Last year, Steinberg told me that they would no longer support my Cubase 11 install because my hardware was out of date. Which seemed odd.
I have Dorico 4 right now
Here’s my hardware:
Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
16 GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce GT 1030
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
Feels like a silly question but - is it possible that Steinberg could stop supporting my Dorico 5 install any time soon on this rig? I want to grab the Dorico 5 upgrade at the current 50% off deal, but need to know if this will trigger a required hardware upgrade.
I think the problem is the upcoming removal of MS support for Win 10. They’ve been telling me for a while that my hardware (Intel i5) is somehow inadequate and not supported - but it still works fine with Dorico 5.
Hmmm, I seem to recall the Yamaha guy told me that he couldn’t answer my Cubase question because of my proc but I may be mistaken. I guess I should upgrade to Windows 11 in any case but is my hardware going to be good enough for xx years? I’ve never been in a situation in which I had to upgrade (hardware or Windows).
EDIT: Nope, I just ran PC Health Check and this rig will not run Win 11. See attached
I really don’t understand MS requirements. I downgraded from Win 11 to Win 10 on this PC (because I dislike Win 11) and now it tells me my machine is inadequate for Win 11!!! Crazy.
The list of ‘Windows 11 supported Intel processors’ is very long and includes many that I could have sworn were less powerful than mine (Celeron, i3, i5). But my i7-2600K @ 3.40 GHz is definitely missing. This page says minimum is 1 GHz. This is above my head. My rig is maybe 6-7 years old so I guess it’s time, it’s just a shame because it runs everything I need very well.
I only have an i3 quad core processor with the same video and OS and can run most things. Although I now have 48Gb RAM, I started with 16Gb which is enough to run the lighter full orchestral libraries (like VSL SE or Prime). I will probably get a new PC when Windows 10 is no longer supported in about 15 months but until then, I’ll be fine and you should be too.
If the Health Check app tells you that your PC can’t run Windows 11, that might not be the end of the story. Depending on your exact setup, it may be possible to enable Secure Boot and TPM in your system BIOS, which will then allow Windows 11 to be installed and to run.
I do wonder, though, whether you might have got the wrong end of the stick when talking to our support team. I’ve never heard of our support team telling people that they can’t provide support because of hardware (except perhaps to those intrepid/foolhardy people in the “Hackintosh” community who try to run macOS on unsupported hardware). However, we will shortly be ending support for Cubase 11, as per this announcement:
So I wonder whether perhaps that’s what they meant?
Microsoft does actually publish a (not recommended) way to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware. It involves a registry edit. The preliminaries already mentioned are needed. A firmware upgrade from the manufacturer of my motherboard enabled TPM 2.0. For Secure Boot without data loss see this. In my case I had to convert MBR partition style to GPT and then enable UEFI and Secure Boot. Now only my processor fails the health check, i5-7600. I shall try the registry change and Windows 11 next year.
I was miffed when the expiry of Windows 10 support was announced. I bought this system in 2017 specifically for Dorico, the first software I wanted that specified a 64 bit processor. My previous system was working well after twelve years (with hardware upgrades in a tower cabinet).
As for Windows 11 not being able to run on older PC hardware, I am running it in the form of tiny11 2311 on a Dell XPS 8700 which I purchased 10 years ago. This version of tiny11 is fully serviceable, so I can use Windows Update to install the monthly security updates from Microsoft. Aside from Edge which I had to install using Winget, all of the other components of Windows 11 I normally use were already available.
Using tiny11 2311, I can run a subset of Windows 11 Pro on a PC using BIOS rather than UEFI with a fourth-generation Intel Core processor, a hard disk which is MBR formatted rather than GPT formatted, no TPM and no secure boot. The operating system isn’t particularly speedy, but it works!
Hi Daniel, nice to hear from you. That may indeed be what they meant. In any case the Canadian team has been good in the past. Your post and that of andrewds below indicates that the time may have come to upgrade. I know it shouldn’t, but for people like me, the phrase ‘registry edit’ conjures doomsday scenarios where I break my rig and can’t get it working again : )
If they aren’t supporting Cubase 11 any more, I guess it’s time to upgrade there as well. For now, it looks like I can upgrade to Dorico 5 with no issue, so I’ll do that today.
