Raising this dead article as Microsoft now delivers extended support pricing details for those who choose not to migrate to the newer version of Windows. The one they were told they’d not ever have to migrate to
The difference this time is that my computer literally can’t run Win 11. I’m not throwing away a perfectly good PC just because of Win 11’s hardware requirements.
So I WAS on 11 until all of the sudden my computer refused to boot with the special hardware thing enabled. Had to downgrade to Windows 10 and the mobo manufacturer’s response was ‘try replacing every other part in your PC’…sorry I don’t have the money to have spare parts of everything just lying around. 10 works perfectly fine, and it’ll give me an excuse to upgrade my mobo in Oct 2025. :-)
If you still need/want to run Windows 11, you can download the ISO from Microsoft, and burn it to an USB Stick using Rufus.
Rufus lets you disable all those requirements.
But I wouldn’t count on it working forever. Any Update could break your OS, cause Microsoft expects you to install it on conforming hardware.
If I wanted an operating that could break from a regular update I’d just install Arch!
What breaks Arch is people thinking pacman -Syu is enough to keep it running.
Especially not for such enragingly artificial hardware requirements. Any computer able to run 64-Bit Win XP would probably run Windows 11 just fine if Microsoft hadn’t decided to build instructions that only work on recent CPUs into the kernel specifically to make it not run on older hardware.
Assuming Microsoft is acting nefarious here, what would there motivation be to lock out older hardware?
