Yupp, I do have some venerable heating equipment (i7 4790K) and other few old I5 and i7 laptops with screen sizes from 13' over 15.6' (with and without graphic card for more external monitors) up to 17' still booting via BIOS, good enough to type on and spiffy enough after retrofitted with large SSDs and maxxed out RAM - can fit screen size to external needs like transport in knapsack on bikes from 0.12HP (if I am fit...) to middle sized horse herd or larger screen sizes with numerical keyboard in car...

If W11 will *not* run in a VM on my old HW, too bad for MS - bad enough they will drop 32-bit OS, probably needing 6-8 GB of RAM for each W11 VM.

The stuff in my airgapped net recently grew 2 XP VM again (no chance of internet infection, nearly as tiny as a linux VM footprint without the hassle of installing WINE). I have no real need for W11 - Android apps loading might be nice, but no real motivation for me to buy new machines. W11 *not* running inside VM would certainly spur me more into Dragans POV moving even more away from offerings needing latest Seattle OS. Back to basics...

thomas

>Some other things to think about (don't know how they will affect introduction of Win11):
>
>- If the hardware requirements are "strict" then that will drive new computer sales. There are already worldwide chip shortages
>- I haven't seen anything yet about running Win11 in a VM. If it's possible (and presumably it will be) then that will bypass certain hardware requirements such as CPU, TPM chip presence etc.
>- After Win10 goes end-of-life there will be lots of good used machines available that can't be upgraded to Win11. It could be an opportunity for desktop Linux except that for business, hardware+OS is such a low percentage of TCO that buying new machines with Win11 is probably a better bet for them if they're Windows shops
>
>This is an interesting situation. Over the last 6 years the world has gotten used to the idea of "Win10 = last version of Windows", but that's not true any longer.