This was a cheap eBay purchase that came with an nVidia Quadro P2000 graphics card that on its own would have costed more than I paid for the whole workstation. The workstation is used to run two Train Simulator games and Microsoft Flight Simulator streaming them to my Mac. Whilst a gaming PC would be more appropriate for peak performance benefits over the reliability optimised workstation, this is what I have and I have been impressed with how well the workstation performs. Unfortunately Microsoft have decided that this high performance PC is illegible for Windows 11 updates but I am determined to keep this machine out of eWaste.
Future Options
- I may opt to purchase extended support updates however the cost of these hasn’t been announced yet, and this also depends on the Steam client and games supporting Windows 10 after the end-of-life date.
- Perform an unsupported upgrade to Windows 11 and hopefully get more use out of this high performance workstation, and I will document this below.
- Install Linux on the Workstation and run the games with Steam Proton with success reported at present for some Train Simulator Classic and Train Sim World 4 players.
Should I need to install Windows 11 I ill need a digital activation which might not be available freely at a latter date, so installing Windows 11 then rolling back is what I will cover below:
Windows 11 Unsupported Upgrade
Following Microsoft’s documentation I added the following registry modifications:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup
- Name: AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU
- Type: REG_DWORD
- Value: 1
I then downloaded the “Create Windows 11 Installation Media” tool from: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
I then mounted the ISO image that the tool created however installation failed with ““We couldn’t update system reserved partition”. I was able to solve this with commands listed in a Microsoft Support article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/-we-couldn-t-update-system-reserved-partition-error-installing-windows-10-46865f3f-37bb-4c51-c69f-07271b6672ac
- mountvol y: /s
- Y:
- cd EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts
- del *.*
With the above done I was able to upgrade to Windows 11 from the mounted ISO.
Having verified that Windows 11 Pro activated I now know that the hardware identifiers of my workstation match a digital license with Microsoft meaning that I can reinstall Windows 11 at any time of my choosing. All that was left to do now is return to Windows 10:
Within 11 days of installing Windows 11 it should be possible from System Recovery in Settings to “Go back”. Having clicked this I went through all the warnings and proceeded non-dramatically to restore Windows 10: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/downgrade-from-windows-11-to-windows-10/84a2416d-ccfb-4d87-9eee-e1056591e91f