Windows 10 bricks

Many have been fixed, but also remember this is an adversarial contest. "Black hats" are actively searching for and developing new ways to exploit the vulnerabilities in the OS or any of the other software commonly installed. It is a continuously evolving arms race.

There are certainly risks - how serious they will be will depend a little on how you use the system and what you do with it. A machine that is used just for word processing, or for driving your CNC knitting machine will not be exposed to many threats. One that is used for web surfing and email however will be very much more at risk.

The is also an additional risk that surfaces when a system moves out of support due to the fact that each "new" version of the OS is mostly based on the same code base as previous versions. So when MS find and patch a vulnerability, and patch it for Win 11, but not Win 10, it only takes hours for the bad actors to identify the changes made by the fix in 11, and then they can develop an exploit for the new fixed vulnerability, and test it on older unsupported versions of the OS.

Which is in many cases the most irritating reason since there are plenty of older CPUs that have more than enough power and all the required instruction sets[1] to run win 11.

I get the impression that MS chose "8th gen" as the baseline since that is also the generation where a TPM device was built into the CPU itself and did not need to rely on dedicated hardware installed on (or plugged into) the motherboard for the functionality.

Probably clone it into a new partition on the new disk

Then take on board that Trump was trying to defund Mitre (presumably for his overloads!):

Thank you. I think I'll buy a mini PC (as soon as I've decided which one), copy a lot of the files from my laptop onto it, which will make room for the upgrade.

Thank you. Explanations and instructions are always so complicated, even for the moderately technical.

If you just want to free some space on the laptop, you can get tiny USB sticks that are so small you can leave them in place all the time to provide extra storage space. Something like this

and will be dog slow compared to a real SSD...

I've just scrapped a Win10 installation on a laptop due to lack of space. During the initial huge upgrade, it was willing to let me use an external drive to make enough space available, but on the last upgrade I tried, it insisted on 6GB space free on C:, which was a 32GB drive that had run Windows for a few years, and there was no way to clear the

I took the hint and dumped it, leaving Linux in sole charge of the computer. Even then, I had to make some fake Windows files in the EFI partition before the laptop firmware would boot.

Thank you. That's worth considering.

That's true, but whether it matters depends on the usage. The USB stick is fine for storing videos that you want to watch occasionally. Photos. Old documents that you want a record of.

Another option is to buy extended security support for EUR25/yr from a company called 0Patch, see:

In the text report, is a disk section.

Storage

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Drive 0 Device Path \\?\scsi... Name Samsung SSD 870 EVO 4TB <=== the product name may be sufficient, to determine type Revision SVT02B6Q This is a SATA III drive (530MB/sec). NVMe are faster.

I would suspect, that a 128GB device, is not a SATA SSD but is an eMMC chip soldered to the motherboard. These are harder to deal with. On some laptops, there is actually a bay available for a SATA SSD to be added, or a place for an NVMe plugin drive to be added. But finding an eMMC is not usually a good sign, as not all machines come with a replacement strategy. They don't have slots or bays, they give you an eMMC and tell you to "suck it". That's life.

Storage devices can be "cloned".

In some cases, all it takes is an external adapter, to "prep" the brand new storage device you would be buying. For example, you can buy NVMe trays, that allow an NVMe to be cloned via USB transfer.

when you have an NVMe slot, you can plug the brand new device into the laptop storage place, and then boot the OS. The OS will install the NVMe driver automatically. After the driver is installed, you shut down the laptop, and use whatever plan you've formed for cloning. It's easier for the audience to give instructions, once we know what the new "thing" is that will be the storage. Since the C: drive now has an NVMe driver, when the C: content is cloned to the NVMe, when the NVMe tries to boot... you have cleverly already put the driver for that booting, in place.

Paul

You need good ports on your laptop for that. My old laptop only has USB2 ports on it, so the fast device would be kinda wasted on a slow port (35MB/sec). Good ports have a blue or red tab, bad ports are black.

My laptop does have an SD slot, covered by a black plastic filler insert. But the transfer rate on the older standard versions of that, is similarly too slow to be useful.

Paul

On a related matter. I have a Toshiba L775 laptop which was a Win7 machine and currently running Win10. I would like to upgrade to Win11 since it has a wide screen I particularly like and unlike my more modern Dell G15 has a Blu-ray drive. Running PC Health check tells me the Core i5 processor is not compatible and it requires to run UEFI secure boot and also TPM ver.

You want this: rufus-4.7.exe from

Worked for me. i7 7th gen with TPM1.0 running Win11.

Future Windows updates make break this. But is the zero cost way to run Win11 on old hardware for now.

To answer the question about TPM, there are two parts.

The plugin dongle can be TPM 1.4 or TPM 2.0.

But, it only "does something", if the BIOS has Secure Boot 1.4 or secure Boot 2.0 support. You cannot force a BIOS at the 1.4 level, to run a TPM 2.0 module as delivered. Apparently, you can flash-downgrade a TPM 2.0 hardware module to 1.4, as the hardware would support both. You would also need to have such a file available from your TPM module maker.

There is more to it, than just plugging in the new dongle.

Because my Asus motherboard maker, knew it would not be releasing a BIOS upgrade with TPM 2.0 support in it, it made no business sense to release an LPM version of dongle (20 pins) with a TPM 2.0 chip on it. At first, the community understanding was they were just being bastards. But it makes sense now, that unless they planned to do both, they should not proceed with either work item.

Depending on how you installed Windows 10, you might have better luck with the win11 install, if the disk setup was UEFI/GPT. The MBR2GPT utility can fix that (built-in executable), but it only works with a limited partition setup (three source partitions), plus it wants a valid reagentc setup, and it claims "it cannot find the OS partitions", when what it is actually missing is a valid reagentc entry.

If I had used the Win11 DVD on that disk, while the disk was in a machine with no TPM module, I doubt it would "let me pass". Chances are good, you need "mm0fmf" suggestion of Rufus for USB stick preparation, in any case.

Do a full backup of the Win10 setup, and then your experiments can begin. I think the Win11 would be happier on a UEFI/GPT setup (with or without TPM), but your mileage may vary. And fixing reagentc, is an adventure of its own, requiring the "PushButtonReset" version of the WinRE.wim file and procedure. To make the above picture, I did a clean install, and it did not correctly make a functional ReAgentc SafeOS boot partition. At some point in the dim pass, that used to work. But it didn't seem to work when I started with a 22H2 DVD.

Paul

Is that a i5 gen 2 CPU? (2012 ish)

If so, then there is no route that will get you to an officially supported win 11 install running on the hardware. You could force it to run it with rufus etc, and could possibly use the installed Win 10 as a hypervisor and trick it with an emulated TPM etc. However it may not (or at some point cease to) get updates.

Note that intel 8th gen CPUs included a TPM built into the CPU - so no longer require a dedicated module on the mobo (and in CPU TPM is "better" in the sense that it eliminates the hardware based attacks for circumventing bit locker). However updating to a later generation of CPU is generally a non starter.

Dave P does a good round up of how the whole stack of UEFI, TPM, secure boot, code signing etc is supposed to work, and gives an insight to the kind of enhanced security it could provide:

Thanks John, the CPU is pre-2012 so it looks like it is for the bin post October 2025. It was just a nice thought for the reasons stated above if I could have got another trick out of it.

Richard