windows 10 Could Send 240 Million PCs To Landfills,...

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• 1 hidden comment

• Re:

  Increasing the rate of ewaste is a bad thing.

  • Re:

    Running power-sucking obsolete hardware is also wasteful.

    • Re: Scrap heap

      As opposed to a new PC with 400+ watt RTX video card?

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    Again you are talking about PCs that don't even have a TPM2.0 chip. Those are several years old by now, and they will be even older come 2028. The vast majority of these PCs are corporate laptops and desktops that are already part of a departmental upgrade cycle. Those are the same corporate customers that might actually pay for continued security updates for Win10 through 2028.

    No corporate customer is going to keep PCs in-house from 2018 or earlier up to and beyond 2028. Most affected PCs are already

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  Due to the end of support, they are heading to the scrap heap 3 years earlier, in 2025.

  • Re:

    See above reply, this is mostly false. Most people will ditch pre-TPM2.0 haedware before even 2025. It's a non-issue.

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  Lots of cheap Linux computers coming.

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    My thought exactly. Give them a complete brain wipe, install Ubuntu, Linux Mint or something equivalent and give them to kids in school who's parents can't afford to buy them a computer. That way, you don't have to worry about them getting infected with malware and/or spyware because the kids won't know how to install anything that doesn't come from the distro's repositories. And, you can also give some of them to senior citizens who want to keep in touch with friends and families.

• Re:

  My dozen year old laptop running Ubuntu 22 is getting due for replacement also, even though it still does everything I require of it.
  
  I'll grab a six year old one cheap and run if for another six years, and it will still do everything I require of it even better.

• Re:

  I recently wiped my old Windows 7 laptop and installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Still reasonably responsive, and I mostly use the thing for simple stuff. I cannot see myself ever "upgrading" to an OS that requires me to authenticate to some commercial provider's system to get permission to use my own computer.

• Re:

  I just recommissioned a desktop I bought in 2010 into a storage and media server. 32GB of RAM, Phenom II 720, Nvidia graphics card. It'll run VMs and ZFS just fine for years to come.

• 4 hidden comments

• • Re:

    Windows 10 breathed new life into my 2012 MacBook Pro. Apple dropped support for it years ago, and while Linux distros run okay on it, they have trouble getting the trackpad right, and game emulation just isn't good enough. Windows 10 on it is pretty good. Just in time for MS to drop support.

    Shoehorning newer MacOS releases with OpenCore Legacy Patcher is possible, but still exposes the gaming weaknesses of macOS.

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    Running Win 10 on a dual-core 1st generation Intel i3 from over a decade ago with 4 GB RAM. Upgraded the HDD to a SSD and it works perfectly. It's actually snappy and responsive. No it won't run photoshop but it works for 90+% of users. What's the point of forcing all this hardware into a wastebin?

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    the consumer versions of linux...
    
    What have you been smoking, and where can I get my hands on some? There is no such thing as a "consumer version of Linux" unless you mean those distros that are designed specifically for servers or other heavy duty business/industrial tasks. And, of course, people who expect to be using computers that way wouldn't be interested in these, partly because they can't handle enough RAM to be useful. And why do you think those distros come stuffed with bloatware? Do you rea

  • Re:

    I don’t know why you would post this but if it was even sort of kind of true there would be zero reason to post it as AC.

• Re:

  ??? The computers were NOT "made useless by Microsoft".

  They run perfectly fine. You can run an outdated MS Windows if you like and everything will work.

  Or you can even install Linux in it and it will go better and updated.

  No need to tag something as "useless" because you lack basic computing knowledge.

  • Re:

    They absolutely WERE made useless - or at least not very good - even if the owners didn't know better. The machines contained a collection of spyware, adware, rentware, bloatware, and shovelware masquerading as an OS. Now they may have a chance at being made useful by a true OS, such as Linux.

    Until said 'outdated Windows' becomes a security hazard and/or won't run newer programs.

    Now you're talking!

    • Re:

      Until said 'outdated Windows' becomes a security hazard and/or won't run newer programs.

      GFY. I ran Windows 7 quite happily until earlier this year, when I was forced to upgrade to Windows 10 for no actual reason other than forced application incompatibility.

      Adobe's about to pull the same shit with Photoshop now, with their new image-generation feature requiring Windows 11 for no reason on God's green earth.

      Oh, and the last virus I had was called happy99.exe. Got it when I didn't pay enough attention to wh

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  It's all so pointless. 10 is a perfectly serviceable OS. it cannot possibly be harder for MS's devs to shit out incremental security patches on a FINISHED (sorta) OS, vs rolling an entirely new OS that's arguably worse than the preceding version every 5 or 6 years.
  how long can that trend actually continue?

  for the average user there is absolutely no reason to go to 11. And in a few years when MS needs to boost some quarterlies, there will be no reason to move to 12. The only way they can force this bullshit

  • Re:

    Deprecating all this old hardware for their shareholders is such a massive affront to global conservation efforts and common sense. It's pretty sickening. Legislation should force them to remove W11's secure boot requirements.

  • Re:

    I don't know. Suddenly one of my computers and two friends windows 10 computers started having problems in the last week. They seem to be driver related. He can suddenly not run Gloomhaven without crashing. My computer can't boot with the second monitor attached. Runs fine if I plug in the monitor after it finishes booting. The last suddenly won't click the mouse in some games- works fine outside of the games. Worked fine in the games 3 weeks ago.

    Kinda dubious we suddenly have so many windows 10

• Re:

  If computers are landfilled after five years instead of ten years, then over time, twice as many computers will go to the landfill.

  • Re:

    What makes you think the affected PCs aren't already 5 years old or older? This is not new hardware. The average age of a PC is 5.29 years according to Statista. All affected hardware has exceeded that age.

• Re: TPM / Secure Boot

  Actually, it's not that hard for ANYONE to do that....

• Re:

  And sacrifice shareholder returns and c-suite bonuses? Hush child!

• Re: TPM / Secure Boot

  get into the BIOS settings before POST finishes, you'll find it there

• Re:

  Indeed. There is absolutely no sound technological reason for these machines to not be able to run Win11.

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    Except that any systems affected are already 5+ years old and already on their ways out the door?

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      That is complete nonsense. Insightless nonsense at that. These systems are fine. With SSDs, useful lifetimes have extended dramatically and the rest of the hardware was never really "wear out" after 5 years except possibly for the PSUs, which are easy to replace.

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  Read the fine FUD, only updates have the Microsoft draconian requirements -- Full installs from USB likely run just fine. Note however, these full Win 11 23h2 installs on older machines will not get the offers to upgrade to any later versions. They will pick up any activations existing on the machines. e.g. applying a USB 23h2 upgrade to a W11 Pro which was upgrade from Win11 Home with a Win 7 pro key, the install ran just fine and the result was an activated Win 11 pro 23h2. This full Win install to the

  • Re:

    You can do that with your own PC, but the IT staff at work isn't going to do that for every system at the office.

• Re:

  No software that is actively used, is ever finished.

  • Re:

    Yes, there is always a pointless upgrade to add, so the software is 'modern': Online voice recognition, advertising in the client window or OS toolbar, mandatory update alerts, no-rollback updates, re-installing deleted applets. This year it is applets using device back-up to the cloud. This has been available for many years and most times, this makes sense but for sensitive data it is very wrong. (At least until Android OS offers "Save as encrypted file" with applet-generated key. Desktop OSs with a le

    • Re:

      How about Linux? Is it finished? There's nothing "modern" about it.

• Re:

  It's like complaining that they don't patch Win98 anymore. These days there are probably more post-support Android and iOS devices to botnet than old Windows boxes anyhow.