Windows 11 | W10 Support to End in October 2025

[Dragon Lord]

The main reason I won't go for a desktop for my next computer is needing the portability to take it with me to college classes and such. That said though @ShiraNoMai did recently buy a new desktop that we can set up now that we just finished building the new desk for it.

On part swapping issues, I've never touched anything on my Dell except to put an SSD into it which was just additional hardware rather than swapping it with another piece. So if that and some other brands are really bad about it I wasn't aware of that.


I know they wouldn't but could you imagine if Microsoft announced Windows 12 right after people have been forcibly migrated to 11 and W12 requires a hardware check again that's higher than the current minimum for 11?

Yeah, I was mainly referring to Elite checking out those other brands. Unfortunately buying a gaming laptop is kind of a pain because prices are so horribly inflated right now ($3,000+ for a top-tier gaming laptop) and laptops will always inherently be weaker than a desktop. A 4090 in a laptop is like the equivalent of a 3090/maybe 4060 at the absolute best.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft do that. Seems like the exact kind of scummy move they'd do. Not only would they do that, but they would also announce that there will be no free upgrades to Windows 12 and that Win11 support would be ended at the end of 2026.

[Moonface]

A 4090 in a laptop is like the equivalent of a 3090/maybe 4060 at the absolute best.

Oh really? I never knew that. How come though?

[Dragon Lord]

Mainly just due to the size. Laptop GPUs output much less power due to size and also because they need to be capped at a lower amount to try and combat heating issues (thermal throttling). Laptops don't tend to have as good of ventilation solutions as a PC case does, so with laptops you're going to be combating that a lot. It's also what typically leads gaming laptops to have very short battery life (a few hours at most unplugged).

I just urge anyone looking to get a gaming laptop as their primary to do lots of research and make sure you're 1000% okay with what you're going to be getting with a laptop, because as I mentioned before, what you buy is what you get and there's no upgrading down the road unless you fork over another 2-4K for a new laptop.

[Mr EliteL]

ASUS and Acer are ones I have been looking at, Razer I was as well but after DL mentioned not to go for them then I'll avoid it. Have also begun to look at MSI as well. I unfortunately still have no room for a desktop so laptop is my only choice between the two. I have a laptop fan that can hopefully help with any heating issues but yeah I'll keep looking for now.

A possible Window 12 coming soon-ish? Ah well If I do get a new laptop with Windows 11 and get used to it, I'll end up probably not upgrading to 12 as soon as it releases.

[Moonface]

Laptops don't tend to have as good of ventilation solutions as a PC case does, so with laptops you're going to be combating that a lot. It's also what typically leads gaming laptops to have very short battery life (a few hours at most unplugged).

This is something that my Dell laptop is actually really good with. I've never had it get close to running hot even when running games it's capable of at full quality settings, and the battery when unplugged lasts 7+ hours; although, that's for general use, I've never tried playing a game unplugged and probably wouldn't bother to do so.

[Moonface]

Hot damn so I started setting up my new laptop yesterday and the amount of stuff I had to deal with in W11 out of the box before I even think of doing anything else is ridiculous. It's been a while since I went through the setup for W10 but I don't recall having to do all of this: 

• Disable a ton of options in initial setup to try and push ads to me. 
  
• Nuke the large amount of space given to recommendations and ads in the Start menu (and I'm still not sure how to outright get rid of it entirely) 
  
• Make the Settings button display next to the power button like it's always been on every version of Windows instead of having to trawl through the apps list to find it every time.
  
• Turn off the stupid widgets that occupy the lock screen that make it look like a billboard.
  

I know there's more but I can't remember the rest of it right now. I just hated how much time I had to spend just killing a ton of unnecessary garbage and enabling QoL features that should be enabled by default.

[ShiraNoMai]

Recommendations, I'll say, is better once you use the computer more. It stops pulling bullshit and starts pulling recently used applications and documents instead, making it useful for a quick boot-up/find.

I actually don't remember the settings icon being hidden? That's wild.

Another thing I'd recommend is hiding all the stuff on the task bar you don't want i.e. the search bar, the task view, the widgets. I would've said add the Task Manager to your taskbar but they've recently added it to your right-click menu on the taskbar.

[Moonface]

Yeah I turned off the stuff in the taskbar like search and whatnot. Recently used apps only feels pointless to me because anything I use often enough I pin to my Start menu, but at least it has documents too. I just got a really bad first impression of it because of Microsoft just pushing a ton of recommendations to me of apps that are clearly ads rather than genuine, like Candy Crush.

[Mr EliteL]

Ugh yeah that was a pain beginning the start up of Windows 11. I've hidden a few things as well. Did you at least get a surf game to play while you wait whilst it updated?

[ShiraNoMai]

I didn't even know you could do that I just stepped away from my PC whilst it did its thing, same with Moony lol

[Moonface]

Ugh yeah that was a pain beginning the start up of Windows 11. I've hidden a few things as well. Did you at least get a surf game to play while you wait whilst it updated?

I saw it offered but didn't care to try it out since I just went and used my existing laptop while I waited. I know you can just play it at any time though via the Edge browser (although it looks like you can play some form of it in any browser?) so I guess if I ever feel like it I can try it out at some point.

I kinda wish W11 let you choose scaling for different aspects of the OS. As it exists, scaling affects everything, which I find horrible because I don't want my games or art programs to be scaled beyond 100%, but I think the OS itself looks nicer when set to 125% scale. I'd rather just have any standard Windows OS stuff at a higher scaling and the rest of my stuff at 100%, but it looks like that isn't possible.

I also still can't work out how I can tell Candy Crush to fuck off from my lock screen either. There's no settings to deal with it so I guess it either can't be removed or involves some deeper OS manipulation which I don't know if I can be bothered to deal with.

[Moonface]

Man, I'm glad I didn't start moving all my stuff onto this new laptop yet. I only just discovered that everything was being auto-saved into OneDrive folders because I didn't know Windows 11 just has that as the default and doesn't make it obvious at a glance that a folder is a OneDrive folder, and un-linking OneDrive means anything stored on it is deleted from your PC. Because I have no files on here yet though un-linking it didn't screw me over but wow, Microsoft really made this OS an ache in the balls out of the box didn't they?

[ShiraNoMai]

For being a software company, Microsoft sure knows how to make absolute dogshit software. It reeks of corporate meddling. I hate how much of that is a thing these days.