We got the big announcement from Microsoft this week that Windows 11 will be available from the 5th of October. You might also have received pop up notifications on your computer about it. Microsoft is touting a fresh design, Teams integration into the taskbar, a better gaming experience, increased speed and efficiency, improved integration with touch, pen and voice input, an updated Microsoft Store and more. Check out Microsoft’s release details here.
However the reality is that the update has some very specific system requirements which won’t be met by older computers. Anything over four years old is very unlikely to meet the requirements. And even newer computers will need TPM 2.0 to be turned on for it to work (a setting which is usually turned off by default). If you have a nice new computer and you would like to upgrade to Windows 11 we would recommend that you bring it in to us to check whether it will meet the requirements first, and to turn on TPM 2.0 for you. In fact I would suggest we walk it through the update. This is a big one.
The other issue of course is that every other time Microsoft have released a new version of Windows, things have inevitably gone wrong at the beginning. This is because, unlike Apple for example, Windows is relatively open and can handle a lot of different applications, made by a lot of different companies other than Microsoft. There are thousands of them out there and the interactions with them cannot always be predicted by Microsoft. We always recommend waiting a few months for them to sort out any bugs in the new system. I will certainly be writing further blogs as the release proceeds and we get more details about what’s new and how it’s performing initially.