Tech Forum

Our stake has eight computers and four of them are up for refresh this year. The Lenevo replacements have been delivered (Lenovo M70q gen3 mini-desktops) and they have Win10 installed, which is out of support in October 2025. It's interesting because these computers have the required CPU for Win11, plus TPM v2. Local Security Policy and/or Intune is prohibiting me from upgrading to Win11. I assume SLC will eventually publish the Win11 in-place upgrade via Software Center.

This is more of a FYI post rather than a question. Anyway, have a nice day!

-AJ

A couple of years ago our stake bought a small "NUK"-size PC for all our AV encoding needs. (It works amazingly well!) When it first arrived from Amazon I logged into Windows 11 to establish the cloud license authentication, then wiped the NVMe drive and installed Windows 10. I run Windows 11 at home on most of my PC's, but jump through the necessary hoops to keep them all setup as local accounts. This is getting harder to do as MS really wants you to use an MS account. Every major update that comes along you have to do a Google search on how to keep a local account on your PC because the intimidation to use an MS account starts all over again. I can handle that at home, but I wouldn't want a PC that several wards use to have to put up with that.

I'm sure the church is wrestling with this for unit PC's. Maybe they'll have each unit create an MS account formatted with the unit's number like we've been doing with local accounts to stop the MS nagging - I really don't know. I'm sure they're well aware of the end of support for Win 10 and also know those dates tend to slip quite a bit with some of their more popular OS's.

I'm pretty sure MS doesn't push that Microsoft Account stuff on Enterprise machines. And since our machines are centrally managed, that's probably good enough. (Although I don't remember seeing them connected to a domain).

I'm sure part of it is just inertia, as Win11 wasn't very well liked when it came out. Everyone know 10. 11, not so much.

I'm guessing the church will migrate mid-2025.

Sure would be nice to just have a FAQ about this. An answer about the move to Win 11 would just help answer dozens of tech questions every month... Hey folks, we know that Win10 is going out-of-support in 2025, we'll be starting a project in the early part of Q1 or Q2 of 2025 to get computers updated. We will package it through X tool. Stay tuned for further information.

By not doing it, the thousands of IT people called around the globe as tech's in wards and stakes just shake their heads about how 'awful' church It is... all they need is some good branding, a teency, weency bit of communication.