Windows keeps asking for more machine

Windows 10 would install on a machine with one gigabyte of memory and thirty-two gigabytes of disk. Windows 11 wants four gigabytes, sixty-four gigabytes, a TPM 2.0 security chip and a processor from a list Microsoft keeps. The oldest Intel chips on that list are 8th generation Core, which reached shops in late 2017.

A working 2016 laptop didn’t break. It got reclassified.

The advertised minimum isn’t the real one

There’s a more honest number sitting in Microsoft’s hardware documentation. Windows 11 switches on a kernel protection called memory integrity by default on clean installs, but only where the hardware qualifies. To qualify: Intel 8th generation or newer, AMD Zen 2 or newer, at least 8 GB of memory, and a solid-state drive of at least 64 GB.

Eight gigabytes. The number on the box is four. Microsoft’s own engineers set the bar for turning on the flagship security feature at double the advertised minimum.

What got left behind

The analyst firm Canalys estimated in December 2023 that around 240 million PCs couldn’t be upgraded and were headed for scrap once Windows 10 support ended.

Support ended on 14 October 2025. Eleven months later, in August 2026, StatCounter still measured Windows 10 on just over 30 per cent of the world’s Windows desktops. That isn’t a handful of stubborn offices. Three in ten machines stayed put.

Microsoft’s answer was a year of extra security updates, since stretched to 12 October 2027. There are three ways in. Sync your settings to the cloud with Windows Backup, spend 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or pay thirty dollars. All three want you signed in to a Microsoft account, and the licence attaches to the account rather than to the computer.

Two of the three cost no money. What they cost is an account and your settings sitting in Microsoft’s cloud.

Meanwhile the desktop got busier

Microsoft documents a feature called Windows spotlight. In Microsoft’s own wording it delivers “suggestions, fun facts, tips”, described as “recommendations on how to enhance the user’s productivity of Microsoft products”, shown on “the lock screen, the background, the taskbar, or the Get Started app”. The same page lists a policy named AllowThirdPartySuggestionsInWindowsSpotlight, so other companies’ suggestions are contemplated as well.

In October 2024 an update changed the default wallpaper on Windows 11 machines to Windows spotlight. The promotional surface arrived by patch.

The Start menu picked up app promotions from the Microsoft Store in April 2024, in build 22635.3495. Microsoft shipped a switch for it, under Settings, then Personalization, then Start, where you turn off “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more”. You need to know it’s there.

The case for all of it

Here’s Microsoft’s argument, and it’s stronger than the internet usually allows.

Memory integrity runs the kernel’s code-signing checks inside a hypervisor-isolated environment, starting from the assumption that the kernel itself might already be compromised. That’s a real defence against a real class of attack. It leans on a silicon feature called mode-based execution control, which Intel added in Kaby Lake and AMD in Zen 2. Older processors can emulate it, and Microsoft’s documentation says plainly that they take a bigger performance hit when they do. The cutoff isn’t a whim. It sits roughly where the hardware stops being able to do this cheaply.

Microsoft also published figures: machines below the requirements saw 52 per cent more kernel crashes, while machines meeting them ran 99.8 per cent crash-free. That’s Microsoft’s own telemetry and nobody outside can reproduce it, but it’s a claim with a number attached rather than a slogan.

So the objection isn’t that TPM is theatre. It’s proportion. A 2016 laptop runs memory integrity slowly rather than not at all, and the answer offered to a few hundred million working computers was thirty dollars for one more year, tied to an account, on machines whose owners were being shown prompts to buy new ones.

The line has already moved again, incidentally. A Copilot+ PC needs 16 GB of memory, a 256 GB drive, and a neural processor that no computer sold before mid-2024 contains. Every machine that scraped past the 2021 cutoff falls outside the 2024 one.

What the other side asks for

Linux Mint 22 asks for 2 GB of memory and 20 GB of disk, and suggests 4 GB to be comfortable. Ubuntu’s install guide asks for 25 GB of storage and doesn’t print a memory minimum at all. Set against 4 GB and 64 GB, that’s roughly a third of the disk and half the memory, taken from the projects’ own pages rather than from anybody’s benchmark.

There’s no TPM requirement and no approved processor list. A 2013 machine installs the same Mint as a 2025 one.

Now the part that gets left out of the sales pitch. A ten-year-old laptop running Linux is still a ten-year-old laptop. No operating system makes a slow disk fast, and the heaviest thing on almost any desktop today is the web browser, which will take whatever memory you hand it regardless of what’s underneath. What you get back is the two or three gigabytes Windows was spending on itself, and a machine that stops being told it’s finished.

If you want to know how yours will cope, work through can my PC run Linux before you commit to anything. If you’d rather be told which Linux suits it, Find my Linux asks four things about the PC and what you do on it, then names one.