A windows 11 upgrade peeve

I was feeling crochety this morning.

I had planned an early morning bike ride but I woke to light drizzle, so, after I had fed the cats, I went back to bed with my little Lenovo laptop to read my email.

When I powered it up it greeted me with an invitation to upgrade to Windows 11. Fair enough.

I declined gracefully, only to get another nag screen about upgrading.

No, I'd said once I didn't want to run the upgrade, especially while sitting in bed with a cup of tea and two cats attempting to push their way in.

Now, I don't have a problem with upgrading to Windows 11. But not yet.

Both the machine on my desk and my fieldwork machine are stuck on Windows 10, and evermore will be so due to Microsoft's hardware requirements for Windows 11 - basically both predate the current version of the TPM security chip that Microsoft requires.

My fieldwork machine is a refurbished Thinkpad and a little over five years old and my desk laptop is not quite four years old. It still does everything I need it to do so I feel no need to go and buy a new machine.

My project documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy will come to an end some time during the first quarter of 2023, basically I have a large glass fronted display cabinet and a pile of 1950's cardboard boxes still to do, and I'll be done.

And because of that I'd like to have all my windows machines Windows 10 to ensure compatability, especially as a lot of the documentation is stored in OneNote, and I don't want to risk the Windows 11 version silently changing functionality.

Much the same reason as while I'm totally convinced I could change my fieldwork machine to Kubuntu without problems, I won't. Not yet.

So until I'm done, I'd like to stay on Windows 10.

Microsoft don't seem to have a way of saying 'thank you for your interest, but I'm working on a project just now/I'm on a slow network link, etc'. The nag screens imply 'it's do it now or never' which is a bit of emotional blackmail - you can in fact run the upgrade procedure from Settings anytime you like.

Just like the emotional blackmail about using Edge, which is actually a fine browser and sometimes works better than Chrome, but of course Edge is not multiplatform, which is a problem if you also use a Chromebook/Mac/Chromium on linux.