#64: Tick, Tock, Time is up (nearly) for Windows 10

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Microsoft developed a reputation for having a couple of shaky versions of anything before the one that you’d be actually happy to use came along. Just as many people do with phone releases, it often seems to make sense skipping a few and just get the latest whenever it’s time to upgrade the computer.

There’s that old joke: “How does Bill Gates count to 10?” The latest answer is “1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, NT3.1/3.5, 95, NT4, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11”. Windows 3.1 was the first to be what you might call mainstream, and XP, 7 and 10 were the versions which got the most users.

Returning to the compelling Statcounter site (as mentioned in ToW #62); it bases its research on which machines/browsers are seen being used to access a host of websites. There are still a lot of people using older Windows versions. Surprisingly, 0.27% of all browsing being done by Windows users was by brave souls still on Windows XP. Vista is barely above 0.

Data from Desktop Windows Version Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats

Windows 8/8.1 (the dark green line which peaked in mid-2015) never really took off – maybe because of corporates who had rolled out Windows 7 as an upgrade to XP (having steered well clear of Vista) and user resistance to the touch-centricity of the whole thing, especially useless if you’re on a desktop PC.

When Windows 10 came out in mid-2015, it took 2½ years for it to overtake Windows 7 in usage, at least according to this data. Windows 11 was released in October 2021 but in well  over 3 years since, it still has less than 2/3rd the usage of Windows 10.

Support Lifecycle

Microsoft took a view some years back, that in order to be credible in the Enterprise, you need to support your stuff for a long time. As a result, the standard lifecycle is for every product to have 10 years of life, usually split 50/50 into Mainstream and Extended support. Extended means you might get security fixes but there will be no more updates to add features, make it better, jam adverts into places you don’t want them etc.

On 14th October 2025, Windows 10 hits that decade milestone – at which point it will go out of support, there will be no more security updates and if you get hit by a cyber attack then that’s too bad. In future, you’d be ridiculed for it when anything goes wrong.

Performing an operating system upgrade can be a big deal – especially if you’re doing it on behalf of a company or large organisation – as some of the existing hardware and software might not work under the new OS. Windows 11 complicates things further by having some fairly specific hardware requirements in the worthy name of security; but even some expensive PCs from a year or two before COVID are now excluded. Many of Microsoft’s own Surface range are upgradeable, but the flagship $4K Surface Studio sold from 2016-2018 is not one of them.

If you have a Windows 10 PC then it’s very likely it will have been offered Windows 11 as an upgrade; if in any doubt, then try the PC Health Check app and see what it says.

How to run Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

tl;dr – don’t.

It’s worth noting that the majority of PCs which can happily run Windows 10 would also be able to run Win11 if they were allowed to. The hardware requirements dictated, though, that you need a certain level of processor and a TPM 2.0 security module, or you get denied.

There have been various tricks and tweaks to fool Windows 11 into running through the upgrade process and letting it continue; some of them even offered up by Microsoft itself. Lately, however, the signal has been that even if the unsupported machine made it to Windows 11 now, it could be blocked in future from getting subsequent updates and therefore would be in limbo. Microsoft’s own advice if you have followed one of these unofficial workarounds, is to revert now to Windows 10.

The previously-toted registry key to bypass the hardware validation has now been removed, in order to prevent any more unsuspecting souls from going down that path.

Some complainers have doggedly stayed on Windows 10 because they don’t like the look of 11, but if you are still using Windows 10 because your hardware can’t make the leap, then you’re in something of a quandary. Microsoft will let you pay $61 to extend support for Windows 10 until October 2026, with that sum doubling every year. So to keep Win10 until the absolute drop-dead deadline of October 2029, it would cost you over $400.

Or time to fork out the readies and buy a new machine before the October bell rings.

If you fancy a Surface, then Intel variants of last year’s ARM-powered Copilot+ machines are now available (at least for business customers), though it might make sense to wait until the summer and see what arrives, given that the current gen Surface Copilot+ machines were unveiled in May 2024.

#63B: It’s Your ISP

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Following on from last week’s missive on finding problems in your home network, this one turns its attention to network of the internet service provider (ISP) itself. Just like any other utility provider, there is a lot going on behind the scenes before the pipe or cable that shows up at your property delivers its stuff. As UK Gov CTO David Knott says, the simpler something looks, the more complex it probably is.

If you think there are problems with your internet connection’s speed or reliability, and it’s not your fault, there are a few things you can do to try and pinpoint where the cause lies. Being quite specific can also help short-circuit the early stages of the supplier’s support desk, where they’ll be getting you to clear your cookies and restart your browser.

Let’s assume that any WiFi devices are working and the home router itself is connecting OK – the lights on your device are behaving like they should be connected.

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I bet none of you losers has their own named port on their broadband router

Sometimes the connection to the ISP might be ropey – even if the lights are on, it could be worth logging into the admin page on your router to see if there are any tell-tales or warnings. There’s probably a log of events that might show repeated disconnect/reconnect loops, or other tell-tale errors. If you have a fancy-pants NAS device or similar, you might even be able to collect the logs and give better reporting.

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It’s worth checking a public speed test site, like www.speedtest.net, to see if it thinks you should be getting decent performance. Pay attention to that Ping ms number – as mentioned previously, latency is the enemy of anything that needs real-time communications like a Teams/Zoom meeting or online gaming. Streaming video can often deal with poor latency since it will buffer at least a few seconds in advance, though if it gets really bad then it might still be unworkable.

HOW NETWORKS WORK

Without grossly oversimplifying things, when you try to connect to a remote resource (say, www.google.com), your computer will use the magic of DNS (short for the Domain Name System) to figure out what is its actual address on the internet, then will attempt to reach it.

Imagine going on a journey with tens or hundreds of junctions along the way; at each turn you don’t need to know all of the directions to the destination, only that it’s further along this road rather than the other way. When connecting to a remote internet site, there will be many “hops” that your data will take – and the connections between each of those points could be a cause of problems.

Given that the internet was conceived to survive a nuclear war, traffic should find a way but sometimes there’s a single link that can throw everything off. If a single website is slow but everything else works, it’s probably that site. But if everything seems slow or unreliable, it’s more likely there’s a problem with your ISP’s network, or possibly the network it connects to.

To test a single connection, there’s a built-in command (again, on Windows, press Win+R an enter cmd) called tracert, which will basically ping everything between you and that remote site:

In this case, it sends 3 requests and measures the round-trip time of each; sometimes you’ll see an isolated spike or a drop out but that’s not unusual. In many cases, for popular sites like Google or Bing, you’ll only really be connecting to a nearby node anyway. Look up the IP Address on whatismyipaddress.com and you’d see, in this instance, that Google.com lives in a Datacenter in London, but if the same experiment was repeated from a PC in LA, the IP address and therefore final destination that corresponds to www.google.com would be different.

If you think your network problem is a bit more transient, you could try an old bit of Windows software called WinMTR (or a lightly refreshed version called WinMTR Redux). This will repeatedly run TraceRT probes and show you the results over time; if you see one particular hop which spikes a lot and it looks like it’s part of your own ISP’s network, then it could be worth sharing this info with them in the hope they go and switch that router off and back on again…

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In this instance, the first hop into the ISP network – 217.47.72.122 – appeared to be the problem as it and everything later had terrible latency (almost a whole second where you’d normally expect a few milliseconds). This above example was presented to a well-known UK national telecoms provider some time ago, as proof that the problem was with them, and to stop ordering the end user to faff about with ADSL microfilters or get engineers out to test the phone line.

Another example shows that while there’s no cataclysmic issue, there appears to be a delay in some of the connections further up the line – probably not worth escalating but it might explain why some sites feel slow while others don’t:

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The nice thing about WinMTR is that you could save it to OneDrive / Google Drive and run it directly without needing to install anything. If you’re happy to add some troubleshooting software in advance of having a problem, another alternative could be PingPlotter:

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WHAT IF IT’S DNS?

Ask anyone who has worked in IT support and at some point, the DNS infrastructure or your connection into it will be the thing that breaks everything else. Moving everything off-premises to a cloud-based environment merely means that DNS is someone else’s problem, but if you can’t figure out how to connect to the cloud, it’s yours.

Stack of blocks below text 'All modern digital infrastructure' made precarious by single small block near the bottom labelled 'DNS'

Normally, when your ISP gives you a connection, they also provide the address that your computers will use to make DNS queries. Your broadband router might act as a proxy, so the devices on the home network just ask it to resolve DNS queries, then it will connect to your ISP’s DNS service and relay the response back.

If everything else appears to be working but your connection is still flaky and slow, it may be that your ISP’s DNS service is stuffed. To the end user, you’d try to connect to www.google.com and it would spin for a while and eventually get an error saying it had timed our or could not be found; this could just be that your PC asked the router, which passed through the request to the ISP’s own DNS server(s), but if there’s a problem connecting or they’re not working properly, then a reply might not come.

Fortunately, there is an option to sidestep this – temporarily, maybe – and use somebody else’s DNS service instead.

Google operates a free, public DNS service, on addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. If your ISP’s DNS is not responding well, try substituting the default automatic provisioning of DNS server addresses that your machine will likely have, with hard-coding Google’s DNS – see Get Started  |  Public DNS.

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If all else fails, you might just have to endure the ISP’s support desk to get someone to check the connection back to you, or just give up and go outside instead.

#63: Trouble with your network?

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We’ve all been there. Just when you need it to work, your home internet connection goes down or huffs off in go-slow mode. You’ll have seen others who, even 5 years after enforced home working, haven’t quite figured out how to make their networks, er, work. Or the colleague who always appears to be having trouble with their internet, so they can’t switch on the camera…?

What to do if your network appears to be up the swannee?

STEP ONE – THE THREE-FINGERED-SALUTE

If you’re lazy and uninterested in the root cause of a problem, then a quick way to resolution might be the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again trick. Most broadband routers have a button to reboot them, or even just pull the power for 10 seconds and then put it back in.

Sometimes, service providers will tell you to reboot your router if you are getting an error – streaming apps on smart TVs appear to be adept at this. Technology gurus will scoff that there’s no way that could be the problem, it must be something with the app provider (until they reboot the router as a last resort, and the app starts working).

The original “Three Fingered Salute” was a moniker applied to CTRL+ALT+DEL, the unmaskable hardware combination on early PCs which forced a reboot. Nowadays, Windows handles it with more grace.

STEP TWO – CAN YOU SEE OUTSIDE?

Once you’ve waited 5 minutes for your broadband router to restart (and assuming that hasn’t fixed the problem), the next thing to check is if your computer can talk to the outside world. If not, that means the problem is somewhere between your keyboard and the internet service provider that the modem connects to. Trying to log a fault with your provider’s support desk will generally mean they’ll make you try unplugging and restarting everything in your house first, so be prepared.

Make sure you’re actually connected to the network and have a valid address; in Windows 11, go to Settings / Network & Internet and look at Properties of whatever the connection is. You should see the local network address of your machine, and the gateway through which everything is sent and received. The format of the numbers might vary but should look something like:

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[If you’re getting a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address then something is going wrong with your computer and getting an IP address; if it’s in your house, try removing and replacing the network cable, or rebooting the PC and/or router. If it’s in a hotel or public wifi area, give up and set your phone up to do Tethering].

PING!

Now, fire up a command prompt (press WindowsKey+R then enter cmd) and enter ping 192.168.1.1 (or whatever address your default gateway is).

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The ping command literally bounces a short piece of data at the address you’re looking for; if that location is available (and not being blocked by some firewall or other) then it replies, and the fact that you got a response and the speed it took are displayed.

If you’re going to be playing with cables and stuff, you could enter ping -t 192.168.1.1 – the -t flag makes it continue pinging until you close the window or press CTRL+C. If you’re getting a reply at all, and the latency (time<1ms) is stable and low, then your connection to the router is just fine.

Latency is the enemy of a stable and reliable connection – when you see people having problems with Zoom/Teams meetings and their audio or video is garbled and choppy, that’s almost always a latency problem, either within their home network or somewhere further up the chain. Some networks suffer from it inherently – satellite connected, like in-flight WFi, are a good example – and anything that needs a stable, real-time connection (video calls, multiplayer gaming etc) is best avoided.

STEP TWOa – ARE YOU WIRELESS?

If you’re using a wireless network, it’s worth checking that something isn’t getting in the way unexpectedly. IT bods troubleshooting a problematic early business WiFi network found that it kept dropping out randomly, but more often around lunchtime – until they realised their neighbour in the office block had a kitchen on the other side of the wall, with a microwave oven that nuked their WiFi whenever it was used. Some home electronics could do the same, or even things like wood burning stoves.

Maybe your household is near other users who could be getting in the way? Try scaring them for a laugh but it’s also worth making sure your WiFi network isn’t clashing with theirs. It could be worth trying the ping -t trick above and move the machine around the place to see if there are some spots where you’re getting really high latency numbers, or to see if the ping reply doesn’t come back at all.

Try the WiFi Analyzer app from the Windows Store (if you’re on a PC; there are many others for iOS/Android and Mac):

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This app will show you all the neighbouring networks and which channel they’re operating on; if you’re sharing the spectrum with too many others then it might be worth reconfiguring your WiFi network to lock to a different channel; time to RTFM for the router.

An alternative to WiFi Analyzer is the long-established inSSider. The latest version needs you to register for an account, but the old one – which still gives a lot of useful info – is still available, if you’re careful to dodge the many links to other unwanted stuff:

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IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

If the internet connection is still not playing ball, but initial signs are that the local network is OK and you’re fairly confident you don’t have sporadic hardware problems or similar, then it’s pretty likely the fault lies elsewhere. Get ready to face the inertia of service provider helpdesks who will assume that the problem is at your end… to prevail, we must arm ourselves with evidence and above all, keep calm.

To avoid over-doing things, we’ll pick that one up next week.