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The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
Going to eleven
I
t has been said many times
before but bears saying again. The real
cost of buying a new computer is not
the cost of the hardware, but the cost
in time and money of getting the new
system up and running with all the same
software and settings as before.
Programs/apps will need re-installing,
which will often only be possible after
new activation keys have been bought.
Existing peripherals, like printers and
scanners and cameras, may or may not
work. All the carefully honed settings
will need new tweaking. All in all, it’s a
rotten awful, horribly time-consuming
and expensive job.
This is what makes Microsoft’s policy
of ending support for Windows 10 towards the end of 2025 so nasty. Owners of perfectly good systems will be
forced to choose between junking them
or risking continued use without the
security updates which Microsoft churns
out monthly. And you can be sure that
criminals will very quickly exploit any
security loophole that Microsoft leaves
unplugged.
The real devil is in the minimum specification decreed for Windows 11. Whole
rafts of PCs have enough memory to clear
the upgrade hurdle of 4GB RAM, and
they can also meet the Secure Boot and
TPM (Trusted Platform Module) security
requirements. What fails them is the CPU/
processor, for which Microsoft has set a
much higher bar.
One of my PCs, a Lenovo desktop, runs
Windows 10 very fast and happy with an
Intel i7-6700 <at>3.4GHz. But it flunks the
Windows 11 Upgrade test.
The Internet is awash with registry
hacks that can used to fool a Windows
10 PC into ignoring the CPU block. A line
of code is added which tells Windows to
“AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU”.
Adding this line will be easy for anyone familiar with regedit, the Windows
registry editing tool. Just Google that
phrase. There are also batch files on free
download offer, which do the job without
the need to use regedit.
But beware trying any of this without
first learning how to use a registry editor and making a backup of the existing
Registry. For good measure, use the
Practical Electronics | March | 2025
standard Windows tool to ‘Create a
Restore Point’.
Furthermore, before trying any forced
upgrade, make a full backup of the entire
PC, using either the full disk backup
software that comes free with Windows
or a proprietary backup program such as
Macrium (of which sadly there is no longer
a free version on offer from the company).
Feeling reasonably confident with
regedit and batch files, I added the AllowUpgrades… line to my registry and
rebooted to make sure it took effect. But
the normal Windows 10-to-11 upgrade
procedures were still blocked. Perhaps
Microsoft is now doing this intentionally? Their upgrade advice site contains
a lot of information on how to buy new
equipment. The trade must love all this.
Fortunately, I found it was still possible
to force the upgrade by downloading a
full ISO copy of Windows 11 from Microsoft, then right-click and Open with
Windows Explorer to reveal its contents,
which includes a setup.exe file. Click to
run this .exe file and the PC goes online
to check for updates to the file.
I still got a warning about “not meeting
requirements”, but clicking the option to
Accept ignores the warning.
“Accepting” triggers more checking of
files and the PC hardware. Most importantly, you will see a tick box opportunity to “Keep Personal Files and Apps”
instead of starting a clean install, which
will delete everything! Take no chances
here. Double-check you are being offered
the “Keep” option and are taking it.
There then follows a long process of
more checking, online and locally inside
the PC, with disconcertingly lengthy black
screens. But, for me at least, it all came
right in the end. The PC started again with
Windows 10 replaced by Windows 11,
and all my old programs, apps, settings
and data intact.
To my astonishment, everything
worked, except for one error message
warning that a driver for an online music
site (Idagio) I had since forgotten about
had been blocked.
It is possible that other problems will
now emerge, like ‘blue screens of death’
and a refusal to install new updates. So I
am keeping my full Windows 10 backup
safe in case a delayed action disaster
strikes and I have to revert. I am also
storing all my new work and data on a
separate disk.
Only time will tell whether I have successfully side-stepped Microsoft’s grand
plan. They seem to want me to junk a
tried, tested and nicely tuned hardware
and software system and spend heavily
on something new that does little more
than the same as before.
As a footnote, and purely by way of
experiment, I also tried forcing a budget,
low-power Acer laptop to upgrade from
10 to 11. Surprisingly, the near-toytown
device passed all Microsoft’s tests except
(unsurprisingly) for the CPU, which is
an Intel N3710 that snail-chugs at just
1.6GHz.
After the now-standard registry hack,
I got the installation process to start by
downloading the Windows 11 ISO direct
from the Windows 11 Download page onto
the laptop, right-clicking to ‘Open With’
Windows Explorer and running setup.exe.
The upgrade process began, but it
greyed out the vital option to keep all
existing apps and data and accused me
of “choosing a different language” for the
installation than for the laptop settings. I
stopped the installation and tried changing the country, language and keyboard
– several times in several ways – but the
error persisted.
Obviously, losing all data, settings
and apps defeats pretty much the whole
object of forcing the upgrade. Also, the
end result would probably have been an
unusably slow laptop. So I gave up on
trying to force a Windows 11 upgrade.
As a further experiment, I then tried to
use ChromeOS Flex to turn the Windows
10 laptop into a Chromebook. Downloading ChromeOS was easy but burning it
to create the necessary Chrome Recovery
USB proved impossible (despite trying
several different 8GB and larger USBs).
An Internet search revealed that I am
not alone in repeatedly failing and there
is no simple one stop fix. So maybe I will
end up replacing dead Windows with
Ubuntu Linux. Or perhaps I will just let
Windows win this one and dump it at my
local recycling centre – after first removing or smashing the hard drive, of course.
Editor’s note: as an alternative to switching to Windows 11, you might want to consider using the 0patch service mentioned
in my Editorial this month. It is said to
be able to patch Windows 10 computers
for serious security vulnerabilities for
at least five years after Microsoft stops
releasing official patches.
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