Updated on October 4 with Microsoft’s latest bad news for Windows users, as another upgrade workaround is suddenly shut down.
Microsoft has given itself a seemingly impossible race against time. With almost exactly a year to run before Windows 10’s unpopular end-of-life hits users in October 2025, Windows 11 is still failing to hook the hundreds of millions more users it needs to prevent a generational support nightmare coming true.
But maybe—and it’s a big maybe—there’s some light starting to penetrate this gloomy tunnel. We don’t have official numbers from Microsoft, but the latest data just in from StatCounter suggests some inroads are starting to be made. In the last 12-months, around 130 million Windows 10 users have switched to Windows 11. The bad news though, is that almost 900 million Windows 10 users are still holding out. The switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is finally picking up pace, but remains far, far behind what we’ve seen before with similar OS transitions.
Windows 11 is of course a uniquely positioned update, given the security hardware requirement that precludes hundreds of millions of PCs from an OS upgrade. Not only does this create a hurdle for those with viable but non compliant older PCs, but it also wipes out the usual secondary market once Windows 10 is end-of-life. Canalys has warned that the sheer scale of this refresh could mean “roughly a fifth of devices becom[ing] e-waste due to incompatibility with the Windows 11 OS. This equates to 240 million PCs. If these were all folded laptops, stacked one on top of another, they would make a pile 600km taller than the moon.”
There are workarounds, but Microsoft seems to ber shutting those down. Back in August, I reported on one of the better known of these, the “setup.exe /product server” fudge, being shut down in a newly released dev update, commenting that “in itself this isn’t a fundamental change—it’s one workaround coded out. But it’s important because it suggests Microsoft is maintaining or even hardening its hardware stance, despite user discomfort and low upgrade numbers.”
Now another workaround faces the same fate. As ZDNet reports, “the popular Rufus utility,” which enables a Windows 11 upgrade for PCs lacking a compliant TPM, had even “been effective on even ancient PCs.” Not any more, through. “At the same time Microsoft rolled out Windows 11, version 24H2 on October 1, it also appears to have tweaked some additional settings that broke the [Rufus] option.” Users now receive a warning that “This PC doesn’t currently meet Windows 11 requirements.”
The developer has seemingly already issued a workaround for the blocked workaround, to handle this “issue performing in-place upgrade to Windows 11 24H2,” but all this does is push the ball back to Microsoft. Ultimately, it’s a game that will be difficult for the company to lose—update after update.
But with another year gone, the reality is that machines would now need to be fairly old to fail the hurdle. There’s clearly much more to it than that. Three-years on from the release of Windows 11, the shiny new OS has an image problem that Microsoft doesn’t seem able to address. Quite what will happen 12-months from now remains to be seen. Speculation continues that users may be offered a support extension or a fudged workaround, putting aside the paid-for support options that will be made available with escalating pricing.
Also this week, Microsoft has started to roll out its Windows 2024 update, which is unsurprisingly dominated by AI and “the latest Copilot+ PC innovation.” The new Windows 11 24H2 update “is a full operating system (OS) swap that contains new foundational elements required to deliver transformational AI experiences and exceptional performance,” Microsoft says, as it details its new features.
With AI front and center, the headline context behind this update will be Recall, the controversial screenshot feature that seeks to store a complete documentary record of everything users do on their PCs. This landed badly when first announced given the security and especially privacy implications, and so it now comes with compromises including options to disable or even uninstall.
Viewed another way, there are almost twice as many Windows users unwilling as yet to make an AI leap as those that have done. Windows 11 didn’t launch with AI at its heart, but that’s how it is being presented now. And so with AI the headline act—just as it is with the latest iOS and Android OS updates hitting those same users’ mobiles, we will start to see how universally the appeal of these updates is landing.
Month-by-month for the next year you can expect updates on the accelerating switch numbers required to avoid that support nightmare. That will all start this week as user reviews and responses come through for the latest AI updates. And for all those holding out, the weekly reports covering Windows 11 hardware upgrade workarounds and likely support options post next October will continue.
