Microsoft Announces October 5 Official Date For Windows 11 Launch

Tech giant Microsoft announced on Tuesday that its new operating system Windows 11 will be launched on October 5 and will be available as a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs, or on new hardware that ships with Windows 11 pre-loaded.

Microsoft stated that the free upgrade like many Windows upgrades in the past will be available in phases and new eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first, and then Windows 11 will become available for more in-market devices in the weeks and months following October 5th.

General manager of Windows marketing at Microsoft, Aaron Woodman explained that “Following the tremendous learnings from Windows 10, we want to make sure we’re providing you with the best possible experience,”

“We expect all eligible devices to be offered the free upgrade to Windows 11 by mid-2022.”

On existing Windows 10 PCs, Windows Update will let people know when the upgrade is available for Windows 11. You can also check to see if your device is eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade through Windows Update, or Microsoft’s dedicated PC Health Check app (currently in preview).

Not all of the announced features will be available at the launch of the new operating system on October 5. Android apps will not be available at the launch until 2022.

Windows 11 can be installed on any hardware using an ISO method, as long as the PC has a 64-bit 1GHz processor with two or more cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a TPM 1.2 chip. But if a workaround is used, your PC will be in an unsupported state. This means an unsupported Windows 11 PC might not get access to Windows Update, and even security patches.

Microsoft also announced that it will still support Windows 10 until October 14th, 2025 for those whose OPC isn’t fully compatible with Windows 11. The Windows 10 users later this year are expected to receive a 21H2 update that includes GPU compute support in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Windows Hello improvements, and WPA3 H2E Wi-Fi security support.