You can prevent 240 million PCs from turning into e-waste

You can update any unsupported PC running Windows 10 to Windows 11.

A few weeks back I attended a sustainability forum where the question of Windows 11 came up. Right there the audacity of Microsoft's update strategy struck me. An estimated 240 million PC's worldwide could be turned into e-Waste when Microsoft end their support for Windows 10.

But my own research has proven that this can be prevented - with adding a single line to the Windows Registry! When I wanted to upgrade my trusted 11 year old laptop at home, I got the message that it was ineligible for the upgrade. After some digging around the internet, I found that there is a harmless and simple way of bypassing the requirement check via a secret loophole - which Microsoft themselves have provided.

You can follow the instructions in this article in The Verge. In short, you add one single value in the registry (“AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU”), after which you can upgrade your device running Windows 10 without issues.

It goes beyond my imagination what Microsoft were thinking when they decided to lock out hundreds of millions of devices from getting second lives, especially since they run just fine on Windows 11. How sustainable is that? What makes a company to not think about the environment these days I wonder?

So, if you want to save your older computers at work or at home from a premature death, consider upgrading them to Windows 11. If they work with Windows 10, they will run just fine also on Windows 11.