Yeah, it's coming in hot.

Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will be released on October 5. As expected, this new release will be available as a free upgrade for those who are using eligible Windows 10 PCs, or those that purchase new hardware with Windows 11 pre-installed. Though I suppose if you're buying new hardware, that doesn't make the Windows 11 upgrade "free" but I digress.

As with most updates from Microsoft, the free upgrade will be released in phases. Newer eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first and then other devices will be offered the upgrade in the weeks and potentially the months following. Those who don't feel like waiting will more than likely be able to grab the ISO or media creation tool to manually upgrade.

True to Microsoft tradition, not everything that was previously announced for Windows 11 will actually be included for the launch. Features such as the ability to run Android apps in Windows 11 will not be available until the operating system's next major update. Other features that users have taken for granted over the years, including the ability to drag and drop apps on to the taskbar have been removed. You cannot move the taskbar from being located at the bottom of the screen either. You cannot access Task Manager by right clicking anywhere on the taskbar anymore either. It's only accessible by right clicking the Start button.

Also, if you use multiple monitors, you can say goodbye to seeing the time and date on your second monitor's taskbar. Customization of the Start menu is also severely limited and you (at present) cannot remove the "Recommended" section even if you do not use it. You cannot natively disable the new Widgets feature, though you can remove the button from the taskbar (the Win+G shortcut will still open it). Microsoft Teams (called Chat) is now also built into the operating system, for better and for worse. The Windows Store did get a nice redesign, but they removed the ability to quickly sort by most recently updated in your apps list. Hopefully some of these issues will be addressed prior to launch but this is what life is like on Windows 11 right now.

Microsoft did clarify its minimum system requirements for Windows 11 just this past week. They also revealed a workaround for those that do not necessarily meet the minimum requirements, saying that you can install Windows 11 on any hardware using an ISO but you may not get important security updates through Windows Update. The bare minimum PC must have at least a 64-bit 1GHz CPU with two or more cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and is TPM 1.2 capable. This is an "install at your own risk" sort of deal here.

If you do not want to upgrade to Windows 11, then you should be aware that Windows 10 will be supported until October 14, 2025.

From my personal experience testing out Windows 11 since it was released to the Dev Insiders channel, I came to like a lot of the improvements Microsoft made compared to Windows 10. Hell, I even came to quite like the centered icons and Start Menu (you can optionally move them to the left). However, I did encounter a pretty severe issue that was tangentially related to installing Windows 11. In order to get my system fully supported to install Windows 11, I enabled fTPM in my bios which enabled the TPM 2.0 support built into my Ryzen 9 5900x. The problem that I encountered after doing this was that my entire system would randomly stutter almost every day for roughly about one full second. Video and audio would stutter and the lighting on my USB peripherals (mouse and keyboard) kind of flickered.

I poured through logs, kept task manager and resource monitor running non-stop to see if there was any unusual activity, did health checks on my drives, did memory tests for hours, swapped the ports my USB components were plugged into, uninstalled software like Corsair iCue and Logitech G Hub just in case they were the cause, adjusted power plan settings within Windows, Googled for answers for weeks, and did clean installs of the latest drivers (video, audio, network, etc.) among other things. I even reformatted my machine back to Windows 10 thinking it was an issue with Windows 11 itself. The stutter persisted.

It never once dawned on me that it might have something to do with fTPM as everything I read about it said that there would not be any hit to performance. Then just the other day I came across this Reddit thread in r/AMD. Apparently, it seems as though some implementations of fTPM have led to people encountering stutter, much like I had, in their systems. It can happen on Windows 10 or Windows 11. It also seems to be happening to those with different motherboard manufacturers and even to different Ryzen generations. There are also a fair number of people who have not had any issues with their systems since enabling fTPM. This is very much a YMMV situation. The fact that Microsoft will only officially support systems that have TPM 2.0 enabled may lead to a lot of headaches down the road as people try to troubleshoot issues related to fTPM or other security features that they require for upgrades.

As it stands right now for me, I will be sticking with Windows 10 for a while longer. It's been a couple of days now since I disabled fTPM and so far (knock on wood) I have not encountered the stutter issue again since. The fTPM issue is something that needs to be addressed by either AMD or the motherboard companies through additional BIOS updates.