I tried Tiny10 once. RAM usage was lower after startup, but eventually when clicking through settings app, it got up to usual Win10 levels. So I thought what's the point and forgot about it. Win11 is noticeably more cumbersome, especially on older (retro?) hardware.

From what I know, Windows 10 does not force you to create a password, it does ask you to enter a password but you can leave that field blank. Although it does force you to create an account.

Of course, Windows 10 is very happy if that account is a Microsoft account. I'm a bit sarcastic, of course it's not Windows the one who is happy but Microsoft.

Not sure which article you ready but Microsoft is pushing MFA on their online cloud services (Office 365, Azure/Entra, etc)
At the same time they are saying not to use phone numbers but authentication app's, passkeys, secure USB's things like this.

Given these intergrade pretty heavily into Windows then I can see online articles highlighting Microsoft's change in policy, but then everyone else is doing the same thing, even vogons has an MFA option!
I doubt MS will ever fully remove local account option at least for the business products like Windows Professional. but you bet they will hide it hoping to get that sweet user tracing info!

chinny22 wrote on 2025-04-07, 01:16:

Not sure which article you ready but Microsoft is pushing MFA on their online cloud services (Office 365, Azure/Entra, etc) At t […]
Show full quote

Not sure which article you ready but Microsoft is pushing MFA on their online cloud services (Office 365, Azure/Entra, etc)
At the same time they are saying not to use phone numbers but authentication app's, passkeys, secure USB's things like this.

Given these integrate pretty heavily into Windows then I can see online articles highlighting Microsoft's change in policy, but then everyone else is doing the same thing, even vogons has an MFA option!
I doubt MS will ever fully remove local account option at least for the business products like Windows Professional. but you bet they will hide it hoping to get that sweet user tracing info!

I find windows with a local account to be ..limiting in silly ways the MS account is not simply because a lot of Windows is now tied to having that MS account ...and you can bet your bottom dollar they will continue to make local accounts even more limited even if the option is still available. The situation is obviously different with Enterprise business windows where everything at some point is tied back to the business account and its details ...but you also dont need a lot of the consumer stuff there either so lack of MS account isn't a hindrance.

You find the same limitations on Mac OS if you dont have an Apple Account.

And both will pester you to get a MS/Apple account if you are using a local account, Apple is just less annoying about it.

As for 2FA and Authenticators .. both have saved my accounts on more than one occasion, just the other day at 3.45 AM some assclown tried to hijack my eBay account but got stopped by the phone authentication ..spammed the shit out of my phone with passcode requests.

I quickly put a stop to it and changed all my accounts still using passwords to using 2FA if its available. With how many data breaches are occurring and how easy it is for your details to be pwned im fully for 2FA and Authenticators.

They only have to save your accounts once and they are worth it.

Yep, I have MFA enabled on absolutely everything online.

Had somebody get into my Gmail years ago before MFA was a thing and was able to get it back and changed my password to something that was over 30 characters long.

For Windows 11 I just switched manually to local account in options and left password blank, that works fine for me.

Best thing is. Tiny11 does not need TPM.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2025-04-07, 17:02:

Best thing is. Tiny11 does not need TPM.

Neither does normal Win11. You just have to set the registry setting to bypass it. You can do the same for CPU.

Not sure what else can be set to not check as I haven't used that option that much.

That's all that Tiny11 would be doing in that case.

cyclone3d wrote on 2025-04-07, 17:50:

Neither does normal Win11. You just have to set the registry setting to bypass it. You can do the same for CPU. […]
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Cyberdyne wrote on 2025-04-07, 17:02:

Best thing is. Tiny11 does not need TPM.

Neither does normal Win11. You just have to set the registry setting to bypass it. You can do the same for CPU.

Not sure what else can be set to not check as I haven't used that option that much.

That's all that Tiny11 would be doing in that case.

Just use Rufus to creat an install media ...it'll bypass every single restriction including the MS account, heck I bet the rufus will even let you install Win11 on a Pentium 4...I for a fact know it can and will !

Yep, it auto sets all those detections to disable.

Why you would want to install 11 on a P4 is beyond me. Even XP 32-bit with a Pentium D 965 EE is agonizingly slow compared to Core2 or AMD CPUs from around that time.

And this is with a SATA SSD... Ugggghhhh.

Is there any distro of Windows 11 that doesn't call home?

I don't tolerate it when software establishes network connections without my specific orders.

cyclone3d wrote on 2025-04-08, 03:45:

Yep, it auto sets all those detections to disable.

Why you would want to install 11 on a P4 is beyond me. Even XP 32-bit with a Pentium D 965 EE is agonizingly slow compared to Core2 or AMD CPUs from around that time.

And this is with a SATA SSD... Ugggghhhh.

Sometimes I want to watch the world burn ... or a P4 struggle trying to boot.

It did boot though and once loaded it wasnt terrible ....till I tried to load anything, I think if the P4 had more than 2gig of ram it would have been a little better.

Grzyb wrote on 2025-04-08, 04:38:

Is there any distro of Windows 11 that doesn't call home?

I don't tolerate it when software establishes network connections without my specific orders.

They have all called home in one form or another but anything after XP has called home more and more often unless its one of the enterprise edition or a server edition with a VLK.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-04-08, 05:20:

They have all called home in one form or another but anything after XP has called home more and more often unless its one of the enterprise edition or a server edition with a VLK.

Yes, I know.
But I'm sure it's possible to isolate all the components responsible for unwanted connections, and remove them from the default install.

Unfortunately, Tiny11 doesn't take care of that.

Newer versions of Win11 (24H2+ I think) require SSE 4.2, so you can't run them on P4 AFAIK. I tried 24H2 ISO once on a virtual machine on my trusty Phenom II X4 system, this happened on boot splash screen:

UCyborg wrote on 2025-04-08, 06:37:

Newer versions of Win11 (24H2+ I think) require SSE 4.2, so you can't run them on P4 AFAIK. I tried 24H2 ISO once on a virtual m […]
Show full quote

Newer versions of Win11 (24H2+ I think) require SSE 4.2, so you can't run them on P4 AFAIK. I tried 24H2 ISO once on a virtual machine on my trusty Phenom II X4 system, this happened on boot splash screen:

on the topic of VMware, did you notice a performance slowdown when clicking, drag and dropping folders already present in the VM? I am facing a few seconds delay for a click to register in WinXP, kind of like it is emulation at less than 100% speed

UCyborg wrote on 2025-04-08, 06:37:

Newer versions of Win11 (24H2+ I think) require SSE 4.2, so you can't run them on P4 AFAIK. I tried 24H2 ISO once on a virtual m […]
Show full quote

Newer versions of Win11 (24H2+ I think) require SSE 4.2, so you can't run them on P4 AFAIK. I tried 24H2 ISO once on a virtual machine on my trusty Phenom II X4 system, this happened on boot splash screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivrlU73VcHw

It can run it but you need Cedar Mill, Pentium 4 had a long life and later models had Instructions that Win11 needs,.

Here is another using 23H2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKxvq-NeVC0 and Rufus to bypass requirements.

IIRC MS did some weird shit with 24H2 when adding in the AI slop so perhaps that's why its got newer requirements like SSE4.2, Also AMD IIRC had a different version of SSE4 that was not compatible with the Intel version of it.

Also another point is that it may be the VM causing issues, VM is not real period hardware and may have other requirements and overheads real hardware doesn't.

The first video is from 2023, I actually watched some time ago, at the end, it shows his Pentium goes up to SSE3. My Phenom II can run Win11 23H2 as well. I remember it was possible to just DISM /Apply-Image from CMD, then you didn't need to fiddle with registry, which helped with GUI installer specifically.

Don't know how true that is, it was said Win11 24H2 has new instructions in USB drivers specifically. But even so, who can say it won't expand to other code?

Yeah, old AMDs have just SSE4A at most, that's just a handful of AMD specific unrelated to SSE 4.1 instructions, Bulldozers from 2011 were first AMD CPUs with both SSE 4.1 and 4.2 and AVX (1).

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-04-08, 06:58:

on the topic of VMware, did you notice a performance slowdown when clicking, drag and dropping folders already present in the VM? I am facing a few seconds delay for a click to register in WinXP, kind of like it is emulation at less than 100% speed

Maybe it's different with much older versions of VMware, which I never tried TBH, but it was always sluggish with XP for me specifically. My impressions are that VirtualBox is better suited for NT 5.x line while VMware is better for NT 6.x and newer. Take this with grain of salt, especially if you think about VirtualBox and newer Windows versions, because I was mostly using VMware in recent years, both for older and newer Windows versions.

Sometime over the decade ago, I was still relying on Win2000 to run specific legacy accounting program (this program's startup was noticeably slower on Windows XP), I preferred VirtualBox. Before that, the program was run on an old noisy Pentium 233 MHz machine running Windows 98. 😁

UCyborg wrote on 2025-04-08, 07:59:

The first video is from 2023, I actually watched some time ago, at the end, it shows his Pentium goes up to SSE3. My Phenom II c […]
Show full quote

The first video is from 2023, I actually watched some time ago, at the end, it shows his Pentium goes up to SSE3. My Phenom II can run Win11 23H2 as well. I remember it was possible to just DISM /Apply-Image from CMD, then you didn't need to fiddle with registry, which helped with GUI installer specifically.

Don't know how true that is, it was said Win11 24H2 has new instructions in USB drivers specifically. But even so, who can say it won't expand to other code?

Yeah, old AMDs have just SSE4A at most, that's just a handful of AMD specific unrelated to SSE 4.1 instructions, Bulldozers from 2011 were first AMD CPUs with both SSE 4.1 and 4.2 and AVX (1).

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-04-08, 06:58:

on the topic of VMware, did you notice a performance slowdown when clicking, drag and dropping folders already present in the VM? I am facing a few seconds delay for a click to register in WinXP, kind of like it is emulation at less than 100% speed

Maybe it's different with much older versions of VMware, which I never tried TBH, but it was always sluggish with XP for me specifically. My impressions are that VirtualBox is better suited for NT 5.x line while VMware is better for NT 6.x and newer. Take this with grain of salt, especially if you think about VirtualBox and newer Windows versions, because I was mostly using VMware in recent years, both for older and newer Windows versions.

Sometime over the decade ago, I was still relying on Win2000 to run specific legacy accounting program (this program's startup was noticeably slower on Windows XP), I preferred VirtualBox. Before that, the program was run on an old noisy Pentium 233 MHz machine running Windows 98. 😁

I guess the point is to avoid 24H2 like the plague, its quite honestly the worst version of Windows 11. I dont even run it on my home PCs, they are all feature locked to Win11 23H2 due to how terrible 24H2 is.

Im curious as to why USB drivers even need SSE4.2,

Even sysprep is broken in 24H2.
-First you have to disable Bitlocker completely through Powershell.
-You have to remove at least four apps through Powershell (Copilot, some widgets thing, can't remember the other two)
-You have to create and use a custom unattend.xml file to get Bitlocker working again after you deployed your image.
-Pray to some entity it works and don't get errors Windows couldn't read the unattend file.
Don't forget to disable secure boot when imaging. And enable it afterwards.