Don’t want to pay? You have options
Microsoft would prefer to nudge you into buying a new PC. That’s what that fee is all about: Microsoft wants people to see the $30 fee and decide it’s time to buy a new Windows 11 laptop after all. Or, at the very least, by signing in with a Microsoft account and syncing your settings, Microsoft wants you to start thinking about how easy a hardware upgrade would be. Microsoft’s marketing is performing a pincer move here: talking not just about the security risks of sticking with Windows 10 but the upgraded performance, battery life, and AI features of getting a new Windows 11 laptop. Microsoft wants businesses to see the steeply increasing fee and make plans to buy new hardware.
But you certainly don’t have to go down that road. If you have a Windows 10 PC you want to keep using, but with truly secure software at its core, you could keep it, ditch Windows and install a Linux distribution on it. You could also install Google’s ChromeOS Flex, a version of ChromeOS Google offers for existing PCs. Both are free.
There are also ways to upgrade some existing Windows 10 PCs to Windows 11, even if Microsoft says the upgrade isn’t “officially supported.” For a home PC, this is one way to keep getting security updates for an old Windows 10 PC — by bumping it up to Windows 11. Some PCs that are just below the hardware cutoff for Windows 11 will work great, while older PCs might not perform as well.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
