Cricket [he/him]

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  • 15 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS.

    I strongly disagree. Ten years should be the bare minimum required. Windows used to support hardware way longer than 10 years and probably more than 15, until Windows 11 came out.

    The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

    Windows 95 is a bad example since it’s a 30 year old OS. It’s a completely different era with different OS architecture and different OS environment. Let’s instead use an example of an OS from the time frame being discussed: Windows 7, released a little over 15 years ago. There’s very little reason why a computer that was made since Windows 7 was released shouldn’t be able to run Windows 11. I think that this is a profit maximization decision on Microsoft’s part (less hardware support, less development and testing cost). They basically said screw the customers and screw the environment.


  • would this not be a good idea for a start up company that recycle computer parts?

    I really don’t think so. Computer recycling already seems to be a low profit business, as evidenced by there not being any large companies that do it (that I’m aware of). This number of computers flooding the market would probably make it even less profitable. Sure, it may be profitable for some small businesses, but nothing on the scale required to address the problem.



  • Hmmm, I don’t agree. The trend is in the opposite direction. Microsoft Windows used to have a larger market share and supported hardware indefinitely. Now that their market share has shrunk, they are also limiting support for older hardware. This only shows correlation, not causation, but it does show that more competition has not improved the issue and that we need laws to do that instead. MacOS, the primary competitor to Microsoft Windows which also has Microsoft Office available, only supports their hardware for 6-8 years as well.

    Edit: just to add, if anything, this actually shows that more competition and reduced market share probably increases the pressure to cut support for older hardware because it probably becomes less profitable to do so.





  • The biggest problem Microsoft has is that the biggest selling feature of Windows is its ability to be backwards compatible and run on older hardware.

    Absolutely, a gazillion percent this. My main desktop doesn’t have TPM. I bought a cheap micro form factor Lenovo that I thought would run Win 11, but it didn’t. It had a 6-year old CPU and that wasn’t supported by Windows 11. 6 years old. I realized then that this eliminated one major reason to get a Windows PC over a Mac. I think that both Mac and Linux are going to make huge gains in market-share in the next months and years.