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Microsoft now rolling out Windows 11 to more eligible devices:
Microsoft is now rolling out the Windows 11 upgrade to more eligible Windows devices as part of a phased rollout designed to deliver a smooth upgrade experience.
"The availability of Windows 11 has been increased and we are leveraging our latest generation machine learning model to offer the upgrade to an expanded set of eligible devices," Microsoft said in an update to the Windows health dashboard.
[...] Windows 10 users can upgrade to Windows 11 via Windows Update as long as their computers come with compatible hardware.
To install Windows 11 on eligible devices, they also need to run Windows 10 2004 and later and have installed at least the September 2021 updates.
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Microsoft Now Rolling Out Windows 11 to More Eligible Devices
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 28 2021, @06:48PM (15 children)
As much as I dislike Ubuntu, I keep advising unwise people to switch to Ubuntu, instead of buying new hardware because of imminent Windows upgrade.
It's easier than before because lot of stuff recently migrated to web technology instead of real applications.
I anticipate at one moment in future you will not be able to prevent the upgrade unless the machine kept offline permanently.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday October 28 2021, @08:04PM (12 children)
And even then some software keeps track of date and bricks itself if it isn't happy.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 29 2021, @03:35AM (11 children)
"some software keeps track of date and bricks itself if it isn't happy"
I think I last encountered that particular stupidity in the Win3.x era. What's doing it now?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday October 29 2021, @07:30AM (10 children)
Probably several, but the one that comes to mind is Adobe Flash player. I had installed a security camera system for a guy at his business (friend really) and it plays the videos in Adobe Flash. When Adobe deprecated Flash, the video system became useless. Well, you can use the local console, but it's a very horrible UI. And you can view stills (.jpg) over the 'net, but no help if you need to review video.
I found if you change your computer's date to sometime early last year, the Flash player will play and the video works. Of course you have to turn off Windows' auto time updater. Sigh.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 29 2021, @07:54AM (6 children)
Argh. Since when it is Adobe's business who uses Flash when??
Any different with old versions? I don't even seem to have it installed, but... [goes off, roots around] I have FlashPlayer9 (2007) standalone archived, and it runs. No installer, just run it. Here ya go:
http://doomgold.com/pcstuff/FlashPlayer9.zip [doomgold.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday October 29 2021, @05:58PM (5 children)
Thanks very much, I'll try that.
Most versions of Windows installed a Flash player, so it might be possible to find that and use it too. The camera system is important enough that a quick install of, oh say XP on some older unused hardware, might do the trick, and pretty much dedicate the XP box to the camera system.
It wasn't a cheap camera system. IR lighting for night vision which works pretty well, wireless (WiFi) cameras. They still need power, but that was generally easy.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 29 2021, @08:47PM (4 children)
Welcome. Here's hoping it works! Sucks when something expensive and functional gets disabled to cover someone else's ass.
I've never seen Flash included with Windows, tho it commonly arrived with Acrobat or as a browser plugin. I vaguely recall this copy was rooted up by a friend when a then-current version wouldn't play nice for me.
I have installers for Flash v32 (separate versions for Chrome, Firefox, and IE) but likely those are the last versions, and would suffer from the fuck-you date problem.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday October 29 2021, @10:03PM (3 children)
Now I'm itching to do a raw XP install, partly because I can use it for several things (long story), and partly to confirm what I think I remember.
\Windows\system32\Macromed is where I remember the default Flash stuff being, which obviously inherits from legacy MacroMedia before Adobe engulfed them.
More than once I remember some kind of updater or system cleaner utility nagging about removing the default Windows Flash player, how it was antiquated and insecure.
Same with the MS Java VM.
But again, it's been years, and I've been through hell and back, so memory is fuzzy on some of this stuff... I'll have to try it... I might even have a disk with a raw install. I need to inventory hard disks anyway...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 29 2021, @10:27PM (2 children)
[goes to look, since preferring not to chronically wish to punch my monitor, I still use XP for everyday]
C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash
Weirdly, it's in there, and on restart whines about doing an update (hmm, here's an item in mms.cfg that might fix that), but it doesn't seem to be installed as a plugin anywhere. From the matching folder date, looks like it was dropped there when I installed CS2.
Inventorying HDs is a good way to get stuck playing with all the old shit you rediscover on those old HDs. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:18AM (1 child)
Thanks for checkin'.
Oh, but but but, you're a risk to world peace, global warming, data integrity of the planet, and a list of things I don't feel like typing. Or so goes the typical commentary from the peanut gallery. My feeling is I'd rather have a well-developed, bug-fixed OS. Imagine if someone kept refining something until it was really good. Okay, a guy can dream, right? But seriously, the number of updates for 7, then 8, then 10, increases with each Windows version. Speculation I admit, but my hunch is there are far more bugs the newer it is. More push to get more "features" pushed in, the whole boondoggle pushed out the door, and by cheaper and cheaper developers. Bug testers? Well that'd be you and me.
I have several machines with XP still on them, and they're fine for many things. I might be wrong about this, but AFAIK, much of the "insecurity" is 1) exploited bugs in newer Windows versions, and 2) web / javascript / webassembly evil that won't run on older XP-age browsers anyway.
I'm typing this on a chrome variant (Vivaldi) on Win7. I was reluctant to run 7, but after much tweaking and tuning, it's okay.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:42AM
Terrible, right?? retrobates like us are going to bring down the entire intertubes!!
This was pointed out by someone in the computer security field a number of years ago: Hackers are not coding super-geniuses. So how do they find all these Windows holes and exploits? After all they don't have the source code, and it's really not practical to disassemble millions of lines of code (Win95 was something like 15M lines, gods know what Win10 is).
A: Reverse-engineer the security patches, since each and every one points directly at a specific vulnerability. Then target that specific weakness, and rely on those PCs not yet updated to provide your victims.
So... no more patches means a sharp drop-off in the number of hacks and exploits, with the only real exceptions being those common to all species of Windows. (When did you last hear of an exploit that targets Win2K or Win98? or even XP??)
And yeah, there's a lot to be said for a mature OS that doesn't go upending the applecart and discovering whole new cans of worms. I was happy with XP and would never have willingly switched. Win7 was tolerable but doesn't have the stability I'm used to (it tends to fall over after a few months, while my XP boxen measure uptimes in years). Win10 is stable but the Brutalist interface has driven me off to PCLinuxOS, which now resides on any newer boxen that won't play nice with XP64.
But since it's taking me forever to switch over (I hate moving computer) to the New! Improved!! XP64 box, today I'm typing on the XP32 box and some random version of SeaMonkey. I really need to turn this'un into a VM and just move the whole damn thing. There's a tool for that, if I can remember what it's called!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday October 29 2021, @02:37PM (2 children)
Wasn't there an independent implementation of the Adobe Flash specification?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday October 29 2021, @05:50PM (1 child)
Actually there are many. https://blogs.innovanathinklabs.com/best-flash-player-alternatives/ [innovanathinklabs.com]
I had tried a couple and they just didn't work, or didn't render the video at all.
It gets even trickier: the stupid camera system's UI is, yup, Adobe Flash. I had done a little "ActionScript" programming some years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript [wikipedia.org] It turns out that some (many, most?) of the 3rd-party Flash players don't run the ActionScript part.
I tried Ruffle for sure, and I forget which other ones I might have tried.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday October 29 2021, @10:18PM
Sounds like putting together a complete one might be a useful preservationist retrocomputing project.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28 2021, @09:45PM
> I anticipate at one moment in future you will not be able to prevent the upgrade unless the machine kept offline permanently.
I anticipate at one moment in the future your Windows system will constantly seek out wireless connection(s) in order to update, phone home telemetry and more, without prompting the user. Maybe in the beginning it will, but eventually it won't, that's my opinion.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29 2021, @04:25AM
It says
"This PC doesn't currently meet all system requirements for Windows 11
Get the details and see if there are things you can do in the PC Health Check app."
Uhm ...
Device name [edited out]
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.40 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB
Device ID [edited out]
Product ID [edited out]
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
512 GB SSD hard drive (397 GB free)
Uhm... it seems to meet all the requirements... I guess I just have to make sure it continues not to ... ?