I watched the Windows 11 live stream from Microsoft today. There was a few interesting tidbits, such as it will be free upgrade for Windows 10 users (not unexpected), will only come in a 64-bit version (32-bit version is gone) and requires UEFI/Secureboot/TPM 2.0. A lot of people are hyperventilating over the TPM 2.0 requirement, but we are roughly 6 months away from the release of Windows 11 and I have no doubt that this requirement will either be relaxed or a workaround will be found.
Installing the leaked Windows 11 dev build was blocked by Microsoft from installing on bare metal and within days, people figured out how to copy all of the files from the Windows 10 sources folder from the install media and then just overwrite the Windows 10 WIM file with the Windows 11 WIM file and viola, all restrictions were removed. The TPM 2.0 requirement was already bypassed for this build by replacing appraiserres.dll with one from Windows 10. Heck, WinNTSetup will probably have a tick box to just remove the requirement.
The 32-bit version should have been removed a long time ago. If you have something that requires Windows 32-bit (for the 16-bit subsystem support), you should probably be running an emulator for that program or leave it on an older OS. The last time I had to install Windows 32-bit was back in June 2014 for a company we bought from Baldor Generators. There was 1 guy that had to run a MS-DOS program and MS-DOS programs only work on Windows 32-bit (without emulation), so we had to revert his Windows 64-bit back to Windows 32-bit.
However, if I had to do it over again, I would just run winevdm or DOSBOX to run his MS-DOS program and leave him on Windows 64-bit. There’s even more options such as VMWare Workstation, I think it’s finally time to drop MS-DOS support for programs that were created 40 years ago.
- Soli Deo Gloria