I have a question for people who probably have more interaction with Microsoft than I do… I have a classroom full of HP Z240 with Intel i7-6700 processors, in theory these are not supported under Win11 (official statement is not supported). I have a laptop that has the mobile version of the i7-6700 and it clearly says that I can not upgrade.
After reading about the different sku’s I saw that Education was listed as running on low end hardware.
Question is this, do the volume licensed versions of 11 have the same hardware limitations as the retail versions?
Why do I ask? I just checked and this machine only has TPM1.2, and secureboot is off. But, I just installed the Education sku at 23h2, and updated to the latest cumulative update.
OS version is 23h2 so it could die in the next couple weeks when 24h1 comes out, but I’m now questioning if Microsoft gave us (Education users) an out. What I can tell is that the Education sku has some of the junk gone, but not as much removed as LTSC (when it finally gets here). Enough junk is gone that I think I can run this sku and make my upgrade sooner rather than later. My KMS is apparently updated enough that it activated, so that’s good.
But am I playing with fire and about to be burned by even trying to run on this old hardware?
[edit] looks like there is a firmware update to upgrade to tpm2.0 on these computers.
Microsoft prematurely killing good hardware is what kind of annoys me. I run a i7-6700k in one of my servers which also runs a vfio desktop and it works fine under Linux and is fairly performant.
As far as Windows goes there are unofficial workarounds but at the end of the day you are likely to run into issues as Microsoft may simply decide to stop pushing updates. For best support use supported hardware.
Another option is you could install Chrome OS flex on these machines. Chrome OS flex has fairly limited hardware support and is not going to magically make them run faster as some people have suggested online. However, it should at least be supported for a while longer.
I need to run windows, these machines use Adobe Creative Cloud so either Windows or Mac since Adobe isn’t smart enough to capture a few more users on Linux, makes you wonder how BlackMagic can still afford to pour money into Resolve on Linux if they aren’t making money from it (at substantially less cost to start).
I won’t use the workarounds to get win11 loaded on unsupported hardware, as soon as we really need them, we’ll find that Microsoft pushed an update the night before and none of them boot now. It’s rumored that 24h2 will stop that hack from working, along with ads in the start menu and everywhere else they want to put them. Not sure how many rumors are true, not really using win11 on a daily basis.
I need to get back to this computer today and finish adding the applications that will survive a sysprep and get an image grabbed and rolled back out. I am seeing some improvement in the number of processes and amount of idle CPU use, might actually be an improvement over win10. I also need to load the latest admx templates and see what stuff I can stop from running, manual uninstall pops these back up after a sysprep and probably per user, so I need to stomp on some things.
Perhaps you could run Windows 10 LTSC or Windows embedded. It will be pricy in terms of licensing but it would buy you some time. (I’ve personally never used LTSC)
Sorry but it seems like you are a stuck between a rock and a hard place.
LTSC ends in October 2025 along with all other Win10 support unless you pay a bunch of money. I’m running LTSC now and have since I first found out it was available (2016 with LTSB). We have an E3 or E5 contract with Microsoft, so I can run many different versions of OS as long as the desktop originally was purchased with a client license (even HOME is ok for this).
So far this win11 is still working, and I was able to upgrade my TPM to 2.0. I’m going to sysprep it and make an image that can be deployed and hope for the best. The best would be getting new hardware this summer, because I know I won’t have time next summer due to a large amount of construction in my department. Otherwise I’m going to deploy this and hope for the best and try to fight off feature updates with group policy or other means until I can get new hardware.
And that assumes these old tired computers will still be able to edit video with Premiere after switching to win11. Which is a second reason why we want new hardware.