Windows Update Assistant

Quite some time ago, Windows Update stopped offering 21H2 as a feature update from 21H1 and only states that the system won't support W11. I finally put some time together to update to 21H2. I used Windows Update Assistant to download the update and do the update. WUA ran for over 6 hours to get to the restart point. The restart took 5 hours. I probably should have chosen a different method, but the WUA was simple to do, just execute the program and let it roll (and roll and roll and etc.)

jamis said:

Quite some time ago, Windows Update stopped offering 21H2 as a feature update from 21H1 and only states that the system won't support W11. I finally put some time together to update to 21H2. I used Windows Update Assistant to download the update and do the update. WUA ran for over 6 hours to get to the restart point. The restart took 5 hours. I probably should have chosen a different method, but the WUA was simple to do, just execute the program and let it roll (and roll and roll and etc.)

Let's install Windows 11 on incompatible hardware | Windows 11 Forum

I'll keep on W10 until the last possible moment. I'll let others do the bleeding edge experience. After over four decades in IT, I'm sort of done with the experimental stuff. Due to the age of the tower, I may just opt for a new one with W11.

jamis said:

I'll let others do the bleeding edge experience. After over four decades in IT, I'm sort of done with the experimental stuff.

It's been done already ... by Rufus. Passed the experimental stage, tried and true and proven and successful

jamis said:

I'll keep on W10 until the last possible moment. I'll let others do the bleeding edge experience. After over four decades in IT, I'm sort of done with the experimental stuff. Due to the age of the tower, I may just opt for a new one with W11.

I block preview builds (Group Policy as I have Pro), and thankfully Win 10 'feature updates' are minor enablement packages that don't introduce the bugs we've seen in previous years.

The feature update seems to be working just fine. No errors anywhere. I'll run a system image tonight and call it a success even though it took over 11 hours.

Disk imaging: speed depends on your hardware and the amount of used data being imaged. If over USB2 will be very much slower than over e.g. USB3.

Imaging a SSD will be faster than imaging a HDD.

Creating a differential image is faster than a full image.
Creating an incremental image can be faster than creating a differential image.

Example: creating a diff. image of my 256Gb SSD (about120Gb used) over USB3 to HDD takes some 12-18 mins typically.

The HDD being updated was an internal 1TB SATA drive. The rest of the system specs.are current in my profile. During the feature update, disk utilization rarely exceeded 20%. CPU utilization by the update processes often exceeded 50% and ran as high as 75%. I think the WUA process was simply performing a LOT of checking and validation of things. I was rather pleased the FU went completely without a hitch. I was actually expecting something to go awry and it didn't. Since this CPU is not supported by W11, I will probably just buy a new tower when all W10 support goes away. It's too bad as the system runs just fine and more than meets our needs. I'll be surprised if MS supports this machine on W11 in the future.

jamis said:

I'll keep on W10 until the last possible moment. I'll let others do the bleeding edge experience. After over four decades in IT, I'm sort of done with the experimental stuff. Due to the age of the tower, I may just opt for a new one with W11.

None of my laptops were supported devices for Windows 11. For my old 'main machine' (System One below) I got a new supported device to become my 'main machine' and restored a system image of the old one to it, ready to get the W11 upgrade when it was offered through Windows Update.

Nothing 'bleeding edge' about it, really. If a PC can run 64-bit W10 then it should also be able to run W11. By now I have all my unsupported devices running W11 as a second boot option alongside their original W10, and all run without issues - even my eleven year old System One below.

Most of them are using native boot vhdx to do so, which means that no changes were made to their original W10 install. It would be easy to remove W11 just by deleting the .vhdx file, should I ever need to.

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