W10 / W11 Together

Hi All -

The media bombardment of End-of-Ten has me looking for options to keep all the time and sweat I put into personalizing my system going as long as this machine has life. These pundits warn to avoid the risk and pain is get a new pc. Very few are sympathetic and advise to disconnect from the 'outside' and have certainty with data that is put on the machine by other means. Fortunately, I don't really need the internet for 90% of what I use my system for. Still, I don't want to be totally ignorant of risks during the 10% I do spend on the www.

I recently have been wrestling with several inexpensive internet use-only options to bring W11 into my life. I started with looking at laptops and tablets. A lot of possibilities with that route and the shopping adventure was quite numbing. However, my deskspace is crowded with lots of other gear and gadgets. I am so focused on my personal projects that I rarely come out for air. This search venture was quite educational. As a result this road has led me to discover a technology that has been around for sometime but completely foreign to my mental-basement existence. The most common term is a mini-PC. They come with the W11-Pro pre-installed and from what I have read it looks to be a solution that even I may be able to do on my own. I did this layout of how I think it can be implemented and seems to be simple enough for someone as low-tech as me to assemble.

Your thoughts, advice and recommendations ...
-thank you

ps - I liken my situation to : my wreckless youth in the 60's I had this muscle car that I lovingly custom modified for the drag strip and car shows. Then came the '70s and post oil-embargo California which rendered my love to no longer be street legal. Rather than 'update' it I bought a cheap law-compliant rice burner for 'daylight' travel, all the while keeping my beast for the strip and 'night' prowls.

@MourningStar

Welcome to ElevenForum.

I believe your laptop is already compatible with Windows 11.
You can run WhyNotWin11.exe ...and if you get all GREEN boxes, you're good to go.

It should look like this...





If it is compatible, you can just do an In-Place Upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11.
It will keep all your files and programs intact.

You don't "need" to buy another PC.



NOTE: Also, you can get CPU-Z here, which will help you fill out your computer specs, properly.
For example... American Megatrends writes BIOSes, they don't make motherboards.
And you should include the make/model of your RAM as well.
The ZIP version is the portable version.


Here, you can see that my motherboard is an Asus Pro WS X570-ACE (BIOS 5201)
...and my RAM is G.Skill (F4-3200C14D-16GTZKW)





Same for the CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 3700X), and the graphics card (EVGA RTX 2070)...




And because I just know that you're gonna fix up your computer specs, I've given you ten points.

Thank you Ghot for your post. I do not have a laptop and I apologize if I was unclear on the point that I will not upgrade The Predator to W11.

(I did d/l the sysinfo tool you mentioned and my specs are spot on)

I, too, will not be moving my custom Win10 desktop to Win11. I use several anti-malware apps fhat scan fne PC daily and I ldo very little browsing. Quicken, MS Word & Excel and a few other apps is all,I use it for.

I had to replace the Win7 desktop in my hamshack lwhen it bit the dust. The Win7 box was running just a single on-line app.."live" weather radar (3-6 minute delay). I now have a Win11 laptop running that app.

Posts on fhe Win11 forum are replete of reports of Win11 problems. No, thanks for now but maybe in a year or so. I didn't make the switch from Win7 to Win10 on our desktop umtil 10 had been out for a long while and seemed stable.

Every new iteration of Windows since Windows 3.1 comes with the same hand wringing paranoia and fear of upgrading. The people that post about the upgrade are the ones that have problems.
No one hears from the several hundreds of Millions of users whose update goes smoothly. No one reports that there computer is running well. Only from people with problems.

Just like Windows 7, when support ended, you found that the computer kept working fine and you didn't feel it necessary to upgrade. The same thing will happen with Windows 10. The computer will still work. Anti-Virus software is helpful, but the security flaws with be with the OS; anti-virus does not help without updates to the OS. If you don't do much online, your computer running Windows 10 will work for a very long time.

Thank you rk911 and Spunk for your posts. Yeah, my pc road began with a Macintosh Plus in the mid to late '80s. Then the Windows machines began to creep in to our workspace, my 1st thought was man!, what a rip-off (of the apple ui). Management may have been in bed with MS because all the apple stuff was phased out and I had no choice. For years I went pc-less in the home and started with 95 then ME followed by 7 and now 10. A lot has changed and I have no fear of Windows 11. It's just I feel better if it's the OS that comes with the computer as were the one's of my past (all were HP except the current one). I never changed OS on my previous machines, so call me a dinosaur that lives by "if it ain't broke ...".

​

I miss W7...prolly the best version of Windows...ever!

Windows 11 official hardware requirements are at least 8th generation Intel Core-i3 or higher or at least 2nd generation AMD Ryzen or higher CPU, 4GB RAM and 64GB hard disk space, UEFI firmware (not Legacy BIOS), Secure Boot, TMP 2.0 and WDDM 2.0 or newer graphics card. Of course this is intentional to scare users and upgrade their systems or buy new. Remember everyone upgrading to install Vista? It was later revealed it wasn't necessary! The real hardware requirements (bypassing the compatibility check) are for Windows 11 21H2, 22H2 and 23H2 ANY 64-bit CPU except 1st generation AMD 64, with at least 2GB RAM and 40GB+ hard disk space. No UEFI firmware required, Windows 11 can boot in Legacy BIOS mode (aka CSM), much like Windows 10. No Secure Boot, no TPM necessary. Also no WDDM 2.0 graphics card, you can use any WDDM graphics card and its Vista 64-bit drivers. You can even use a much older graphics card without WDDM drivers, Windows will install the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter drivers (aka Standard VGA in earlier Windows). In fact as an experiment I managed to install Windows 11 23H2 to an Intel Pentium 645 socket 775 CPU (1st generation Intel 64-bit CPUs), with 2GB RAM and 40GB mechanical IDE hard disk (no SATA) without UEFI firmware, without TPM, without Secure Boot and even without WDDM graphics card! Yes, it took more than one hour to install, and yes, it was very slow, but I wanted to prove Microsoft hardware requirements are BS.

In Windows 24H2 and 25H2 there is one more requirement that cannot by bypassed, the CPU must support SSE4.2 instructions. This means at least 1st generation Intel Core-i3 or equivalent AMD. The rest hardware requirements are the same and can be bypassed. So before you buy anything new, since your old one covers your needs, consider upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 keeping all your apps and data.

PS: Back in Vista the rumors said without a WDDM graphics card you are doomed and other BS. Much like what they say today for non-compliant PCs. Later it was revealed that if you run the 32-bit version of Vista (most back then did as all they had was a 32-bit Intel Pentium 4 or lower), you can use the Windows XP graphics drivers (aka XPDM mode). The same is true for Windows 7 32-bit, it too can use the Windows XP graphics drivers if you don't have any WDDM graphics card. Windows 8 and later removed that option and they force the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter driver which is WDDM but without any hardware acceleration and makes the computer crawl. At least in XPDM mode you had full DirectX 9.0 acceleration and the computer had the same performance as running Windows XP.

PS2: If you don't like the Windows 11 interface, there are utilities to make it look like Windows 10 or even Windows 7.

spapakons said:

... So before you buy anything new, since your old one covers your needs, consider upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 ...

PS2: If you don't like the Windows 11 interface, there are utilities to make it look like Windows 10 or even Windows 7.

Click to expand...

Thank you spapakons for a very educational post.

As referenced in the OP, I'm a driver basically with extremely light mechanic skills. I feel more confident and safe with a system that is fresh out of the factory and 'ready to roll'. 'Scotty' would let me visit the engine room, and then send me back to the bridge.

I will look into the utilities you refer to - thx

To change the start menu and start button, Open Shell. To make taskbar and File Explorer behave like in Windows 10, Explorer Patcher. You can install both and combine. To run good old Vista/Windows 7 gadgets in Windows 11, 8gadgetpack. Beware that latest versions support only 64-bit gadgets. To use an old 32-bit gadget use version 37. There is a script to even install Windows Media Center, yes the one controlled by a remote! Also search for Winaero. He has made tools to get the old calculator back (the modern one is huge and ugly), to get old MS Paint and many others. To extract system icons use Customizer God or Resource Hacker. Same to replace the icons in the respective Windows 11 system files. Most of it are discussed in the Personalization section of the Forum.

ok - as per the diagram in the OP I am up and running on the new mini pc with W11 Pro and am coming to you live! The new multi-device mouse and A-B switch are working perfectly. Now to take in the W11 experience. Will update my specs soon.

Here's some other things that you may find useful...

^
Yes, very useful, -thank you Ghot.

I guess you inspired your username from Lucifer Morningstar, but do you realize that mourning has different meaning from morning?