Its been know for awhile that Win 11 is EQ's Y2k bug .. and once anyone upgrades to win 11 EQ will stop updating and the launcher will stop responding
I know that Demi is joking . I am running Windows 11, and EQ runs just fine on it. As for support, I don't see why DPG would stop supporting the game if it is still active, regardless of the Windows it is run on. I know that they have stopped support for older Windows (7), but will continue support through this new iteration of Windows.
It should be fine. However, stay away from 11 for about a year. Give them time to find and fix the worst bugs and until then, 10 is just fine. (or 8.1.. or even 7 if you've made it this far) EQ1 won't break until Microsoft stops supporting DX9.0c and/or drops 32bit app support. (they only dropped 16bit apps with 64bit builds of windows 10, if that tells ya anything about how they phase out old tech)
Here's an article that gives some options for cheap Windows 10 keys. I bought two for $7 each. Cheap Windows Keys These are legal copies of Windows, by the way. It's basically an overstock.com kind of deal.
I'll check into it .. I talked to microsoft rep other day via chat and they said I could not upgrade for free .. so will check into buying a key for cheap
From a purely technical standpoint you can still install Windows 10 using any legal Win7 or 8 key. I'm not talking about the "legality", I'm just saying that it will activate just fine on the old key and not complain at all. If you are logging into a Microsoft consumer account on the old machine you will not even need to type the key for Windows 10, it will just grab it from your cloud profile.
FWIW, if you have an unsupported TPM/CPU Microsoft itself does give instruction on how to bypass the requirements if you just feel you want to install 11 and everything else be damned:
I'm still convinced that TPM requirement is all about Microsoft's continued removal of user control of the OS with an eventual plan to completely remove administrative control and encrypt things to keep the user out, probably to appease the media industry which is obsessed with DRM getting as draconian as possible, with what I am convinced is a plan to totally kill off the single-payment media license to completely remove consumer control or rights over what they 'buy' entirely. The latest removal of user control is that Microsoft no longer allows you to stop typing in the start menu from using Bing. Before Windows 11, a Registry tweak could do it. Now you WILL broadcast to Microsoft what you are typing, even if you have not desire for your search result to be polluted with random internet garbage when you're just trying to get a local program to run. I'm not sure the inferior taskbar functionality is more "modern" UI design (as in removing more and more features and offering less and less customization) or just that it's just plain not finished yet and they will implement improvements (as in, make it work as well as it used to) over time. Conspiracy theory aside, the big divider for compatibility is usually if it was originally designed for the Windows NT family. As far as I'm aware most things for Windows XP+ still work fine, or have workarounds to work fine. Due to the way AMD implemented 64 bit instructions (an implementation Intel uses too) I doubt 32 bit programs are going anywhere for a long time. There's always the ARM doomsday scenario but I think love of backward compatibility will mitigate that threat, maybe? Microsoft ditching DOS/Windows 9x and transitioning fully to Windows NT (with Windows XP and forward) was the best thing to happen to Windows. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. As far as I'm aware if it's from Windows XP or newer, there's usually some way to make it work on modern Windows? Microsoft abandoning DirectX9 would be a catastrophe. I hope that never happens.
Thanks for the link. It's not so much that I feel a need to disable it. What bugs me is how increasingly aggressive MS is over it.
I have had serious problems with Win 7 running EQ lately. Bought a new comp with 6core 16gig ram, 4 gig video, and 500g SSD. My EQ runs like an Olympian and no refusals to load, so after transferring files from my old comps to the new one i am upgrading it, to win 10-- since they are going to support it for another 4 years at least i do not feel the need to go to 11.
