Solved What's different?

@BamaInArk

Thanks for your update comment. Looks promising in that nothing seemed to inhibit or break normal installation/running.

I have a break from my own (small) team geoscience AI project so I've decided to try 24H2 26100.268 on laptop no.2 (i5, gen8, 8Gb RAM, 1Tb NVMe). SSE4.2 listed as present by CPUID utility. First steps are to ensure current backup images, as of now.

I'll update this for those interested as it develops. I'm not much interested in new 24H2 gizmos but rather any interference in installation/booting/booting off older USB sticks. Your comment that it all reboots ok is helpful.

Using an ISO from UUP, I ran the "update setup" for 24H2 26100.268 on an i5 gen 8. No clean install, only the update overwriting 22631.3527.

Works ok, grinds away a bit at 87% but gets there. As far as I could see, nothing untoward or sticky occurred.

The final 26100.268 Windows directory was about 3Gb less in size than the older 22631.3527. I have no idea why or even if it matters.

Tested the updated installation with USB boot disks (Macrium, Aomei, Hasleo, and my own compilation). All worked as they always have.

So, really, not much to become interested about from my standpoint.

Hope this adds to accumulating information.

Perhaps should have added that I used Rufus to write the ISO to the boot USB disk, with all of Rufus' workarounds, and had the EUFI BIOS set with Secure Boot off.

I've also observed that the most recent version of Rufus (4.4) now gives a warning when writing older iSO's to USB disk along the lines of: "The bootloader in this ISO has been revoked and will give a boot error when attempting to boot with Secure Boot on".

So revocation is making some people nervous.

One thing to point out about Secure Boot....Win11 doesn't require it to be "ON" but just be Secure Boot capable. Unless something else has changed. I'll have to build a flash drive a few more times to look at the options. It might be as simple as using MBR over GPT. For my last 2 builds I used GPT.

Well, I removed it from all the old platforms the best way ever — pull all the drives with Win 11. It was only a test. Not that I'm opposed to going rogue. My girls don't like it. This old dinosaur is just going to have to be happy with what it has coz I'm certainly not forking out for A.I. I'll keep Win 11 on my two mains but nobody here likes it.

RD Mercer said:

What about older people?

Click to expand...

Well like Grandma used to say. "Well I Declare, Look Here"

I further attempted to install Win11 24H2 on an even older system. Asus P5N-E SLI, LGA 775, Core 2 Quad Q6700 cpu. Fully unsupported CPU as in no SSE4.1/4.2 support. Used another Rufus built flash drive using MBR, etc. I could boot to flash drive and it would show reading the drive for about a minute, then system would reboot without getting into the actual installer. Attempted multiple times. I can't be sure if it's the unsupported CPU causing the reboot or something else however.

BamaInArk said:

I further attempted to install Win11 24H2 on an even older system. Asus P5N-E SLI, LGA 775, Core 2 Quad Q6700 cpu. Fully unsupported CPU as in no SSE4.1/4.2 support. Used another Rufus built flash drive using MBR, etc. I could boot to flash drive and it would show reading the drive for about a minute, then system would reboot without getting into the actual installer. Attempted multiple times. I can't be sure if it's the unsupported CPU causing the reboot or something else however.

Click to expand...

I thought it had been fully established that without SSE4.2, even if you succeed in installing 24H2, it won't boot. No way to avoid that requirement.