Windows 10 is no longer Microsoft’s flagship operating system but that doesn’t seem to be affecting its popularity. New stats from the advertising platform AdDuplex have revealed that Windows 10 user numbers are growing at a quicker rate than the shiny new Windows 11 OS. During this month, Windows 10 managed to expand the number of people using it by over 6 percent. Meanwhile, Windows 11 grew by less than 0.4 percent. Things were even worse in March with this very latest operating system getting just 0.2 percent more users.
Windows 11 now has a market share of around 19 percent which is pretty impressive considering the operating system only launched back in October last year.
What will be worrying Microsoft is how the adoption rate has now stalled and that could be because this new software requires fairly new hardware to work.
That means some users might not be able to upgrade from Windows 10 until they buy a brand new PC and that’s clearly putting many people off.
If you weren’t already aware, Windows 11 has pretty specific requirements including with Microsoft confirming users will need at least 1GHz or fast 64-bit processor, 8GB of RAM, 64GB or larger storage, a 720p HD display and a DirectX 12 compatible graphics card with a WDDM 2.0 driver.
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Any PC running a processor that’s older than 8th Gen Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 2000 will not work. That means an expensive trip to the local gadget shop to buy a new computer.
To make things even more confusing, PCs also need something called a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip to work.
This piece of hardware makes things far more secure and it seems Microsoft wants Windows 11 to be safer for people to use.
TPMs work by offering an additional layer of security on the PC itself and, with cyber attacks on the rise, it makes sense for Microsoft to beef up protection for its billions of users.
As Microsoft explains, “Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology is designed to provide hardware-based, security-related functions. A TPM chip is a secure crypto-processor that is designed to carry out cryptographic operations. The chip includes multiple physical security mechanisms to make it tamper resistant, and malicious software is unable to tamper with the security functions of the TPM.”
If your PC or laptop hasn’t got a TPM then you’ll be stuck with Windows 10 until you switch to something new and that need to upgrade could be a major problem for Window’s 11 growth in the future.
