As I was scratching my balls, I had this revelation: what if we are fools to want to install Win11 on CPUs that are officially unsupported? Sure, they’re not supported for a made-up reason (TPU 2.0), and the real reason was to revitalize the selling of new, crappy computers (newer laptops, for instance, have cheap keyboards), but this is what made me ponder.

I just noticed a useless €200 laptop that uses Intel’s N100 CPU. But its uselessness does not primarily stem from of the CPU: it comes with 4 GB of RAM and Win11 in S mode! They carefully avoid mentioning the S mode, but the official HP page for 15-fd0611ng makes it clear. And S mode means Windows Store-only. Sort of Windows Phone without the phone and with a larger screen.

At first sight, N100 is not powerful enough for the full Win11 experience. It’s usually used for Chromebooks, if not for the retarded Windows in Shitty mode.

In Germany:

With more RAM, some are selling it with Win11 Pro, but the exact model name is not given (Verkauf und Versand durch X-HARDWARE, which might be fishy): HP 15.6”, N100, 16 GB, 512 GB SSD, Windows 11 Pro = €349 (Black Week Deal).

In Romania:

This latter guy has a cornucopia (or should I have said pornucopia?) of ports:

  • 5×USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) ports
  • 2×Type-C ports
  • a microSD card reader
  • a Gigabit Ethernet LAN
  • 2×HDMI 1.4

However, it might be too slow for Windows 11 Pro, eh?!

But then I wanted to compare the CPU of my old cheap laptop from 2016 with this N100 shit, and I was stunned by the results!

Despite its low price, the N100 is faster than my i5-5200U and its TDP is 6 W, whereas mine is 15 W!

Now, let’s compare my newer cheap systems: my HP mini-PC from 2021 (Intel i5-10400T) and my cheap laptop from 2023 (i3-1215U):

Indeed, these are significantly faster systems (also, NVMe SSDs and faster DDR4 SDRAM, but not DDR5).

So it occurred to me that it’s only the newer Acer that I should migrate from Linux to Win11 (and it will be able to fucking hibernate!), but not the older one! The older Acer should probably be used for experiments with Linux, because its CPU is a joke compared to the crappiest CPUs of 2025! (And we’ll soon enter 2026…)

Or should it?! It’s a shame how “modern” OSes require more and more CPU power (and RAM, and SSD) for nothing. For non-gamers, the heaviest app is actually the web browser! (Blame the web apps for that, but the OS isn’t lightweight anymore either.)

For fuck’s sake, this world is really fucked up!

More food for thought

There is a comparative test for laptops in the French magazine Que Choisir, December 2025, at page 35:

The “top 2”:

  • LENOVO IDEAPAD SLIM 5 GEN 10 (16” AMD Ryzen AI 7 350), €900
  • ACER ASPIRE 16 A16-61M-R7V1 (AMD Ryzen AI 5 330), 2048×1280 OLED, €900

At least this Acer model is an “AI Copilot+ PC”! The problem with it, despite being recommended by the magazine? “The only disappointments: flat sound quality and slow start-up time (42 seconds).”

FORTY-TWO SECONDS? Let’s compare the CPUs for these laptops:

It looks like Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 is the only real choice for CPUs that are having a multithreaded rating under 20K! Or FlyOOBE. Or some other way of slimming down Win11.

We’re so very much fucked indeed.