The day Windows 11 leaked, I took one look at it and confidently predicted that it would be a complete disaster. Imagine my surprise when... I was absolutely right. It feels like ages ago when Microsoft made bold claims that Windows 10 would be the last operating system. But I’m sure you’re all familiar with that story by now.
So, here's the deal: I have just one computer that can run Windows 11, thanks to the wonderfully helpful (and entirely unavoidable) PC Health Check bloatware. That computer happens to be my Lenovo Legion. A few days after the release of Windows 11, I noticed that my system was ready for the update. Without thinking too much about it, I started the update and let it run overnight. The next morning, I checked on it, and, to my delight, the update had completed successfully. Cool! Everything seemed to be fine... that is, until I noticed something odd: the icons for some programs stored in my documents were missing.
At first, I thought it was a glitch. But when I checked my documents, downloads, and backups, which were all stored on my D: drive, I couldn’t find them. Naturally, I opened Disk Management, only to discover that my 1TB Samsung SSD was uninitialized, filled with random data, and all of my precious files were irretrievable. I contacted Microsoft support, and their response was, essentially, "Sorry, there's nothing we can do."
Reinstalling Windows 10 wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either. I lost nearly everything because I had exceeded the window for rolling back to Windows 10, all while trying to get some help from Microsoft regarding the 600GB of lost data. After painstakingly recovering what I could, I made a vow: never again.
The Perfectly Placed Information
As luck would have it, at the time all of this was happening, I was also taking a networking class as part of my Cybersecurity studies. For those of you who haven’t followed my educational journey, yes, I’m in Cybersecurity. One of the assignments in that class required me to configure a group policy to prevent users from installing their own updates. As I navigated through the Group Policy Management interface to the update section, something caught my eye:
"Select the target feature update."
Curious, I opened the policy and was immediately struck by what I found: I could actually restrict which operating system versions could be installed on the machine. That’s when I had an epiphany: I needed to find a way to stop Windows 11 from even being an option on my system. But there was a catch: my Lenovo came with Windows 10 Home, which doesn’t include the Group Policy Editor. A quick Google search revealed that upgrading to Windows 10 Pro would cost more than I was willing to spend, so I had to get creative.
After a bit of digging, I stumbled across a solution on MajorGeeks—a download for the Group Policy Editor (GPEdit.msc) that could be installed on Windows 10 Home. Once I ran the file, it installed the Group Policy Editor, and I was able to configure policies on my own PC.
Now, I regularly change the available feature update (as of writing this, Windows 10 22H2 is the latest) and, as a result, my machine no longer recognizes itself as capable of running Windows 11.