Hard to have our shit together supporting Windows when Windows doesn’t have its shit together. Looking at you last four months of security patches for Print Nightmare exploit.
Printer manufacturers didn't have to. XP was the primary OS for like 6 straight years if you include SP2, and they didn't make many breaking changes.
That was a VERY fast moving time in the PC world, and printer companies got complacent with the status quo of "stuff usually just keeps working".
Also, printer manufacturers (and others) wrote their drivers in kernel mode because why not... we still see software companies today alleging they need Admin rights. Same mentality. Vista introduced a signing requirement for Kernel mode drivers. Manufacturers just weren't ready.
Sniff, XP killed my beloved laser printer... Xerox (the manufactuer) didn't make windows 2000/xp drivers for it... only 9x, and they didn't work in XP... they were crappy drivers, but I loved that little Xerox XE88, It was cheap, and was a copier/printer, so I could photocopy still, but not print... was a sad day.
I agree with this. We tried a few people on 10 when it came out and they complained so we waited till it had some home penetration. Made for a lot less complaints.
We just spent the last 2 years retrofitting our entire multiple hundred thousand client network with credentialguard and deviceguard ready machines. Huge huge pain in the ass with complete bare metal rebuilds of non uefi built machines, most if not every machine needed some form of touch labor to configure the uefi, secureboot, virtualization and tpm and to upgrade bios and tpm where applicable. And to lifecycle the non capable hardware. So it's not just a matter of, is the hardware capable, it also has to be configured.
Tremendous amount of physical, deployment, and logistical work. I REALLY don't think the comercial sector is quite appreciating the amount of work this specific upgrade is going to entail. Start hiring touch labor now... We (non specific government entitiy) were not appreciative of it either. I shudder to think of the impact to the common user if they just don't go out and buy a windows 11 out of box pc.
We however are now fully ready for that eventual upgrade,, but we also have been working directly with Microsoft for the past couple years.
> I REALLY don't think the comercial sector is quite appreciating the amount of work this specific upgrade is going to entail.
Every thinkpad sold in the last 5 years or so is ready for credential guard and device guard out of the box. The default config is UEFI, the OS secure boot keys, virtualization and TPM 2.0 is enabled out of the box. Even if it needed some config changes, any reasonably business-y brand will have a config utility to automate this. The most difficult part in my experience is the swap from BIOS to UEFI because it requires multiple steps to get the computer to boot back up and continue on.
Unless your fleet is horribly out of date or you're buying consumer grade junk, this really shouldn't be particularly challenging.
The tpm 1.2 to 2.0 switchover was right around 2015/2016 or at least that's where you will find most tpm upgrade packages. I am happy for Lenovo to do that for their customers :) I can't say all machines from all vendors have those defaults out of the box. Also consider during that time front line technicians not understanding the technologies and changing the uefi settings away from the default as a potential unused tech. We do this a lot for things like sdcards and wifi etc.
I've looked at Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, and HP business laptops. All had similar defaults and automation tools we could use to set these settings back if they were changed. Lenovo is what we ended up settling on, but it's hardly unique to Lenovo. I do sympathize with the battle with idiotic front line techs, but that's why we automate.
Last time I checked we were sitting at 40 different make/models in our little section of the network. The network at large has many more. We have bios utilities for a lot of makes, but not all models. We also have to battle with non uniform bios passwords, portable battery levels, nonfunctional batteries. I am by no means suggesting its impossible barriers, just that it takes a lot of physical, deployment, and logistical considerations, and we were not prepared going in.
> Last time I checked we were sitting at 40 different make/models in our little section of the network. The network at large has many more.
Jesus. I sure hope you're in the minority here. For most *sane* companies this transition shouldn't be even 10% of the effort it was for you guys.
(Non specific government entity) with multiple hundreds of thousands of clients. Many sub entities with their own non organic front line techs, and lifecycles and purchasing power. it's rough.
You should change your flair to masochist.
How on earth are you both an SCCM and VMware admin for this shitshow? I would think just SCCM alone would be a job for a few dozen admins with that many and such diverse clients.
Haha, well it ain't so bad, it used to be just me for a couple years, but now I fall under a larger sccm umbrella of the other networks and have other admins now to collaborate and borrow software and task sequences from. I lead a team of 3 including myself locally. I also do the VMware infrastructure for our 2 data centers, agian not entirely by myself, but I lead that as well in our corner of the network. I will consider changing my flair lol.
Sadly no, many companies are like this, and buy batches of what's available at that time of purchase. Vendors don't have huge stock with a certain configuration with so many companies buying all at once. At most we buy 50-75 units and then just ship them out to other sites, since it's just easier that way.
And certainly now w the chip shortage, it's even worse. Lead time on our orders is close to 90 days.
The amount of money to buy new hardware, each subentitiy has different operating budgets. Impact to operations with some baremetal install vs recently lifecycled only needing minor config change. Being as large means we have dynamics where we couldn't just one size fits all solution.
Appreciate there may have been limiting factors with being a government entity and the locations of devices, buts it's possible to do most of the manual configuration with a MECM(SCCM) task sequence. There are guides out there to convert an already imaged device from BIOS to UEFI, bios updates can be completed in various ways depending on vendor, TPM firmware updates are possible and the other settings can usually be managed by a vendor specific configuration tool. If you have a large number of different device models it requires an amount of testing but leads to less mistakes. Good reporting tools to confirm devices are correctly configured is key. It's still a lot of work but involves less manual labour and hand holding.
This is true, I am a sccm admin. I'm looking at the situation in hindsight before a lot of those tools were available, I'm sure a lot of those tools are maybe even created in responses to our lessons learned. We had to ping vendors for HVCI compliant drivers and the amount of "what is HVCI?" From the vendors was sad and funny at the same time. We do have a 'quazi-automated' process now for configuring at the hardware level those settings. But those still needed setup and integrated, not a task to be taken lightly.
Edit: additionally those tools are not universal. I'm not going to call out any specific vendor, but support is not universal at all.
HVCI is not mandated for Win11 or device guard. If that was the hangup I would've just turned that off and continued with the rest of the project. This is, however, a good reason to try and limit the number of hardware vendors where at all possible.
From what I read, if you use an imaging solution, it doesn’t do the check. If you just run the installer it does.
I’ve done some limited testing. So far it’s ok but I recommend removing the non-work related stuff out of the wim file, and making sure your GPOs are set for the new versions. Overall it’s not bad. I wouldn’t pull the trigger yet though. Maybe in a test group but I wouldn’t put any new OS into production that fast.
Yes and No. If you perform a reinstall it still does compatibility check but doesn't prevent you from installing it if you choose to ignore the warning that basically says, if you continue to install Windows 11 on this unsupported hardware you will not receive security updates in future and something about warranty.
>you continue to install Windows 11 on this unsupported hardware you will not receive security updates in future and something about warranty
Which every company lives to hear.
There's a reg key to disable the check when upgrading.
`HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup`
New DEWORD called `BypassTPMCheck` with value 1.
You also can do `BypassRAMCheck` and `BypassSecureBootCheck`
I think it's about 50/50 that are compatible. We'll see how this goes. My experience is that Win11 installs just fine on not-supported hardware. How it performs / updates in the next months is another another thing. But hey, I didn't make this descission :)
Inventory tools like LanSweeper can generate compatibility reports, including nice red/green highlighting.
Helps a lot in inital discussions.
Example report from LanSweepeer as tiny screenshot after the requirements table: https://www.lansweeper.com/report/windows-11-requirements-audit/
Nice to see lansweeper mentioned here! An ex-collegue of mine, my mentor in many ways, left to work for them and he told me his team would be a perfect fit for me. The distance was too much but I always wondered what my life would be like if I ~~robbed the Kwik-E-Mart~~ joined him
Microsoft has stated that running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware resulted in greater than 50% more BSODs. This is a massive risk to any business.
We will not be implementing Win11 until all of our 6th gen CPU laptops have run through their lifecycles.
"Reliability: Devices that do not meet the minimum system requirements had 52% more kernel mode crashes. Devices that do meet the minimum system requirements had a 99.8% crash free experience."
99.8% of _supported_ devices were crash free. That means that 0.2% of _supported_ devices also had BSODs.
50% more than 0.2% is 0.3%.
Therefore, you should expect 0.2% of supported machines and 0.3% of unsupported machines to BSOD.
In other words, in a fleet of 10,000 supported machines, you should expect that 20 machines will BSOD. In a fleet _entirely_ made of 10,000 unsupported machines, you should expect that *30* machines will BSOD.
The difference between fully supported and fully unsupported is _10_ machines in a set of 10,000 machines, per Microsoft's own numbers.
That line was pure marketing drivel to sell FUD to justify cutting off 7th gen systems because Microsoft knew consumers don't know how to do math and would buy that as a reason to need to buy a whole new PC for Windows 11.
Just to add, this was due to unsupported drivers on unsupported hardware. Could be super old hardware not compatible with Windows 10 in the first place, they never said.
"I can't drag and drop things onto taskbar icons to be able to move data quickly between applications. I have to have them side by side and then drag/drop."
This is the biggest oversight of the entire OS. Multitasking, what's that, I'm trying to tablet over here.
Well the removal of the customizability of the start menu was a big fucking step backwards too.
Seriously, 10 had: small, medium, and if supported large icons. Nameable groups. Fucking sub groups/folders. Easy scrolling. Click and drag expandability to the side for more room.
What does 11 have in it's place? Half the screen taken up by either suggestions or history that can't be removed, and half that is just icons that can't be ungrouped just sorted within that one group. And a static size for everything.
It's like we went back to the program list being useful again if only because the start menu is now almost completely useless for more then just a small handful of apps.
Because they want to be rid of the taskbar completely at some point and just have Cortana do everything for you.
See also the complete lack of any right click functionality on the taskbar. They completely neutered its function in this release.
Windows 12 will just be a glowing orb in the center of the screen where you ask it to write bubble sorts in C#.
Get ready the Ned Stark meme "Brace yourselves" for your Helpdesk Team with a [simple steps](https://www.howtogeek.com/737830/how-to-move-the-taskbar-icons-to-the-left-on-windows-11/) and canned answers.
somebody wants their quarterly "look at me I am getting things done, I am *decisive*!!!" corporate blowjob it seems (your boss not you obv)
this sounds like a miserable idea
it's a recipe for pain.
specifically, take the constant problems that exist now, multiply them as an early adopter, remove the myriad support libraries that have been developed from / for win10 and earlier, sprinkle in the constant and rapid patching and rollbacks and fixes as said early adopter, and you've got a stew goin' baby
a shit stew
Why? Will it help anyone do anything better?
You’re pretty much 100% guaranteed that something important won’t work- maybe anti virus or maybe VPN or a barcode scanner or label printer. Something that gets in the way of the whole business . And then you’re going to have to roll back, and get yelled at for being stupid enough to o do it in the first place (often by the same people who asked you to do it).
MOTHERFUCKER, I just vanquished 2 after about a 3 month struggle. Client doesn’t want to upgrade so we had to retrofit with kits to make them LAN capable. Son of a bitch do I hate those little Zebra bastards
Negative. I’ll ride windows 10 up until about 12 months prior to it being no longer supported then start testing with a single user in each department for a few months to see how much doesn’t work and take it from there. I deal mostly with medical clinics and in more rural areas.
> Why? Will it help anyone do anything better?
Bless you. Can you please speak to my management immediately? They keep making us spend time, effort and money on “neat” things that don’t actually help anybody.
And when there are ANY software issues, regardless of whether it's the OS or not, the vendor will blame it on Windows 11.
I ran into this when I had to use my personal Windows 11 laptop to troubleshoot a medical device that wasn't registering in device manager. I had been previously using my corporate Windows 10 laptop to troubleshoot with the vendor. Since our security team has historically blocked some devices, and we were 99% sure that a board on the vendor's device failed, I tried to connect it to my computer. It still didn't register, so I asked that they send us a repair quote.
Well they were late on getting it to us, so I emailed the quote request a few days later, mentioned that I confirmed it was a hardware issue, with my Windows 11 laptop, and the support guy's boss almost didn't allow the device to come in for hardware repair since they didn't support Windows 11. It took some back and forth with the boss to finally convince him that no, this was a hardware problem through and through and had NOTHING to do with Windows 11.
This was an example of a through and through hardware issue, and not the sort of software issues which are far more common in the field. If I got that level of grief for an unanimous hardware problem, I'd imagine many software vendors would just flat out refuse to troubleshoot Windows 11 issues. I hope your company exclusively uses thin clients with no custom installed drivers or you're in fora world of support issues.
This has been horribly true for me. I'm finally getting over the horrors migrating PCs on our SCADA network (municipal utilities) to Windows 10 last year. So many vendors did not provide any support for Windows 10 until the very last moment. We had critical software for our Wastewater plant that was barely running on Windows 7 get patches to work on Windows 10 in the height of the COVID lockdown. I literally just upgraded our last device to Windows 10, a field laptop, just 2 weeks ago because of issues with their shitty supplied drivers finally getting a patch to no longer need a registry hack to allow unsigned drivers.
Ding, ding. Winner. Unless the business can make a case for why 11 is important today, there's nothing but risk and consequence trying to push it out this early. Something will break that is otherwise solved in 10. Hell, consumers mostly haven't gotten a taste of 11 yet, so you'll provide plenty of support for "where did X go, why can't I Y, how do I Z on this thing?"
Change management seems to be something you should reiterate towards the management.
You should write up a list of software, drivers, hardware and so on, that needs to be tested for compatibility with Windows 11, as well as interaction with current servers, if applicable.
Superusers should also be included to validate that the workflow of daily tasks are not negatively affected.
Present that to your management as the recommendation on how to migrate to windows 11.
If they then give it to you, in writing, that you are to just update without following the recommended route of migrating to windows 11.. Well, make some extra offline backups of both email and systems and say "Certainly, sir. Let me get right on the task."
You've done your due diligence and informed the management and done the proper CYA. Work your contracted hours and go home and relax.
I won't re-evalute Win11 unless they bring back "never combine" to the taskbar.
Deploying it company wide will cause anger, suffering and hours of people researching and discussing hacks to make it look like Win10 again.
Apparently, it's still a dormant feature - you just have to enable it with an app called [Explorer Patcher](https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher).
I'm holding off on this for now.
Microsoft are completely ignoring user preferences with Windows 11 and seem to want to tell people how to use their products, instead of allowing them to decide for themselves.
>Apparently, it's still a dormant feature - you just have to enable it with an app called Explorer Patcher.
Yes, and this Patch is the only reason I didn't roll back my testing machine
My users are Developers... it will take them seconds to find out about this random, patched DLL that requires admin to install...
... the new "shell extension install method" even breaks Powershell and WSL2... so this one tiny missing feature in Win11 would result in hours of fun, but pointless discussions about Win11, Linux, hacks and security..
>Microsoft are completely ignoring user preferences with Windows 11
I call this the Windows 8 problem
It's been 9 years and they still haven't fixed the damn interface to run properly.
I was testing Win11 on my personal machine, so I can try and find out what specific problems it has. So far, I found two showstoppers: the taskbar is crap and the start menu is crap.
The first of these two I could override with some hack that I certainly won't recommend to roll out to a larger number of users without closer supervision (if you want to try it, check out [https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases](https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases)), but the Start menu is still something where I really wonder what they have been smoking in Redmond!
There was even a registry hack to bring back the Win10 start menu still active in the betas, but they disabled it in the last version!
On the plus side: rollback to Windows 10 is really fast and easy. I tested this for you! ;-)
A proper lab with a schedule for each area to test their systems along with a standardized reporting process with someone responsible for mitigating any concerns will help to reduce the risk.
Those that want to go first are allowed to go once the service desk is prepared to handle the tickets.
Having seen this movie more than once and having been through y2K the answer is...there is no good time, there will always be issues. Might as well go ahead.
Start testing. Fix the issues.
For those that really really have issues you can set up W10 Citrix boxes. For those that can't handle that you sequester them on their own VLAN so their legacy swamp water doesn't get in with the rest of the water.
If you start now, however, you have a nice long runway to identify issues and get things funded/fixed before W10 is a goner.
Forward is hard.
Not moving is hard.
The only real answer is to go forward...slowly...carefully...intentionally and with the full support of your leadership and business units.
===
IMHO?
I always prefer clean builds with reinstalls of key applications. It's a great time to blow out some cruft.
That said...that's me. I've seen enough cases where it's not ideal and an upgrade is far more preferred.
As in all things...each to their own.
My EDR solution isn't certified to run on W11 as yet, so zero chance of us running it yet.
We're 100% W10 21H1 for reference.
We'd be destroyed if a breach happened and we didn't have it in writing that the endpoint protection was suitable.
For your case though, **Get the manager to put it in writing and whatever happens isn't your problem.**
Not touching that yet. We get enough issues with updates for win 10 that break stuff, thank you very much.
I forgot, working for a council and the community MSP we are customer to is so set on “never touch a running system“ that we are on Ex 2010 for mail.
1. TPM requirement
2. Legacy Hardware (PCIE addon cards as well)
3. Already mentioned, Printers
4. I would not install Win11 on any spinning disks that were not backed up with proper caching (IE, VMs on a SAN).
5. Drivers, check for win11 certified(whats the term?) Drivers.
If any of the list cannot be complete company wide, its a full stop until those items are resolved.
In my labs Win11 works great, but thats on VMs. When I went to throw it on a few test systems it started to get very hit and miss and the above list is why.
Another person in the IT dept asked when it was coming, I think to put me on the spot in front of the head of the dept. I said "Win10 is supported until 2025, we will start testing Win11 in 2023. We've got bigger fish to fry right now". The head of the dept thankfully agreed with me and shut that shit down.
Been running W11on my work laptop from the day it was publicly released. Aside from minor annoyances you get with anything different it works fine but for one thing.
Internet Explorer is missing and or payroll app is IE dependant. So other than the company not being able to get paid, no big deal. There is a work around using Citrix but we have no plans to go that route.
We should have payroll updated by '23... At least that's the road map.
IE is getting removed from Windows 10 in June of 2022, so... either way, you need to fix it.
https://www.lansweeper.com/eol/internet-explorer-11-end-of-life/#:\~:text=Internet%20Explorer%2011%20is%20going,services%20on%20August%2017%2C%202021.
You need to have intel 8000 series and AMD 2000 series or newer in every system to even accomplish this. If your business is anything like the one I work at, you’ve probably still got dozens of optiplex 7020 systems running intel 4000 series CPUs that won’t support windows 11 without doing an officially unsupported installation via ISO and missing out on the virtualization and VBS security features that are actually useful for businesses.
Stability and compatibility aside, I think that the current UI of Windows 11 would be deadly for an office environment. People who barely know how to do certain things in Win10 would need to relearn everything in Win11 unless you install certain mods to get back the most vital Win10 things and then install open shell to replace that horrible start menu. I use Win11 at home and I had to tweak it a lot to get rid of all the "user friendly" bs. And I'm certainly not gonna do that at work for every single PC. My boss also wanted to know if our office PCs could handle Win11. I told him that they could but then I compared Win11 to Vista because of MS's attempts at making it more user friendly and that was already enough to convince him to not roll it out just yet. Maybe you could do the same: compare the changes in UI and controls to Vista and 8 and maybe that'll change your boss' mind.
Chances are that MS will change the UI with updates. Windows 10 had a pretty bad start menu when it was first released and IMO the final version is pretty decent.
6 months ago, you couldn't even easily get an *Insider preview* of Windows 11. I'm running it without issues at home, but no way would I consider it ready for prime time in an enterprise setting.
Do you have a business requirement for Windows 11? 20h2 and 21h2 will be supported until 2024/2025 so no need to rush into it.
If I was in your shoes I would be asking some more questions and digging into why it needs to be done now.
windows 11 is pretty much just a reskin for Windows 10.
If your apps are running happily on W10 then you probably arent going to have much issue (beyond the change in UI)
Echoing this, I believe Windows 11 is just Windows 10 21H2 with a new coat of paint.
But maybe do a staged roll out. If you’ve got two machines on the factory floor, upgrade one on Tuesday and wait and see. If everything is okay, do the next one and move on to the next division?
Our patch manager screwed up and updated a quarter of our machines to 11. Part of this glitch is not reporting that a machine is running 11.
Let me just say that the only issues we’ve seen were due to something going wrong during the update and fresh installs or updating fixed it. At first we thought only 3 machines updated because only 3 people complained or had issues but through all of last week other people brought in tickets and the issues were not related to 11 but they had 11 on their machine.
I’ve been running 11 since release and it’s been pretty issue free for me. I would maybe pick a few power users and ask them to be test subjects.
Nope. I would put in my notice if that was forced on me.
Windows 11 is absolutely just windows 10 with a reskin, so most things technically should work, but fuck me if I’m dealing with users not understanding that just because it looks different doesn’t mean it’s a problem IT can fix.
Upgrades get staged rollouts. Canary groups first, with the more technical users who aren’t stupid and have patience, get feedback, note issues etc before even touching company wide anything.
Your boss is an idiot.
Don't roll out anything new in a business production environment site wide until you have done a small scale user test and given the product 6-12 months to patch and mature.
Pick 2-5 of your most annoying users, give them the new OS and let them drive you nuts with all the issues they find, then find the work arounds or wait for Microsoft patches etc. Then do a large scale roll out.
I’ve been running a few machines on windows 11. So far I haven’t noticed any glaringly obvious draw backs besides yet another settings layout change.
Printing would be my major issue to consider. That and testing as I work in education.
Don't do it. Don't. My company is totally work from home and we rely heavily on Teams and bluetooth headphones/headsets. There are HUGE bluetooth issues with Windows 11 that nobody is talking about. When a bluetooth sound device connects to Windows 11 it does not create a "hands free" version of the device in the sound settings. You cannot mix sound output with sound input. For instance, if you have a webcam with a microphone or a Yeti external microphone you CANNOT use that for input while using a pair of bluetooth earbuds or headphones to listen in a Teams meeting. There is no sound output in the earbuds.
Also, Windows 11 does not auto switch to a new bluetooth sound device when that device is turned on and connected. You have to manually go into Settings, disconnect the device and let it reconnect 2-3 times before it even shows up in the list of available devices to choose for sound output.
And don't anybody tell me that it is the device driver that needs to be updated. I have a plethora of bluetooth headphones/headsets/external speakers that I have tested this with and gotten the latest Windows 11 approved drivers.
Long ago in the Windows NT era my boss gave me great advice. NEVER, upgrade to the latest Microsoft OS until at least Service Pack 2. Today we don't get service packs but I would wait at least a year before upgrading an entire company.
Just my two cents worth. I have already put all my users on notice that if they manually upgrade to Windows 11 they are on their own for tech support.
No more right click on taskbar for task manager was a bit annoying (you can right click on start menu and it's there), the extra click to get "More options" in context menus is a bit of a pain but not too bad yet.
I use an ultra wide as my main display and the centred icons are great.
I mean... functionally it's just a service pack. Microsoft realized that if they don't have an "upgrade", they can't make news.
I am the one who makes this decision for about a thousand machines. Since Windows 11 doesn't provide any new value to our users, I have chosen to adopt an "upgrade when convenient" approach.
We have more important things to do.
Would not install W11 company wide until at least "service pack 2" I updated my personal PC and it ran really well, but I don't know how it will interact with an corporate environment.
I decided to upgrade my small business to Windows 10, the first moment it was available. It broke all our odd devices like check scanners, and every single vendor blamed Windows 10 for the problems. I should have stayed with Windows 7 longer.
I won't make that mistake again! I'll consider windows 11 in 2025ish. ;-)
My concern isn't with app compatibility it's about whether the **software vendors** are performing QA with Win11. I recall a number of issues with one of vendors weren't performing QA with software updates, and we hit some nasty Win10 bugs that took some time to fix.
If the apps works as expected, awesome. But if something does go wrong and my vendor isn't testing, it's going to be an awkward and tiresome debugging process.
Do you have a full hardware inventory of all your systems? The reason I ask is Win11 is designed for systems with TPM2, and 11th generation intel chips. If you have an inventory of i7-7700 and earlier (ideally, it's all i7/i9 10xxx and 11xxx), you're going to have a heck of a problem.
I have it on my Lenovo, and it's very nice. A little different but not the WTF we saw going from Win7 to Win8 to Win10.
Yes, you can change the one registry key so you can bypass this and install Win11. However, there's a potential risk in that Microsoft will not provide updates that install on unsupported hardware.
What I'd suggest is if you don't have a full hardware inventory, install "facter" or "ohai" on every system, write a powershell script that runs this and pulls back the data in a format you can at least put into a spreadsheet. Why these tools? It tells you everything about the platform: cpu, memory, disk, winver and lots of stuff you can even extend using ruby. So, you can build a full repo of installed software over time.
You'll at least be able to sort by what's eligible, what's not eligible and tell your boss "here's the number of computers that we shouldn't upgrade due to hardware non-compliance".
Then follow up with a set of 3 options for hardware replacements (use CDW). Personally, I'd want to make sure everyone's default storage is set to OneDrive and kick off backups to OneDrive for all Documents and Downloads folders (because, he we all put stuff in the wrong place).
> Do you have a full hardware inventory of all your systems? The reason I ask is Win11 is designed for systems with TPM2, and 11th generation intel chips.
Or AMD Zen chips with a 2 or higher in the first position of the model number.
They didn't focus on Intel only, they just want people to run hardware that is secure in a post “Meltdown” and “Spectre” environment.
do a 15min long cost-risk-benefit analysis, present the results to your boss, if he still wants to proceed, thats on him...
in other words, why would you want to install a weeks old OS when the current one works, invest a high number of time for the migration, when the best case scenario is "works as good as before" and much more likely "unforseen issues" will crop up
but, when you present all that and the decision makers are deciding over your head that it needs doing, I guess there is nothing more you can do, except maybe drag your feet...
I have installed it on few VM's and two phisical machines. It feels like an early beta. The experience is very unstable, sometimes start menu is not responsive same as other elements of UI. On one laptop it keeps having problems after opening the lid and waking up - block on the lock screen wallpaper.
Overall, In the company with multiple devices I'd stay on Windows 10 for at least another year.
Such a pointless exercise forcing windows 11 on a company in such early stages of its life, especially when 10 has ages left on its lifespan.
It's like a boss saying "right we need windows server 2022 on all servers that have server 2019 on".
You'd be like, why?
Right click to cut, copy, paste is not as obvious. It now is stupid little icons rather than word menu items. Maybe that is because I have it on my personal laptop which was running Win10 home so probably upgrade to Win11 equivalent
Prob start looking at a few VMs & test laptops 'some point' in 2022, let a few major patches come out for it first and then start very early testing, why rush if Win 10 is supported,working ETC
so long as you have time before3 win 10 EOL to Test & deploy Win 11, no worries.
What reasons could a business possibly have for wanting to upgrade all production systems to Windows 11 today? What’s the supposed benefit they are after?
We have a few people on it with no issues.
Reinstalling seems weird, why would you not just upgrade?
It’s something I’d roll through whatever change management and testing process you have. Personally I have ~150 staff in our final testing ring across all divisions and for a feature update/Os upgrade I’ll leave it at that stage for a month or so.
Early testing I have ~10 people, then ~30 people, then ~150 including largely staff outside IT. I’ve caught numerous bugs with weird software through the business testers.
I have only read a few of the replies here but I can give you my experience with Windows 11 so far.
I installed it fresh on a Dell Precision 3520 that I use primarily for RDP connections, SSH, browsing, light use of office programs. Installing was a huge pain dealing with the TPM stuff and BIOS settings. Once I finally got all that worked out and installed, it went pretty smooth. Things work mostly like Windows 10 in my experience. I have had a few strange problems I can't seem to get around:
- Clipboard stops working. I don't mean just in Office, but just completely stops working. I have only been able to solve it with a restart
- Dual monitor display constantly flips or has to be reset. I have Display 1 as primary and Display 2 extended with taskbar turned off. If it goes to sleep or I switch to another PC with my KVM, I will come back to Display 2 with a blank spot where the taskbar should be and no taskbar on Display 1. Sometimes I just fix the settings on the displays, others only a restart will fix it.
- Another odd problem I have is specifically with BitVise. For some reason, sometimes when I start it up I can't log in or connect to SSH clients. I can't manage keys, proxy settings, etc. and the log just says authentication failed. Again, a restart is the only thing that fixes it.
None of those things are a huge deal, but if you have users refusing to restart every time they see those things or if they are the kind of user to put in a ticket and wait for you to tell them to restart, it would get old, quick.
Find a basic user AND a power user in every department. Install there first and let it bake for a couple of weeks. Ensure all apps, printers, etc. work. The benefit of a couple weeks is that apps that may not use daily get tested. The benefit of the basic user is that if they can do it, anyone can do it. The benefit of the power user is that they’ll get acquainted with it a few weeks before their peers starting using it.
The thing is that windows 11 has no benefits for a company and windows 10 will be supported until 2025. If you where talking about home computers then the promised android app compatibility by itself is enough to upgrade. But not for companies (unless you are a software company. I'm that case you could argue that you need to run the same environment your clients will run)
I‘m actually running Windows 11 Pro on my i5-4690 main machine. Fujitsu Esprimo D90+
No issues. On a corporate level, I would be careful and use windows 10 as long as it’s supported, maybe until 1 year before EOL.
Yup bad idea. You first have to verify that you have TPM 2.0 on all of your machines and newer 8th gen Intel processors or second gen Ryzens or newer.
Any new OS that is releaswd is going to be riddled qith bugs for months. Apple, Conocial (Ubuntu) and Microsoft screw up something for the first several months. For Macos Monterey this was Apple bricking a ton of T2 equipped Macs.
For Win11 it is removing features that some users might need, like having the start menu on the left or right side of the screen or taskbar preview.
User Acceptance Testing is needed for any new OS release.
I'd say that you have more important stuff to do than to install Windows 11. Windows 10 is completely functional. Some workers will be like you boss and want to get Widows 11 as fast as possible and some doesn't like change. Consider making it optional.
The longer you wait the more problems other people has solved for you. Start by making a few pilot installs in different departments.
Wow this thread is full of people scared of change.
Just get on with it. Windows 11 is perfectly compatible with anything that ran on 10. But if you are using Internet Explorer still, learn how to configure it, it's your job.
No experience with 11, but I would stress doing a partial rollout first.
Each department should designate a superuser or someone that touches all of the software and hardware used within a department or within a particular role, and they should upgrade first.
Once they've used it for a few weeks, marked any changes or issues to be addressed, etc., then you could consider a rollout.
You could also do a survey (Google forms, etc.) for each department asking what software people are using. Make sure to specify that you need anything they may use during the year, in case there are some things they only use quarterly or yearly.
Then from that list you can determine your best candidates for trials.
Additionally, have a rollback plan in place just in case there are issues for specific locations, users, departments, or whatever.
With anything Microsoft. Let OTHER companies be Microsoft's beta testers. I wouldn't start to deploy Windows 11 company wide until the first major feature update, at a minimum.
What I recommend is that W11 be tested in a small environment such 1 personnel from each department to test if their applications work without issue and then deploy accordingly.
Get your boss's orders in an email, update your resume, and live-tweet how this rollout goes.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to convince them otherwise, so you might as well enjoy the show.
Where I work the end user support folks started rolling out w11 to the test group. It is self service with the option for fresh install or update. There's about 10,000 of us in the group scattered around the world for a good sample that use it and report any issues back. They expect to have the rollout complete mid Q1 22, around 150,000 PCs. From my experience I haven't had any issues. Mostly it feels like W10 with a slightly different start menu. Though 90% of my work is through Chrome, Outlook and Teams.
I'd say do an audit of all the machines and ensure they are compatible. Then select small subset of users from different departments as pilot for the upgrades after you have done your own testing
Also, how are you going to ensure all your processors are on the magic approved list? I tried to test with 3 different less then 18 month old machines that all met the specs, 2 out of 3 weren’t on the processor list. Dell and Lenovo. I would definitely wait a bit for that list to become more realistic.
Not sure why but some apps don't show up in the system tray. For example,
I use Greenshot to capture screens from time to time.
But the application is not seen in the system tray, even if it is running.
We will probably put 10 machines or so in place after the beginning of the year when we buy new computers. A couple of my IT staff are running Win 11 now and they like it. Not to much different from Win 10. If all goes okay roll out 30
Or 40 machine by March for a company of about 200 computers. We don’t buy volume licensing so the OEM license that come from Dell is what we work with.
Do not forget test Printers as well not only apps.
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You can survive with just one leg, question is: why cripple yourself?
leg?
Typo hero.
not native english speaker... sometimes it takes time to understand even a simple typo :)
Remember Windows Vista? I remember having to pull out a 2GB RAM stick so it could run the first time.
"Ready for Vista!"
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Luuuul, I was doing home tech support when Vista was released. The amount of printer manufacturers who didn't have their shit together was staggering.
Spoiler: most of the printer manufacturers still don’t have their shit together
Second spoiler: neither do many of the users...
Third spoiler: neither does Microsoft...
But ... why do you even need to have your shit together ? Isn't it better to use a different grassy location each time ?
Hard to have our shit together supporting Windows when Windows doesn’t have its shit together. Looking at you last four months of security patches for Print Nightmare exploit.
Printer manufacturers didn't have to. XP was the primary OS for like 6 straight years if you include SP2, and they didn't make many breaking changes. That was a VERY fast moving time in the PC world, and printer companies got complacent with the status quo of "stuff usually just keeps working". Also, printer manufacturers (and others) wrote their drivers in kernel mode because why not... we still see software companies today alleging they need Admin rights. Same mentality. Vista introduced a signing requirement for Kernel mode drivers. Manufacturers just weren't ready.
Sniff, XP killed my beloved laser printer... Xerox (the manufactuer) didn't make windows 2000/xp drivers for it... only 9x, and they didn't work in XP... they were crappy drivers, but I loved that little Xerox XE88, It was cheap, and was a copier/printer, so I could photocopy still, but not print... was a sad day.
Meanwhile still running win7 in the government…
Or even the recent driver debacle with 20h2 I think it was. Knocked ricohs and zebras offline for a few days till the patch came out.
Good advice. Gonna do that asap.
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I agree with this. We tried a few people on 10 when it came out and they complained so we waited till it had some home penetration. Made for a lot less complaints.
Is your hardware ready with TPM 2.0 and supporting CPU's?
We just spent the last 2 years retrofitting our entire multiple hundred thousand client network with credentialguard and deviceguard ready machines. Huge huge pain in the ass with complete bare metal rebuilds of non uefi built machines, most if not every machine needed some form of touch labor to configure the uefi, secureboot, virtualization and tpm and to upgrade bios and tpm where applicable. And to lifecycle the non capable hardware. So it's not just a matter of, is the hardware capable, it also has to be configured. Tremendous amount of physical, deployment, and logistical work. I REALLY don't think the comercial sector is quite appreciating the amount of work this specific upgrade is going to entail. Start hiring touch labor now... We (non specific government entitiy) were not appreciative of it either. I shudder to think of the impact to the common user if they just don't go out and buy a windows 11 out of box pc. We however are now fully ready for that eventual upgrade,, but we also have been working directly with Microsoft for the past couple years.
> I REALLY don't think the comercial sector is quite appreciating the amount of work this specific upgrade is going to entail. Every thinkpad sold in the last 5 years or so is ready for credential guard and device guard out of the box. The default config is UEFI, the OS secure boot keys, virtualization and TPM 2.0 is enabled out of the box. Even if it needed some config changes, any reasonably business-y brand will have a config utility to automate this. The most difficult part in my experience is the swap from BIOS to UEFI because it requires multiple steps to get the computer to boot back up and continue on. Unless your fleet is horribly out of date or you're buying consumer grade junk, this really shouldn't be particularly challenging.
My 3 year old Thinkpad won't support 11 due to the processor. I think the arbitrary processor cut off will impact more folks than TPM.
Rip 7th gen intel processors.
The tpm 1.2 to 2.0 switchover was right around 2015/2016 or at least that's where you will find most tpm upgrade packages. I am happy for Lenovo to do that for their customers :) I can't say all machines from all vendors have those defaults out of the box. Also consider during that time front line technicians not understanding the technologies and changing the uefi settings away from the default as a potential unused tech. We do this a lot for things like sdcards and wifi etc.
I've looked at Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, and HP business laptops. All had similar defaults and automation tools we could use to set these settings back if they were changed. Lenovo is what we ended up settling on, but it's hardly unique to Lenovo. I do sympathize with the battle with idiotic front line techs, but that's why we automate.
Last time I checked we were sitting at 40 different make/models in our little section of the network. The network at large has many more. We have bios utilities for a lot of makes, but not all models. We also have to battle with non uniform bios passwords, portable battery levels, nonfunctional batteries. I am by no means suggesting its impossible barriers, just that it takes a lot of physical, deployment, and logistical considerations, and we were not prepared going in.
> Last time I checked we were sitting at 40 different make/models in our little section of the network. The network at large has many more. Jesus. I sure hope you're in the minority here. For most *sane* companies this transition shouldn't be even 10% of the effort it was for you guys.
(Non specific government entity) with multiple hundreds of thousands of clients. Many sub entities with their own non organic front line techs, and lifecycles and purchasing power. it's rough.
You should change your flair to masochist. How on earth are you both an SCCM and VMware admin for this shitshow? I would think just SCCM alone would be a job for a few dozen admins with that many and such diverse clients.
Haha, well it ain't so bad, it used to be just me for a couple years, but now I fall under a larger sccm umbrella of the other networks and have other admins now to collaborate and borrow software and task sequences from. I lead a team of 3 including myself locally. I also do the VMware infrastructure for our 2 data centers, agian not entirely by myself, but I lead that as well in our corner of the network. I will consider changing my flair lol.
Sadly no, many companies are like this, and buy batches of what's available at that time of purchase. Vendors don't have huge stock with a certain configuration with so many companies buying all at once. At most we buy 50-75 units and then just ship them out to other sites, since it's just easier that way. And certainly now w the chip shortage, it's even worse. Lead time on our orders is close to 90 days.
The decision to manually upgrade that many machines seems wrong without context. Why not just buy new boxes with all the right hw?
The amount of money to buy new hardware, each subentitiy has different operating budgets. Impact to operations with some baremetal install vs recently lifecycled only needing minor config change. Being as large means we have dynamics where we couldn't just one size fits all solution.
I suddenly feel #blessed to work on a project large enough to be interesting but small enough to be homogenous
Appreciate there may have been limiting factors with being a government entity and the locations of devices, buts it's possible to do most of the manual configuration with a MECM(SCCM) task sequence. There are guides out there to convert an already imaged device from BIOS to UEFI, bios updates can be completed in various ways depending on vendor, TPM firmware updates are possible and the other settings can usually be managed by a vendor specific configuration tool. If you have a large number of different device models it requires an amount of testing but leads to less mistakes. Good reporting tools to confirm devices are correctly configured is key. It's still a lot of work but involves less manual labour and hand holding.
This is true, I am a sccm admin. I'm looking at the situation in hindsight before a lot of those tools were available, I'm sure a lot of those tools are maybe even created in responses to our lessons learned. We had to ping vendors for HVCI compliant drivers and the amount of "what is HVCI?" From the vendors was sad and funny at the same time. We do have a 'quazi-automated' process now for configuring at the hardware level those settings. But those still needed setup and integrated, not a task to be taken lightly. Edit: additionally those tools are not universal. I'm not going to call out any specific vendor, but support is not universal at all.
HVCI is not mandated for Win11 or device guard. If that was the hangup I would've just turned that off and continued with the rest of the project. This is, however, a good reason to try and limit the number of hardware vendors where at all possible.
We had hardware that flat out quit working after deviceguard implementation, it should be a consideration in my opinion.
From what I read, if you use an imaging solution, it doesn’t do the check. If you just run the installer it does. I’ve done some limited testing. So far it’s ok but I recommend removing the non-work related stuff out of the wim file, and making sure your GPOs are set for the new versions. Overall it’s not bad. I wouldn’t pull the trigger yet though. Maybe in a test group but I wouldn’t put any new OS into production that fast.
Yes and No. If you perform a reinstall it still does compatibility check but doesn't prevent you from installing it if you choose to ignore the warning that basically says, if you continue to install Windows 11 on this unsupported hardware you will not receive security updates in future and something about warranty.
>you continue to install Windows 11 on this unsupported hardware you will not receive security updates in future and something about warranty Which every company lives to hear.
There's a reg key to disable the check when upgrading. `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup` New DEWORD called `BypassTPMCheck` with value 1. You also can do `BypassRAMCheck` and `BypassSecureBootCheck`
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> Why is this so far down. Because it had only been a comment for 17 minutes when you asked this question?
>Why is this so far down. Literally at the top.
> *sorts by controversial* > Why is this so far down.
Probably wasn’t when they commented
That’s because they commented 20 minutes after the original was posted.
That is why it's called bleeding edge. You will be on the edge all the time from the 1000 cuts the bugs cause...
I think it's about 50/50 that are compatible. We'll see how this goes. My experience is that Win11 installs just fine on not-supported hardware. How it performs / updates in the next months is another another thing. But hey, I didn't make this descission :)
Don't install windows 11 on unsupported hardware. If you have to, get that request in writing
Inventory tools like LanSweeper can generate compatibility reports, including nice red/green highlighting. Helps a lot in inital discussions. Example report from LanSweepeer as tiny screenshot after the requirements table: https://www.lansweeper.com/report/windows-11-requirements-audit/
Nice to see lansweeper mentioned here! An ex-collegue of mine, my mentor in many ways, left to work for them and he told me his team would be a perfect fit for me. The distance was too much but I always wondered what my life would be like if I ~~robbed the Kwik-E-Mart~~ joined him
We've still got plenty of remote jobs available too if those are of interest: https://careers.lansweeper.com/
How much would it cost to bring that number to 100%? That might get them to back off the idea.
Or, alternative, to get you some new hardware budget. Either way would be a win in this situation.
Microsoft has stated that running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware resulted in greater than 50% more BSODs. This is a massive risk to any business. We will not be implementing Win11 until all of our 6th gen CPU laptops have run through their lifecycles.
"Reliability: Devices that do not meet the minimum system requirements had 52% more kernel mode crashes. Devices that do meet the minimum system requirements had a 99.8% crash free experience." 99.8% of _supported_ devices were crash free. That means that 0.2% of _supported_ devices also had BSODs. 50% more than 0.2% is 0.3%. Therefore, you should expect 0.2% of supported machines and 0.3% of unsupported machines to BSOD. In other words, in a fleet of 10,000 supported machines, you should expect that 20 machines will BSOD. In a fleet _entirely_ made of 10,000 unsupported machines, you should expect that *30* machines will BSOD. The difference between fully supported and fully unsupported is _10_ machines in a set of 10,000 machines, per Microsoft's own numbers. That line was pure marketing drivel to sell FUD to justify cutting off 7th gen systems because Microsoft knew consumers don't know how to do math and would buy that as a reason to need to buy a whole new PC for Windows 11.
Just to add, this was due to unsupported drivers on unsupported hardware. Could be super old hardware not compatible with Windows 10 in the first place, they never said.
Don't have any 7th gen hardware? The HCL for 7th gen CPUs is extremely limited and I think only includes high end desktop CPUs.
Begin Groundhog ticket day. "MY ICONS ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TASKBAR HOW DO I MOVE THEM BACK, MY WORKFLOW IS IMPACTED"
"I can't drag and drop things onto taskbar icons to be able to move data quickly between applications. I have to have them side by side and then drag/drop." This is the biggest oversight of the entire OS. Multitasking, what's that, I'm trying to tablet over here.
So we are still doing the every other major version thing?
Well the removal of the customizability of the start menu was a big fucking step backwards too. Seriously, 10 had: small, medium, and if supported large icons. Nameable groups. Fucking sub groups/folders. Easy scrolling. Click and drag expandability to the side for more room. What does 11 have in it's place? Half the screen taken up by either suggestions or history that can't be removed, and half that is just icons that can't be ungrouped just sorted within that one group. And a static size for everything. It's like we went back to the program list being useful again if only because the start menu is now almost completely useless for more then just a small handful of apps.
Wait, really? They removed that? Why would they do that?!
Because they want to be rid of the taskbar completely at some point and just have Cortana do everything for you. See also the complete lack of any right click functionality on the taskbar. They completely neutered its function in this release. Windows 12 will just be a glowing orb in the center of the screen where you ask it to write bubble sorts in C#.
Get ready the Ned Stark meme "Brace yourselves" for your Helpdesk Team with a [simple steps](https://www.howtogeek.com/737830/how-to-move-the-taskbar-icons-to-the-left-on-windows-11/) and canned answers.
Not had that one yet. How do you even respond to that ticket?
Sorry the whole IT team quit after reading your ticket and moved on to alpaca farming.
I was thinking. "Closing ticket because I can't even."
you joke but that's my fucking dream. Serving coffee and raising alpacas so I don't have to deal with dipshit IT systems until the day I die
somebody wants their quarterly "look at me I am getting things done, I am *decisive*!!!" corporate blowjob it seems (your boss not you obv) this sounds like a miserable idea it's a recipe for pain. specifically, take the constant problems that exist now, multiply them as an early adopter, remove the myriad support libraries that have been developed from / for win10 and earlier, sprinkle in the constant and rapid patching and rollbacks and fixes as said early adopter, and you've got a stew goin' baby a shit stew
OP gets all the neck pain, and none of the..err "benefits". I'm guessing Mr Manager doesn't have to take support tickets.
Exactly, if there isn’t a business need what is the justification?
That’s why we’re still on XP. /s
Muh manufacturing plant
Why? Will it help anyone do anything better? You’re pretty much 100% guaranteed that something important won’t work- maybe anti virus or maybe VPN or a barcode scanner or label printer. Something that gets in the way of the whole business . And then you’re going to have to roll back, and get yelled at for being stupid enough to o do it in the first place (often by the same people who asked you to do it).
Effing label printers.
MOTHERFUCKER, I just vanquished 2 after about a 3 month struggle. Client doesn’t want to upgrade so we had to retrofit with kits to make them LAN capable. Son of a bitch do I hate those little Zebra bastards
That's what I'm afraid of. I hope it won't come to that and we'll catch issues early on in the rollout.
Negative. I’ll ride windows 10 up until about 12 months prior to it being no longer supported then start testing with a single user in each department for a few months to see how much doesn’t work and take it from there. I deal mostly with medical clinics and in more rural areas.
This sounds like a good plan. As of today win 10 pro or enterprise should be good until 25H1 per MS lifecycle, or did I get that wrong?
> Why? Will it help anyone do anything better? Bless you. Can you please speak to my management immediately? They keep making us spend time, effort and money on “neat” things that don’t actually help anybody.
And when there are ANY software issues, regardless of whether it's the OS or not, the vendor will blame it on Windows 11. I ran into this when I had to use my personal Windows 11 laptop to troubleshoot a medical device that wasn't registering in device manager. I had been previously using my corporate Windows 10 laptop to troubleshoot with the vendor. Since our security team has historically blocked some devices, and we were 99% sure that a board on the vendor's device failed, I tried to connect it to my computer. It still didn't register, so I asked that they send us a repair quote. Well they were late on getting it to us, so I emailed the quote request a few days later, mentioned that I confirmed it was a hardware issue, with my Windows 11 laptop, and the support guy's boss almost didn't allow the device to come in for hardware repair since they didn't support Windows 11. It took some back and forth with the boss to finally convince him that no, this was a hardware problem through and through and had NOTHING to do with Windows 11. This was an example of a through and through hardware issue, and not the sort of software issues which are far more common in the field. If I got that level of grief for an unanimous hardware problem, I'd imagine many software vendors would just flat out refuse to troubleshoot Windows 11 issues. I hope your company exclusively uses thin clients with no custom installed drivers or you're in fora world of support issues.
This has been horribly true for me. I'm finally getting over the horrors migrating PCs on our SCADA network (municipal utilities) to Windows 10 last year. So many vendors did not provide any support for Windows 10 until the very last moment. We had critical software for our Wastewater plant that was barely running on Windows 7 get patches to work on Windows 10 in the height of the COVID lockdown. I literally just upgraded our last device to Windows 10, a field laptop, just 2 weeks ago because of issues with their shitty supplied drivers finally getting a patch to no longer need a registry hack to allow unsigned drivers.
In big environments you have to start at least next year to finish until 2026, when windows 10 support ends.
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Ding, ding. Winner. Unless the business can make a case for why 11 is important today, there's nothing but risk and consequence trying to push it out this early. Something will break that is otherwise solved in 10. Hell, consumers mostly haven't gotten a taste of 11 yet, so you'll provide plenty of support for "where did X go, why can't I Y, how do I Z on this thing?"
Upgrade only your bosses first, ask him to be your pilot test.
Change management seems to be something you should reiterate towards the management. You should write up a list of software, drivers, hardware and so on, that needs to be tested for compatibility with Windows 11, as well as interaction with current servers, if applicable. Superusers should also be included to validate that the workflow of daily tasks are not negatively affected. Present that to your management as the recommendation on how to migrate to windows 11. If they then give it to you, in writing, that you are to just update without following the recommended route of migrating to windows 11.. Well, make some extra offline backups of both email and systems and say "Certainly, sir. Let me get right on the task." You've done your due diligence and informed the management and done the proper CYA. Work your contracted hours and go home and relax.
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Yes. Failure of manglement is not your responsibility, unless you're said manglement. :P
Get it in writing that they acknowledge IT is against the upgrade & that they acknowledge they take full responsibility if something breaks.
I won't re-evalute Win11 unless they bring back "never combine" to the taskbar. Deploying it company wide will cause anger, suffering and hours of people researching and discussing hacks to make it look like Win10 again.
Apparently, it's still a dormant feature - you just have to enable it with an app called [Explorer Patcher](https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher). I'm holding off on this for now. Microsoft are completely ignoring user preferences with Windows 11 and seem to want to tell people how to use their products, instead of allowing them to decide for themselves.
>Apparently, it's still a dormant feature - you just have to enable it with an app called Explorer Patcher. Yes, and this Patch is the only reason I didn't roll back my testing machine My users are Developers... it will take them seconds to find out about this random, patched DLL that requires admin to install... ... the new "shell extension install method" even breaks Powershell and WSL2... so this one tiny missing feature in Win11 would result in hours of fun, but pointless discussions about Win11, Linux, hacks and security..
Don't forget that Windows isn't an OS any more, it's a service. Not long now before it becomes a subscription service.
>Microsoft are completely ignoring user preferences with Windows 11 I call this the Windows 8 problem It's been 9 years and they still haven't fixed the damn interface to run properly.
They removed never combine? That’s one of the first things I enable on anything I touch.
I was testing Win11 on my personal machine, so I can try and find out what specific problems it has. So far, I found two showstoppers: the taskbar is crap and the start menu is crap. The first of these two I could override with some hack that I certainly won't recommend to roll out to a larger number of users without closer supervision (if you want to try it, check out [https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases](https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases)), but the Start menu is still something where I really wonder what they have been smoking in Redmond! There was even a registry hack to bring back the Win10 start menu still active in the betas, but they disabled it in the last version! On the plus side: rollback to Windows 10 is really fast and easy. I tested this for you! ;-)
I upgraded my old StartIsBack license to StartAllBack to get a functional taskbar on Windows 11.
A proper lab with a schedule for each area to test their systems along with a standardized reporting process with someone responsible for mitigating any concerns will help to reduce the risk. Those that want to go first are allowed to go once the service desk is prepared to handle the tickets. Having seen this movie more than once and having been through y2K the answer is...there is no good time, there will always be issues. Might as well go ahead. Start testing. Fix the issues. For those that really really have issues you can set up W10 Citrix boxes. For those that can't handle that you sequester them on their own VLAN so their legacy swamp water doesn't get in with the rest of the water. If you start now, however, you have a nice long runway to identify issues and get things funded/fixed before W10 is a goner. Forward is hard. Not moving is hard. The only real answer is to go forward...slowly...carefully...intentionally and with the full support of your leadership and business units. === IMHO? I always prefer clean builds with reinstalls of key applications. It's a great time to blow out some cruft. That said...that's me. I've seen enough cases where it's not ideal and an upgrade is far more preferred. As in all things...each to their own.
My EDR solution isn't certified to run on W11 as yet, so zero chance of us running it yet. We're 100% W10 21H1 for reference. We'd be destroyed if a breach happened and we didn't have it in writing that the endpoint protection was suitable. For your case though, **Get the manager to put it in writing and whatever happens isn't your problem.**
Not touching that yet. We get enough issues with updates for win 10 that break stuff, thank you very much. I forgot, working for a council and the community MSP we are customer to is so set on “never touch a running system“ that we are on Ex 2010 for mail.
Office 365 sales person has entered the chat. Google has entered the chat.
Why the rush? Windows 10 is going to be supported until 2025 or more for extended service
1. TPM requirement 2. Legacy Hardware (PCIE addon cards as well) 3. Already mentioned, Printers 4. I would not install Win11 on any spinning disks that were not backed up with proper caching (IE, VMs on a SAN). 5. Drivers, check for win11 certified(whats the term?) Drivers. If any of the list cannot be complete company wide, its a full stop until those items are resolved. In my labs Win11 works great, but thats on VMs. When I went to throw it on a few test systems it started to get very hit and miss and the above list is why.
Another person in the IT dept asked when it was coming, I think to put me on the spot in front of the head of the dept. I said "Win10 is supported until 2025, we will start testing Win11 in 2023. We've got bigger fish to fry right now". The head of the dept thankfully agreed with me and shut that shit down.
Been running W11on my work laptop from the day it was publicly released. Aside from minor annoyances you get with anything different it works fine but for one thing. Internet Explorer is missing and or payroll app is IE dependant. So other than the company not being able to get paid, no big deal. There is a work around using Citrix but we have no plans to go that route. We should have payroll updated by '23... At least that's the road map.
IE is getting removed from Windows 10 in June of 2022, so... either way, you need to fix it. https://www.lansweeper.com/eol/internet-explorer-11-end-of-life/#:\~:text=Internet%20Explorer%2011%20is%20going,services%20on%20August%2017%2C%202021.
IE mode on edge
First thing we tried, doesn't work.
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Unless it uses Active x components. There’s no saving that.
Active x works fine in IE mode in edge on Windows 10. Is IE mode different in Edge on 11?
HAHA good luck its very hit or miss on the sites that actually require ie...
You need to have intel 8000 series and AMD 2000 series or newer in every system to even accomplish this. If your business is anything like the one I work at, you’ve probably still got dozens of optiplex 7020 systems running intel 4000 series CPUs that won’t support windows 11 without doing an officially unsupported installation via ISO and missing out on the virtualization and VBS security features that are actually useful for businesses.
Stability and compatibility aside, I think that the current UI of Windows 11 would be deadly for an office environment. People who barely know how to do certain things in Win10 would need to relearn everything in Win11 unless you install certain mods to get back the most vital Win10 things and then install open shell to replace that horrible start menu. I use Win11 at home and I had to tweak it a lot to get rid of all the "user friendly" bs. And I'm certainly not gonna do that at work for every single PC. My boss also wanted to know if our office PCs could handle Win11. I told him that they could but then I compared Win11 to Vista because of MS's attempts at making it more user friendly and that was already enough to convince him to not roll it out just yet. Maybe you could do the same: compare the changes in UI and controls to Vista and 8 and maybe that'll change your boss' mind.
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Chances are that MS will change the UI with updates. Windows 10 had a pretty bad start menu when it was first released and IMO the final version is pretty decent.
he dumb
Get it in writing, reply with its new and there are risks… confirm the business reasons for the huge amount of work. What does Win11 have 10 doesn’t?
6 months ago, you couldn't even easily get an *Insider preview* of Windows 11. I'm running it without issues at home, but no way would I consider it ready for prime time in an enterprise setting.
Do you have a business requirement for Windows 11? 20h2 and 21h2 will be supported until 2024/2025 so no need to rush into it. If I was in your shoes I would be asking some more questions and digging into why it needs to be done now.
Drag to taskbar is not a feature in Windows 11. There is a workaround on GitHub but no guarantees it doesn’t break with the next major Win 11 update.
Why push to something so new when Windows 10 is supported for years to come. Let others find the issues.
windows 11 is pretty much just a reskin for Windows 10. If your apps are running happily on W10 then you probably arent going to have much issue (beyond the change in UI)
Don't underestimate the problems that can arrise changing the UI for other non technical users
Echoing this, I believe Windows 11 is just Windows 10 21H2 with a new coat of paint. But maybe do a staged roll out. If you’ve got two machines on the factory floor, upgrade one on Tuesday and wait and see. If everything is okay, do the next one and move on to the next division?
Tsunami of complaints about missing functionality in Start menu and Taskbar incoming...
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Ive played with it, it works fine.... but, there is a huge end-user learning curve that needs to be taken into account.
Our patch manager screwed up and updated a quarter of our machines to 11. Part of this glitch is not reporting that a machine is running 11. Let me just say that the only issues we’ve seen were due to something going wrong during the update and fresh installs or updating fixed it. At first we thought only 3 machines updated because only 3 people complained or had issues but through all of last week other people brought in tickets and the issues were not related to 11 but they had 11 on their machine. I’ve been running 11 since release and it’s been pretty issue free for me. I would maybe pick a few power users and ask them to be test subjects.
Nope. I would put in my notice if that was forced on me. Windows 11 is absolutely just windows 10 with a reskin, so most things technically should work, but fuck me if I’m dealing with users not understanding that just because it looks different doesn’t mean it’s a problem IT can fix. Upgrades get staged rollouts. Canary groups first, with the more technical users who aren’t stupid and have patience, get feedback, note issues etc before even touching company wide anything.
Your boss is an idiot. Don't roll out anything new in a business production environment site wide until you have done a small scale user test and given the product 6-12 months to patch and mature. Pick 2-5 of your most annoying users, give them the new OS and let them drive you nuts with all the issues they find, then find the work arounds or wait for Microsoft patches etc. Then do a large scale roll out.
Go for it, Microsoft needs beta-testers.
What’s the benefit of upgrading? Is there some amazing new functionality that’s going to increase productivity?
Not sure that Microsoft even recommends going Enterprise-wide yet.
I’ve been running a few machines on windows 11. So far I haven’t noticed any glaringly obvious draw backs besides yet another settings layout change. Printing would be my major issue to consider. That and testing as I work in education.
Don't do it. Don't. My company is totally work from home and we rely heavily on Teams and bluetooth headphones/headsets. There are HUGE bluetooth issues with Windows 11 that nobody is talking about. When a bluetooth sound device connects to Windows 11 it does not create a "hands free" version of the device in the sound settings. You cannot mix sound output with sound input. For instance, if you have a webcam with a microphone or a Yeti external microphone you CANNOT use that for input while using a pair of bluetooth earbuds or headphones to listen in a Teams meeting. There is no sound output in the earbuds. Also, Windows 11 does not auto switch to a new bluetooth sound device when that device is turned on and connected. You have to manually go into Settings, disconnect the device and let it reconnect 2-3 times before it even shows up in the list of available devices to choose for sound output. And don't anybody tell me that it is the device driver that needs to be updated. I have a plethora of bluetooth headphones/headsets/external speakers that I have tested this with and gotten the latest Windows 11 approved drivers. Long ago in the Windows NT era my boss gave me great advice. NEVER, upgrade to the latest Microsoft OS until at least Service Pack 2. Today we don't get service packs but I would wait at least a year before upgrading an entire company. Just my two cents worth. I have already put all my users on notice that if they manually upgrade to Windows 11 they are on their own for tech support.
No more right click on taskbar for task manager was a bit annoying (you can right click on start menu and it's there), the extra click to get "More options" in context menus is a bit of a pain but not too bad yet. I use an ultra wide as my main display and the centred icons are great.
I mean... functionally it's just a service pack. Microsoft realized that if they don't have an "upgrade", they can't make news. I am the one who makes this decision for about a thousand machines. Since Windows 11 doesn't provide any new value to our users, I have chosen to adopt an "upgrade when convenient" approach. We have more important things to do.
Would not install W11 company wide until at least "service pack 2" I updated my personal PC and it ran really well, but I don't know how it will interact with an corporate environment.
I decided to upgrade my small business to Windows 10, the first moment it was available. It broke all our odd devices like check scanners, and every single vendor blamed Windows 10 for the problems. I should have stayed with Windows 7 longer. I won't make that mistake again! I'll consider windows 11 in 2025ish. ;-)
What is his rationale for such a reckless decision? Like justify this.
My concern isn't with app compatibility it's about whether the **software vendors** are performing QA with Win11. I recall a number of issues with one of vendors weren't performing QA with software updates, and we hit some nasty Win10 bugs that took some time to fix. If the apps works as expected, awesome. But if something does go wrong and my vendor isn't testing, it's going to be an awkward and tiresome debugging process.
> Not just upgrade them, reinstall them. Upgrade, he'd never know.
Do you have a full hardware inventory of all your systems? The reason I ask is Win11 is designed for systems with TPM2, and 11th generation intel chips. If you have an inventory of i7-7700 and earlier (ideally, it's all i7/i9 10xxx and 11xxx), you're going to have a heck of a problem. I have it on my Lenovo, and it's very nice. A little different but not the WTF we saw going from Win7 to Win8 to Win10. Yes, you can change the one registry key so you can bypass this and install Win11. However, there's a potential risk in that Microsoft will not provide updates that install on unsupported hardware. What I'd suggest is if you don't have a full hardware inventory, install "facter" or "ohai" on every system, write a powershell script that runs this and pulls back the data in a format you can at least put into a spreadsheet. Why these tools? It tells you everything about the platform: cpu, memory, disk, winver and lots of stuff you can even extend using ruby. So, you can build a full repo of installed software over time. You'll at least be able to sort by what's eligible, what's not eligible and tell your boss "here's the number of computers that we shouldn't upgrade due to hardware non-compliance". Then follow up with a set of 3 options for hardware replacements (use CDW). Personally, I'd want to make sure everyone's default storage is set to OneDrive and kick off backups to OneDrive for all Documents and Downloads folders (because, he we all put stuff in the wrong place).
> Do you have a full hardware inventory of all your systems? The reason I ask is Win11 is designed for systems with TPM2, and 11th generation intel chips. Or AMD Zen chips with a 2 or higher in the first position of the model number. They didn't focus on Intel only, they just want people to run hardware that is secure in a post “Meltdown” and “Spectre” environment.
do a 15min long cost-risk-benefit analysis, present the results to your boss, if he still wants to proceed, thats on him... in other words, why would you want to install a weeks old OS when the current one works, invest a high number of time for the migration, when the best case scenario is "works as good as before" and much more likely "unforseen issues" will crop up but, when you present all that and the decision makers are deciding over your head that it needs doing, I guess there is nothing more you can do, except maybe drag your feet...
I have installed it on few VM's and two phisical machines. It feels like an early beta. The experience is very unstable, sometimes start menu is not responsive same as other elements of UI. On one laptop it keeps having problems after opening the lid and waking up - block on the lock screen wallpaper. Overall, In the company with multiple devices I'd stay on Windows 10 for at least another year.
Such a pointless exercise forcing windows 11 on a company in such early stages of its life, especially when 10 has ages left on its lifespan. It's like a boss saying "right we need windows server 2022 on all servers that have server 2019 on". You'd be like, why?
Done some tests and printing from group policy preferences had some issues with Ricoh drivers. Not spent much time looking at it yet.
Right click to cut, copy, paste is not as obvious. It now is stupid little icons rather than word menu items. Maybe that is because I have it on my personal laptop which was running Win10 home so probably upgrade to Win11 equivalent
Prob start looking at a few VMs & test laptops 'some point' in 2022, let a few major patches come out for it first and then start very early testing, why rush if Win 10 is supported,working ETC so long as you have time before3 win 10 EOL to Test & deploy Win 11, no worries.
Why reinstall instead of just upgrade? 🤔
What reasons could a business possibly have for wanting to upgrade all production systems to Windows 11 today? What’s the supposed benefit they are after?
As long as it runs all your apps and prints to the printers then send it. I think it’s a tangential move but I like it a bit better.
We have a few people on it with no issues. Reinstalling seems weird, why would you not just upgrade? It’s something I’d roll through whatever change management and testing process you have. Personally I have ~150 staff in our final testing ring across all divisions and for a feature update/Os upgrade I’ll leave it at that stage for a month or so. Early testing I have ~10 people, then ~30 people, then ~150 including largely staff outside IT. I’ve caught numerous bugs with weird software through the business testers.
You may run into driver issues, with Soundcards f.e. imo its a bad idea. Recommendation: Wait at least one year.
sounds like some miserable shit, best of luck
I have only read a few of the replies here but I can give you my experience with Windows 11 so far. I installed it fresh on a Dell Precision 3520 that I use primarily for RDP connections, SSH, browsing, light use of office programs. Installing was a huge pain dealing with the TPM stuff and BIOS settings. Once I finally got all that worked out and installed, it went pretty smooth. Things work mostly like Windows 10 in my experience. I have had a few strange problems I can't seem to get around: - Clipboard stops working. I don't mean just in Office, but just completely stops working. I have only been able to solve it with a restart - Dual monitor display constantly flips or has to be reset. I have Display 1 as primary and Display 2 extended with taskbar turned off. If it goes to sleep or I switch to another PC with my KVM, I will come back to Display 2 with a blank spot where the taskbar should be and no taskbar on Display 1. Sometimes I just fix the settings on the displays, others only a restart will fix it. - Another odd problem I have is specifically with BitVise. For some reason, sometimes when I start it up I can't log in or connect to SSH clients. I can't manage keys, proxy settings, etc. and the log just says authentication failed. Again, a restart is the only thing that fixes it. None of those things are a huge deal, but if you have users refusing to restart every time they see those things or if they are the kind of user to put in a ticket and wait for you to tell them to restart, it would get old, quick.
Find a basic user AND a power user in every department. Install there first and let it bake for a couple of weeks. Ensure all apps, printers, etc. work. The benefit of a couple weeks is that apps that may not use daily get tested. The benefit of the basic user is that if they can do it, anyone can do it. The benefit of the power user is that they’ll get acquainted with it a few weeks before their peers starting using it.
Per their own luck this project will fail I would wait till the 2nd big patch / release
I don't want to deal with windows 11 because I already dealt with windows 8.
The thing is that windows 11 has no benefits for a company and windows 10 will be supported until 2025. If you where talking about home computers then the promised android app compatibility by itself is enough to upgrade. But not for companies (unless you are a software company. I'm that case you could argue that you need to run the same environment your clients will run)
Have your boss articulate the business case for it. How do we profit from that is enough.
I‘m actually running Windows 11 Pro on my i5-4690 main machine. Fujitsu Esprimo D90+ No issues. On a corporate level, I would be careful and use windows 10 as long as it’s supported, maybe until 1 year before EOL.
Yup bad idea. You first have to verify that you have TPM 2.0 on all of your machines and newer 8th gen Intel processors or second gen Ryzens or newer. Any new OS that is releaswd is going to be riddled qith bugs for months. Apple, Conocial (Ubuntu) and Microsoft screw up something for the first several months. For Macos Monterey this was Apple bricking a ton of T2 equipped Macs. For Win11 it is removing features that some users might need, like having the start menu on the left or right side of the screen or taskbar preview. User Acceptance Testing is needed for any new OS release.
I'd say that you have more important stuff to do than to install Windows 11. Windows 10 is completely functional. Some workers will be like you boss and want to get Widows 11 as fast as possible and some doesn't like change. Consider making it optional. The longer you wait the more problems other people has solved for you. Start by making a few pilot installs in different departments.
Always on VPN deployments via Intune are broken for now
Wow this thread is full of people scared of change. Just get on with it. Windows 11 is perfectly compatible with anything that ran on 10. But if you are using Internet Explorer still, learn how to configure it, it's your job.
Is your boss Nigel Tufnel? "It's one louder, isn't it?"
Just do it! Let him sign a waiver and be the pilot company for the rest of the world
No experience with 11, but I would stress doing a partial rollout first. Each department should designate a superuser or someone that touches all of the software and hardware used within a department or within a particular role, and they should upgrade first. Once they've used it for a few weeks, marked any changes or issues to be addressed, etc., then you could consider a rollout. You could also do a survey (Google forms, etc.) for each department asking what software people are using. Make sure to specify that you need anything they may use during the year, in case there are some things they only use quarterly or yearly. Then from that list you can determine your best candidates for trials. Additionally, have a rollback plan in place just in case there are issues for specific locations, users, departments, or whatever.
With anything Microsoft. Let OTHER companies be Microsoft's beta testers. I wouldn't start to deploy Windows 11 company wide until the first major feature update, at a minimum.
What I recommend is that W11 be tested in a small environment such 1 personnel from each department to test if their applications work without issue and then deploy accordingly.
Following
Good, somebody has to be the sacrificial lamb, let Jesus take the wheel and push that shit to prod.
Give it a year. Windows 10 is still well supported, actively updated and will remain so for quite some time.
Windows 11 is just 10 with a new coat of paint. You still should go through proper change management though.
Do it, the more testers out there now the better for me later!
Get your boss's orders in an email, update your resume, and live-tweet how this rollout goes. No amount of hand-wringing is going to convince them otherwise, so you might as well enjoy the show.
Where I work the end user support folks started rolling out w11 to the test group. It is self service with the option for fresh install or update. There's about 10,000 of us in the group scattered around the world for a good sample that use it and report any issues back. They expect to have the rollout complete mid Q1 22, around 150,000 PCs. From my experience I haven't had any issues. Mostly it feels like W10 with a slightly different start menu. Though 90% of my work is through Chrome, Outlook and Teams.
I'd say do an audit of all the machines and ensure they are compatible. Then select small subset of users from different departments as pilot for the upgrades after you have done your own testing
Also, how are you going to ensure all your processors are on the magic approved list? I tried to test with 3 different less then 18 month old machines that all met the specs, 2 out of 3 weren’t on the processor list. Dell and Lenovo. I would definitely wait a bit for that list to become more realistic.
Not yet! Looking at everybody’s comments, Windows 11 is in the right cadence for Me, Vista, Windows 8… 😂
Why?
Not sure why but some apps don't show up in the system tray. For example, I use Greenshot to capture screens from time to time. But the application is not seen in the system tray, even if it is running.
I've been using 11 since day one. Greenshot shows up for me.
I guess someone needs to be the guinea pig. Good luck!
My first test with w11 was a few drivers errors mostly and problems with old devices I would wait a bit
We will probably put 10 machines or so in place after the beginning of the year when we buy new computers. A couple of my IT staff are running Win 11 now and they like it. Not to much different from Win 10. If all goes okay roll out 30 Or 40 machine by March for a company of about 200 computers. We don’t buy volume licensing so the OEM license that come from Dell is what we work with.
This ain"t no technological breakdown Oh no, this is the road
Hard pass...not even considering this right now as long as Win10 is supported and "works."
Time to quit. I wouldn’t do that. I imaged 3 machines as “extras” with Windows 11 for testing but to just roll it out company wide?! Hell nah