this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
649 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
78511 readers
2840 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I detest this company for many reasons, it's like they go out of their way to make dealing with them as painful as possible.
Here's just one example I discovered today. I have a Windows 10 VM I needed to upgrade to 11 but the "PC Health Check" app says no, the i5 processor isn't supported.
I can, however, create a new VM and install 11 on the exact same hardware, so that's what I did, along with a whole bunch of extra work to get the new VM set up the same as the old Windows 10 VM was.
Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
Assholes.
This is how i feel about 98% of Azure. Its just so needlessly complicated, with incomprehensible defaults, and out of date documentation, and APIs that just fail silently.
So much this. I actually pulled all of our servers from Azure and went back to a regular provider. Way cheaper as well.
There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/
It works fine - you just won't get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.
.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server
This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.
Thank you for this. I already did a fresh install but it's interesting that your link is to the Surface subreddit just to rub some more salt in the wound. The processor is officially supported for upgrades only if it's in Microsoft's hardware. I hate them so much.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Since I was trying to update my surface. I’ve also installed Linux on it. Which runs a lot faster on the older Surface Nook 1 harder.
You can also flash a usb stick with rufus, mint needs 4GB IIRC.
/j
I prefer Fedora. Tried mint and hated it.
As a neophyte to all those distros out there but still curious, any specific reason?
Is that an upgrade or a fresh install?
It will upgrade an existing install. I did it on my surface and all my files and settings were kept.
Have you tried creating a new VM and attaching your existing vhdx or whatever to it?
I just went for a new installation. Why would that work? Just curious.
It sounds like your VM config was presenting a COU or TPM config that the upgrade wasn't comfortable with. If your new machine presented acceptable configs to a brand new VM, then making a new VM and feeding it the old .vhdx would be the same as pulling a storage device and putting it in a new motherboard that was win 11 compliant. After a reboot to install new drivers it probably would have upgraded happily.
Hmm, the only barrier to upgrading was that the i5 processor wasn't supported, no complaints about TPM/motherboard compatibility and a fresh install worked fine on the exact same hardware. Oh well, it's done anyway.
The hypervisor doesn't necessarily present the guest the exact CPU you're running. Maybe it was presenting an older model, or something stripped down that didn't have the features win 11 was looking for. It's moot.now that you found a solution but I believe this is what happened and moving the disks to a new VM probably would have worked.