CPU upgrades? What CPU’s? Are the CPU’s in the Microcenter with us, Microsoft? Can you show us on the shelf where the mystical CPU’s are?
Is the shortage a mirage? Our imagination?
What is the charge? Installing a CPU? A succulent x64 CPU? Gentlemen, this is supply side economics manifest!
I’m beginning to think this is all a conspiracy to try to kill Windows because Microsoft doesn’t want to support a desktop OS anymore.
If you’re not ready to switch to Linux:
Windows 10 Enterprise IoT is supported until 2032, works great, contains almost no bloat, and is free to download and activate.
You can configure just about anything else you want or need using Chris Titus’ Power Shell Windows Utility.
Rufus is simple and easy to use for extracting the ISO to a USB drive, and has built in options for setting up a local account and automatically disabling telemetry options during installation.
Microslop is rabidly, desperately, sprinting-on-fire towards a closed mobile-style system paradigm, frothing at the mouth and glowing radioactive iridescent green with envy at Apple and Google’s silicon to application device and software ecosystem control. They want you to purchase the edge tensor hardware they need to run and train the LLMs and machine learning algorithms that will be used to analyze everything you do on your computer, perform deep learning recognition on every photo, video, and file on your hard drive, and securely export that model to themselves, advertisers, and the government at a premium, paid for by our tax dollars.
They’re burning down their own company to do it, that’s how bad they want it.
Be warned though that some installers will yell at you for not having a “compatible version of Windows”. Its rare, but some apps don’t like the enterprise editions.
My brother used to use enterprise windows 10 until he started having that vary issue with trying to play COD.
I’m banking on the world ending before then. Or I get an incurable cancer. Either way, fuck Microsoft.
Or I get an incurable cancer.
So you are planning to upgrade?
Damn, a somewhat disenshittified Windows that still has support??
It’s the barest of bones. I use it for one of my consulting machines in the times I’m forced to run windows.
remember when windows 10 was supposed to be the last os they ever made
Dude, they’re still struggling with Windows 11 adoption because of the unreasonable requirements of a TPM 2.0 capable motherboard/CPU… and they are asking people to upgrade their CPUs again?
They only started seeing real growth in Windows 11 numbers as of January of this year. Windows 11 finally hit 73% last month while Windows 10 is down to 27%. Linux continues to gain marketshare, and there’s no telling if the reason that Win 11 is finally gaining marketshare is from people dumping Windows entirely for other options. Mac and Chromebook shares have been growing as well! It took Microsoft four and a half years from release to break 50% Win 11 adoption and they want to release Win 12 on year five while forcing more upgrades when half the people who got in just upgraded?
This on top of trade wars, actual wars, and an AI arms race that is making buying PC parts obscenely overpriced… and they think people will fucking go for this?
The suits at Microsoft are out of their fucking minds. Even businesses won’t want to upgrade this soon after many only just making upgrades to meet Windows 11 requirements just recently… because businesses are also facing the same increased costs due to the above issues!
god i hope they fuck this up
They’re already fucking this up with vibe-coding Windows 11, so if they seriously go all-in on this, Windows 12 will be a bigger disaster than fucking Windows Vista and Windows Millennium Edition combined.
…and frankly, I think they will. They’ve bet the farm on this AI shit, and they need to force it into everything to justify it’s fucking existence even though Copilot is the most dogshit out of all these dogshit generative AI systems.
vista was great on compliant hardware. w11 is very much not.
Right, but that’s just it, they’re basically pulling another Vista if they release Windows 12 later this year.
It’s not clear whether Windows 12 will welcome any non-NPU processors. More likely, PCs that don’t meet its system requirements will lose some functionality.
As the article reasonably posits, it’s way more likely that they’ll just degrade the experience for people without NPUs, which in other words means decreased performance on older hardware, a la Vista on non-compliant hardware. Yes, Vista fucked up rollout by claiming that some hardware was Vista ready when it wasn’t, but basically the same could happen here regarding lack of NPUs.
whoof. i still don’t understand what makes an npu different from a vector coprocessor (except the proprietary api) so if they’re smart about it they’ll fall back to gpu use. they will not be smart about it.
Windows 7 was arguably the last OS they ever made.
This line of thought goes all the way back to NT, and even then IBM would have some comments.
DOS was the last one they built, and they made a really decent GUI for it before they switched to NT.
And they still haven’t even finished making PowerShell anywhere near as functional as Bash or any other Linux shell environment. First version of PowerShell came out exactly 10 years after the first version of NT.
I don’t outright hate PowerShell but it’s clearly a hacky afterthought after realizing Linux was eating their lunch in the server space via quick rollouts to thousands of computers at once through Bash scripting.
I find PS pretty great. Probably the best improvement to Windows since going 32-bit.
For sure, it’s a vast improvement, but there’s still so much you can’t do with it.
Mostly because unlike Bash and DOS, which are CLIs that get GUIs slapped on top, PowerShell is a CLI slapped on top of a GUI.
Windows 10 arguably became passable for stability about 3 years after release… but you still had to cut out the advertising bloat, spyware, and all which undermined any gains of stability because that shit was just fucking annoying.
wasn’t advertised as such though
No, because that was a shitty headline that mischaracterized an employee’s one-off statement and was then held up as gospel truth by the internet.
Yes, like Arch but for windows
Lmfao Microslop stop trying to make Recall and Copilot and AI bullshittery happen. It’s not gonna happen.
it WILL happen,even if it takes ages to. AI is simply the future
I guess I’m no longer ever going to play a video game that runs on Windows. At some point game developers need to realize that Linux is the future of gaming if Windows keeps pulling this shit.
That’s what Proton is for.
Proton works great. I now play all my windows-“only” games on Linux.
Not out of principle. I’m just lazy. My coding laptop is always within reach and Proton works. The Windows laptop is, like, way over on the other side of the living room and I don’t feel like spending the evening disabling more ad shit or ai shit or whatever they did to Windows since I used it last.
proton is just emulating windows games,it needs windows to exist.
Oh goodie! I mean, Windows 11 was hand-coded. Disgusting! Windows 12 will bring the vibes! It’ll be the most vibe coded OS! (And probably the last when it tanks.) Think about it, AI is monitoring every action you do! Reporting to all it’s masters and their business partners everything you do! Oh all the ads they’ll send you, all the subscriptions they’ll sell! Of course, it’ll be always online else it can’t fully use the datacenters.
I’m being mostly sarcastic (any “excitement” for it). I mean, it’s probably going to have the worst performance since AI will be monitoring EVERYTHING and I really do expect it to be coded via prompts instead of talent. Microsoft and NVIDIA are already having massive issues with everything due to “AI” being used and they started with a working based code. 11 adoption was already bad and they made sure people knew 10 was dying so they could push the numbers… I don’t recall any previous version of Windows getting that treatment.
Upgrade? In this economy?!?
'member when Windows 10 was supposed to be the final version of Windows? I 'member.
Me: Using 11 year old PC. Originally rjnning Windows 7. Now running ZorinOS.
I don’t particularly like linux, but…
looks at Windows 10…11…now 12…
Yeah, fuck that dumpster fire.
As long as you are not blasting away on random sites downloading every link you see then you are pretty safe. The old days of a hacker getting into your PC because you forgot to update your firewall are kind of gone.
Wrong on a ton of levels.
You can get infected by drive-by malware. It’s actually quite common. Zero interaction required on your part.
Running an outdated operating system or software like a browser makes you even more susceptible to this
You can, but that doesn’t mean you will. Unless you’re raw dogging your pc fully exposed on the internet there’s no way for malware to go to you, you have to go to it.
You can pick up malware from a website or an advert on a website. You can pick it up by a friend bringing an infected device and attaching it to your home network. You can pick it up from a phishing link or attachment. You can run an IoT device that downloads malware and propagates it to other machines on your network. You can install a dodgy app on your phone. You can run an application that has a chain of dependencies down to some obscure backdoored library (xz). You can run software that downloads automatic updates and whose update server was compromised (Notepad++) or whose signing certificate was compromised. Those are just the first few that spring to mind. And you can pick it up because someone else in your family did any one of these things or many others.
Malware isn’t just for people who do obviously dangerous things like downloading cracks and keygens. There are many vectors for it to get in.
I’ve had a Win 7 running for 12 years as a media server, never once been hacked.
ISPs and even old school Win 7 to Win 10 OSs have the old ports blocked by default that prevent “drive-by malware”.
What you are talking about is the equivalent of a Boogeyman that only exists because people are stupid about what they open up or install or allow to control their firewalls. Your points even prove that.
You can open a Netscape browser on Windows 95 and not get hacked. But of course you believe opening a browser opens you wide up so just ignore what I say.
i agree with you,some people are just paranoid.
They really want to lose users.
However, newer processors with dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPUs) reduce strain on cloud servers and GPUs. As a result, PCWorld believes that CPUs, including Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen AI chips that support 40 TOPS or more, will become mandatory
in other words, your pc will be doing ai shit for someone else’s pc while you are idle
They couldn’t afford enough electricity to run it in-house so now they just run a mandated botnet to make you pay for it instead. If this isn’t a page out of a George Orwell novel, it should have been.
2026 even has newspeak in the form of bullshit like “unalive”
Didn’t Microsoft try that one before?
Windows is already occupying your hardware and network with “telemetry”. I would be surprised if telemetry overhead alone was all that was needed to burden modern hardware and yet when i boot into windows those fans never shut up.
That’s not at all what that means, nor does it make any sense.
Microsoft can do whatever. I’m not coming back.
Good luck with that shit.
