Must you change your Home windows 10 PC on Prime Day? This is the right way to know
By now, it is best to know that Microsoft has been making an attempt arduous to maneuver you away from Home windows 10 and onto Home windows 11 by October 2025. What you may not know is whether or not you possibly can even improve your current PC to Home windows 11—and for those who can’t, what to do about it.
Give it some thought this fashion: there’s no good time in your fridge to conk out. But when it does, the perfect time is correct earlier than a giant sale.
That’s the place we’re at proper now. Amazon’s Prime Day sale occasion shall be going down between July eighth and July eleventh, providing lots of of bargains on numerous units. Lurking sooner or later, nonetheless, is a deadline: Home windows 10’s finish of life in October. Should you personal an older Home windows 10 PC that isn’t eligible for Home windows 11, you face three disagreeable decisions: preserve utilizing it in its unsupported state, pay for a yr’s price of assist (a technique or one other), or change the PC completely with an upgraded mannequin.
Wouldn’t it’s good to know whether or not you truly can improve to Home windows 11 or whether or not you’ll want to purchase a brand new PC? Now’s a good time to reply that query. When you’ve got an older machine and Microsoft received’t will let you improve to Home windows 11, you will want to interchange it will definitely—and higher to take action when gross sales abound.
PC Well being Test to the rescue
Microsoft supplies 3 ways to examine to see whether or not your PC meets the Home windows 11 {hardware} necessities, however the easiest is to seize the free PC Well being Test app from Microsoft (obtain hyperlink).
Mark Hachman / Foundry
PC Well being Test itself is a somewhat ineffective software, but it surely does have one factor going for it: a giant blue button labeled Test now that allows you to see in case your PC meets the {hardware} necessities for Home windows 11. If it doesn’t, you’ll immediately see the place your PC falls quick: no Safe Boot, lower than 4GB of RAM or 64 GB of storage, and so forth.
One of many controversial necessities for Home windows 11 is a Trusted Platform Module, a cryptographic lockbox that both exists in your PC as a discrete chip or is constructed into the processor itself. For all the fuss about TPMs and what to do to allow them, I needed to go fairly deep into my figurative closet to discover a gadget that doesn’t qualify for Home windows 11.
The one I discovered was Microsoft’s Floor Professional 3, the 11-year-old Home windows pill that fulfilled Microsoft’s “rule of three” and kickstarted the Floor lineup. Weirdly, it wasn’t the dearth of a TPM that doomed the pill—simply the age of the processor itself. (Sure, Home windows thinks it has a TPM 2.0.)
Mark Hachman / Foundry
At this level, I wasn’t too fascinated with dedicating the time it could require the pill to improve to Home windows 11. But when that Floor Professional 3 occurred to be my solely PC, I’d wish to know if I used to be risking malware infections after Home windows 10 assist lastly runs out.
After all, in case your PC does qualify for Home windows 11, we’ve a information to upgrading from Home windows 10 to Home windows 11, step-by-step. If it doesn’t, you’ll ultimately should take motion—and it’s as much as you whether or not you employ Amazon’s Prime Day gross sales to put money into a brand new PC.
