People buying PCs today will therefore be eligible for a free upgrade when Windows 11 launches around the holidays. Microsoft has announced that the new Windows 11 OS release will be available as a free update to licensed Windows 10 users. Will Windows 11 be a free update for Windows 10? Still, with Microsoft essentially giving it away to existing users, that will salve some of the pain. To check if Windows 11 is ready for your device, go to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update and select Check for updates. And that kinda takes some of the shine from the release of something purporting to be a whole new version of the Windows operating system. Install Windows 11 Once the Windows 11 upgrade has been tested and validated for your specific PC, Windows Update will indicate that it's ready for installation.

The downside of this is that, shiny new UI aside, Windows 11 looks an awful lot like the Sun Valley Windows 10 update we thought it would be. That said, we're pretty confident that Windows 11 started out life as simply a larger update to Windows 10, and that close relation will hopefully help Microsoft avoid the worst excesses of buggy release software. Windows 10 has not been without its share of system- and even game-breaking bugs on even small update releases, so something as large as a whole new version of the OS has a few more points of potential failure.

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