You can no longer activate new Windows 11 builds with Windows 7 or 8 keys::Bad news for those planning to activate Windows 11 with a Windows 7 or 8/8.1 key: users noticed that the latest Windows 11 preview builds no longer allow activation with old license keys.

  • @orclev@lemmy.world
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    231 year ago

    I mean, you’d have to want to activate a Windows 11 build in the first place. I’m doing just fine on Windows 10 and don’t see any reason at all to “upgrade”. Let’s see if they can manage not to bake ads and tracking into whatever comes after 11 and I’ll consider it then.

    • @peastea@feddit.de
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      51 year ago

      Not a problem right now but Windows 10 is reaching its end of support two years from now in Oct 2025.

      • @Jimbo@yiffit.net
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        111 year ago

        When Windows 10 launched, wasn’t it said that this would be the “last” version of Windows and it would just get continually updated?

        • @kalleboo@lemmy.world
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          51 year ago

          Yeah but then Apple dropped their longstanding practice of naming MacOS releases 10.x and went to MacOS 11 and if there’s one thing that Microsoft can never resist it’s copying Apple.

        • @orclev@lemmy.world
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          41 year ago

          Yep, and that lasted all of about a year I think before MS backtracked on it. Microsoft has an MO, they release a bad version of Windows which everyone hates, then they remove/fix most of the things people hate and release a good version of Windows, then they get cocky and cram a bunch of stuff people hate into the next version and the cycle repeats. Right now we’re on the “everyone hates it” part of the cycle with Windows 11 where they crammed ads, tracking, and a mandatory MS account sign-in into it.

          I’m expecting Windows 12 (or whatever they end up calling it, probably not 12 as that would be sane), to bring back offline accounts, remove the ads, and at least tone down the tracking, but that will only happen after enough people refuse to “upgrade” off of 10.

          Alternatively they could go the XP route and release essentially Windows 11 SP2, which rips all the garbage out and makes it not suck, but I think that’s less likely.

            • @orclev@lemmy.world
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              11 year ago

              From what I recall last I looked into this, that’s technically true but there were a couple gotchas. I can’t remember exactly but it was either that it’s a major PITA to setup during install (deeply buried in a very non-obvious location), or else that you had to use a MS account to install, but once installed you could then make and use a local account. In either case it’s very clear MS is doing everything they can to force you into using their online accounts. I wouldn’t be surprised if they remove the ability to activate Windows 11 without using a MS account soon if they haven’t already.

        • @jose1324@lemmy.world
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          31 year ago

          No. This was one engineer that said that en everyone ran with it. Microsoft officially never said this

          • @BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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            41 year ago

            everyone ran with it

            Because everyone wanted it to be true. Everyone wanted to just have stability and no more radical interface changes.

      • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Everything since 7 has been a skip. 10 only seemed good for a short while because of how poorly 8 was received.

        But that didn’t last long when MS kept updating it with more and more bloat, more and more telemetry, and more and more dark patterns.

        When Win10 came out, it was more performant than Win7. Now it bogs down and feels sluggish even on systems with gen4 NVME drives.

        There are some aspects of Win11 that I like, but they took the bad stuff with 10 and turned it up to 11 (hehe)

        • just another dev
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          31 year ago

          Wasn’t there a directx version that wasn’t supported by win 7? Pretty sure that was done to push people to upgrade. I’m not a power gamer myself, but I can understand if you bought a video card that costs as much as the rest of your components, you’ll want to get the most out of it.

          • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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            41 year ago

            Yes, DirectX12 didn’t come to Windows 7

            Similarly, DirectStorage isn’t being added to Windows 10. But that’s not used by many games

        • @BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Everything since 7 has been a skip.

          You younguns haven’t met a decent OS! XP was the last decent Windows… Nah, 2000 was… Ah fuck it!

          Every OS wastes your time

          From the desktop to the lap

          Everything since the abacus

          Just a bunch of crap

          Personally I’m halfway offended that my job forces win 11 on us, at least 10 didn’t remove the old settings dialogs.

      • @ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        21 year ago

        TBH, Win10 was a skip version too. Don’t think I’ve ever had THAT many problems with a Windows system I willingly used. Even Vista was better.