The free upgrade to Windows 11 will start rolling out on October 5th, but like many Windows upgrades in the past, it will be available in phases. New eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first, and then Windows 11 will become available for more in-market devices in the weeks and months following October 5th.
Many older PCs have been happily running the Windows 11 previews for months now despite Microsoft's stringent official system requirements, but that's about to change. ZDNet reports that some users of unsupported PCs are beginning to see a message telling them to reinstall Windows 10 when they attempt to enroll older PCs in the Insider program after performing a clean install of the Windows 11 preview.
Microsoft started pushing promotional notifications on the latest builds of Windows 11 which is currently still in Beta, perhaps showing off how you can never really escape advertising. The promo was about Microsoft flaunting Windows 11's integration with Teams. However, the ad left the Start menu and Taskbar totally unresponsive by crashing the Windows desktop shell.
Microsoft later posted a fix for those affected by the problem. The company says that the problem was caused by a server-side deployment that went out to Windows Insiders testing out Windows 11.
If you were impacted by this issue, you can use the following steps to get back into a working state on your PC.
Step 1: Use CTRL-ALT-DEL and choose to open Task Manager.
Step 2: Choose “More details” at the bottom of Task Manager to expand Task Manager.
Step 3: Go to “File” and choose “Run new task”.
Step 4: Type “cmd” in the “Open” field.
Step 5: Paste the following (everything in bold): reg delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\IrisService /f && shutdown -r -t 0
Step 6: Hit enter, and then your PC should reboot. After rebooting, everything should be back to normal.
Data from my informal survey shows most Windows 10 users are content with the status quo, and feel no pressure to move to Windows 11 — even with version 22H2 arriving soon.
A year later, Lansweeper has released new data and the landscape has definitely changed somewhat in favor of Windows 11. However, it is probably not close to what Microsoft had hoped for. The percentage of CPUs that meets the requirements has gone up from 44.4% last time to 57.26% this time, an increase of around 13 percentage points. This means close to 43% systems do not meet the CPU requirements still.