The laugh is that most of the blockers that MS put in place at the beginning of the "your computer is unable to run Windows 11" farce can be worked around fairly easily these days. In many cases they have dialled a lot of them back as they were a requirement for the Windows Pro business version of the platform and not really relevant to the home version. I have friends still using XP on a coal fired desktop and happy as they are not doing anything complex. It makes me twinge but what the heck. Windows 10 will remain supported for a few years yet. By trying to optimise Windows for both business and home versions it does make life harder for itself.
Given Windows was always optimised for Intel chips and Intel have blundered they way into the lazy zone only to have their lunch nicked by ARM and AMD things are changing fast. Apple did a great job in provoking this in their use of multiple ARM cores in the iPhone and now Mac. Microsoft can see which way this is going and need to react. I am not certain that the Intel/Microsoft duopoly will truly be opened up to ARM that quickly but it would make for a better value proposition for all of us. Or we may just see Intel go bust in 2 years.
One of the big things about Win11 is the way it demands the hardware has a security chip to store some encryption engineering making that bit of tin unique. Your phone has had this for a long time but Windows has never made it a requirement, who said Windows playing catch up? Hence with the first release of Windows 11 you need a device that can enable this and has the integrated chip. Having had their ears firmly chewed about this for home devices they relaxed it a few months later. About the same time loads of workaround videos were appearing on Youtoob anyway. Go to youtoob and search for "installing windows 11 on an old laptop" and you should find a load, or put in the name/model of your laptop for more detail. DO A BACKUP FIRST. But of course you do those all the time right?
The thing to watch for is applications that want to leverage the new security stuff in Windows 11 and so will not work without it. Think of it like the apps on your phone that need to be made live on that handset. Your Internet banking application or car app that needs to be linked to that handset, when you upgrade to a new phone needs to be moved to the new one. This sort of hardware identifiable security will appear on your laptop in the future. It is a good thing but as usual IT does a totally cwap job of explaining it to people in human language.
I can almost hear the moans from here. However your handset and potentially laptop are now starting to be more (daily) valuable than your passport, driving licence and other documents all rolled into one. Imagine you lost control of your ID, what would stop working and how long would it take you to resolve. The IT industry is among the most fashion speed addicted in the world and much of it is emperors new clothes but some of it is for our own good even if it is harder to spot. They are usless at explaining it to humans and so we stop listening I guess.
