597
Lots of PCs are poised to fall off the Windows 10 update cliff one year from today
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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To be fair, I may have stopped getting updates anyway? I suspect what happened is typical, that some Win10 update bugged the update process and I was supposed to either roll it back or get the next one by hand and just... didn't.
It is my intention to start looking at linux distros and have one installed by Summer 25...assuming I haven't immolated in a wildfire or been sent to a detention center by then.
Same thing happened to me a few years ago. My old laptop from 2013 is hardware incompatible with something in modern Windows10 and when it tried installing the late 2019 update it just died. Had to buy a new laptop to keep working.
Today, that same laptop is happily running Arch Linux. I'm still trying to decide what I'll do with the main gaming PC.
Windows 11 requires a TPM chip. On some phones, a TPM exchanges a small, memorable pin for a large key with which to unlock your phone, and only allows so many guesses (20 usually) before it locks up...allegedly.
They can be unlocked with an electron microscope, but that's expensive enough that FBI is going to be resistant to do that to any but the most important devices.
However, apparently Microsoft and Intel are releasing TPMs they can access, not to block off outsiders for the users, but to keep the highest tiered access reserved for the OS controller. That being Microsoft. So your Windows 11 computer isn't yours, rather you're borrowing it from Big MS... and eventually any other state or institution that figures out how to hack it open.
It's not like Microsoft hasn't pulled this kind of stuff since the 1990s, trying to lock down control of every computer for its own profit.