Originally Posted by
KRSW
StuckInYYZ : I still stand by my recommendation. If someone buys a used enterprise laptop today at ~1/2 what new prices are going for and gets 4 years out of it, I'd call that a win.
There's still hundreds of thousands (probably more) of Windows 7 systems chugging along out there faithfully. About half the laptops at my office are still running Win7 or OSX 10.11. No updates? No problem. I keep all of the PCI-compliance crap on a dedicated updated system. The most dangerous users also get the newer stuff. I'm still supporting Win 3.11 and MS-DOS 5.x systems for clients.
I have a suspicious feeling that Microsoft's 4-year deadline will be extended. The chip shortage is real. My Lenovo rep told me some configurations won't be available for *70* weeks. Yes, more than a year delay. Given China's recent power shortages and it's not even winter yet, production is going to get a lot worse.
Also, manufacturers are starting to release TPM patches to update older TPM chips. I see Dell has one available for some systems. TPM was recently defeated, so it's eventually going to be as useless as DVD's CSS system.
I don't doubt it. One of my clients has a few production systems on OS/2 and NT. We can't even virtualize them. We've tried but whoever coded the control systems did it in a way that doesn't like virtualization. We've already advised them to get off those systems as we can no longer source working HDD if they should fail.
That said, I don't know if MS will expand the system reqs for W11. Originally MS said 8th Gen even though the pre-release worked on older hardware. But looking at the system requirements, it doesn't mention generational requirements. Just what were effectively W10 requirements plus TPM. I do wonder...how much the MS requirement might impede the adoption of W11.