Announced at a Microsoft press conference yesterday, the software company is making the upcoming revision to the Windows operating system, Windows 11, completely free to download and use if you are already using Windows 10. But there’s a couple requirements you have to meet.

1. CPU Requirements

You will need a 8th Gen or newer Intel Core processor. Or you will need an AMD Ryzen 2000 and newer processor. Here’s the full list of supported Intel processors and here’s the full list of supported AMD processors.

That being said, Microsoft is calling the CPU requirements a “soft floor”. This likely means that any CPU not supported by Windows 11 could possibly still work. But it could make running specific programs problematic and your Windows 11 experience may suffer as a result.

2. You have to enable TPM

You need to have TPM (Trusted Platform Module) turned on in your motherboard’s bios. Before you check your bios, you can use Microsoft’s PC Health App (LINK) to see if your computer is ready for Windows 11. If you are like me, you will see a “not compatible” warning. This means it’s time to dive into your computer’s bios.

Windows 11 requires a TPM capable of at least 1.2 support (most of the newer chips are 2.0), and UEFI Secure Boot. Both are used to help security on Windows PCs.

If you don’t know how to get into your computer’s bios, simply restart your computer and wait for the first splash screen to pop up. It will tell you the key you need to press to get into the bios. For me, it was either F2 or Delete. When you are in, it’s likely that you will need to go into the Advanced settings.

You aren’t looking for something labeled TPM quite yet. Both AMD and Intel have different terms for it, wonderfully confusing. If you have an Intel system, look for the “PTT” settings. On an AMD system, look for “PSP fTPM’. When you find that, flip on TPM. On my AMD system, I had to select “Discrete” to turn it on. Then you simply save and reboot.

Other system requirements for Windows 11 include at least 4GB of RAM, at least a 64GB hard drive, a Direct 12 compatible graphics card and an Internet connection w/ Microsoft account.

Freebie Alert: Windows 11 is going to be free, but there’s a catch

Are you getting frustrated at having to stay at home all the time due to coronavirus? Are you trying to cut back on your spending this month? We can help on both of those fronts. Here’s all the free trials being offered this month for streaming movies, TV shows, and music as well as video game streaming services and book subscription services.

Remember, as long as you cancel before the end date, you won’t spend a dime. Check out the full list below.

Streaming Video

Apple TV+: 7-day trial, $5-a-month after

• Access to Apple original programming like The Morning Show, Ghostwriter, Defending Jacob and the Beastie Boys Story.  (If you recently bought an Apple device, you should get a year of Apple TV+ for free.)

CBS All-Access: 1-month trial, $6 to $10-a-month after

• Access to CBS original shows like Picard, Star Trek Discovery and The Good Fight. Includes access to 10,000 episodes of CBS shows, live sports broadcasts and 24/7 news.

DC Universe: 7-day trial, $8-a-month after

• Access to DC live-action shows like Doom Patrol & Swamp Thing as well as animated shows like Young Justice and Harley Quinn.

Disney+: 7-day trial, $7-a-month after

• Access to Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars & Nat Geo content. Combo subscription option to Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ for $13-a-month.

HBO Now: 7-day trial, $15-a-month after

• Access to tons of original shows as well as recently released movies. This trial can also be found within Amazon, Hulu, the Roku store, DirectTV Now and AT&T Watch TV.

Hulu: 30-day trial, $6 to $12-a-month after

• Access to tons of original shows as well as new episodes from major networks the following day.

Netflix: 30-day trial, $9 to $16-a-month after

• Access to tons of original movies / TV Shows as well as documentaries, true crime, & comedy specials.

Prime Video: 30-day trial, $10 to $13-a-month after

• Access to tons of original shows and movies. Included in Amazon Prime subscription.

Quibi: 90-day trial, $5 to $8-a-month after

• Only works on mobile devices, Original content, episodes are 10-minutes or less.

Sundance Now: 7-day trial, $5 to $7-a-month after

• Access to true crime series, original dramas and thrillers.

YouTube Premium: 1-month trial, $12-a-month after

• Offers access to original programming as well as advertisement free YouTube videos, offline viewing, background play and access to YouTube Music

Streaming Music

Amazon Music Unlimited: 3-month trial, $8-a-month after.

• 60 million song library, unlimited skips, ad free.

Amazon Music HD: 30-day trial, $13-a-month after

• 60 million songs, double the bitrate of other services, millions of songs in 10x the standard bitrate.

Apple Music: 90-day trial, $10-a-month after

• Offers access to 60 million songs, advertisement free, accessible on iOS and Android devices. Also includes local radio stations & offline listening.

Pandora Premium: 60-day trial, $10-a-month after

• 30+ million songs, ad-supported option also available for free.

Spotify Premium: 30-day-trial, $10-a-month after

• 50 million songs, ad-supported option also available for free.

YouTube Music: 30-day trial, $10-a-month after

• Listen to music on YouTube without advertisements, offline or with your smartphone screen off.

Video Games

Google Stadia Pro (PC): 2 free months, $10 a month after

• The free trial offers access to 9 games: Destiny 2, Grid, Gylt, Steamworld Dig 2, Steamworld Quest, Serious Sam, Spitlings, Stacks on Stacks and Thumper.

GeForce Now (PC): 90 day trial, $5-a-month after

• You can also get completely free access, but it’s limited to a single hour of playtime. The 90-day trial offer priority access, extended session length and RTX functionality.
• Ubisoft recently added their library of games to the service, like the Assassin’s Creed series and the Far Cry series.

PlayStation Now (PS4): 7-day trial, $5 to $10-a-month after

• Includes over 300 PS4 games as well as 500 PS3 and PS2 games.

Books / AudioBooks

Audible: 30-day trial, $15-a-month after

• Your choice of 1 audiobook + Audible originals. In addition, check out the free books for kids (like the Harry Potter books)

Kindle Unlimited: 2-month trial, new accounts only, $10-a-month after

• Offers access to over a million eBooks and thousands of audiobooks. Requires a Kindle (or the Kindle Cloud reader in a web browser).

Scribd: 30-day trial, $10-a-month after

• Includes access to books, magazines, audiobooks and documents. There’s also a NYT bundle, if you want to subscribe to the service and the newspaper.

Getting Bored? Here’s every free trial on entertainment available during April 2020

Are you tired of watching TV? Are you getting bored of the same, stay-at-home routine everyday? Have you lost track of what day is it? Break out of the cycle of coronavirus tedium and learn a new hobby! You just might find something you love to do.

Of course, why spend money on learning a new hobby when there are resources online that will help you for free? Check out seven hobbies that you can learn for free while in quarantine.

Learn Photography

If you have a DSLR or are simply looking to get better shots with your smartphone camera, check out Nikon’s online camera school. Nikon typically holds in-person classes, but during coronavirus, they have made a number of their classes free to watch. While some of the classes are specifically targeted at Nikon owners, check out topics like photographing kids / pets, macro photography, and landscape photography to step up your game.

Here are some more free resources to check out:

• Lifehacker: Basics of Photography: The Complete Guide
• Future Learn: Commercial Photography: Still and Moving Image
• BluePrint: Professional Family Portraits
• Alison: 7 Photography Courses
• YouTube: The Art of Photography

Learn Origami

Got a big stack of printer paper or construction paper nearby? Grab a sheet and check out the free, online tutorials for Origami folding at the Spruce Crafts. Great for party tricks and it’s also a fun activity to kill an afternoon with the kids.

Here are some additional resources on YouTube:

• Happy Folding
• Jeremy Shafer
• Tadashi Mori (Make an origami Darth Vader!)
• Kade Chan

Learn Cooking / Drink Mixing

Tired of eating cold sandwiches? Want to give your microwave a break from frozen meals? You really can’t go wrong with the Bon Appetit YouTube channel. There are hundreds of videos that walk you through the steps of making both simple and complex meals.

Regarding drink mixing, check out Steve the Bartender’s YouTube channel. His straightforward style walks you through making delicious cocktails with the most common household ingredients.

Here are some additional resources:

• Binging with Babish (awesome for creative recipe recreations)
• New York Times Cooking
• How to Cook That
• Tasty

Learn a new Language

Adding a second language to your skill set can be ideal in areas where bi-lingual speaking is an important job skill. Or it can just be fun to learn a new language before visiting another country.

We like Doulingo. The ad supported version of the software is completely free (ad-free is $7 a month) and it teaches you reading / writing and speaking the new language. The company estimates that 34 hours of using the app is the rough equivalent of taking a language course at college.

Here are some other resources:

• Open Culture (Great for popular languages)
• Learn a Language (Great for basic phrases)
• Surface Languages (Great for learning common phrases / pronunciation)

Learn Fitness / Yoga

While the stay-at-home exercise equipment market segments has exploded over the last couple years, there are plenty of ways to learn proper fitness techniques and stay active without spending a dime. Fitness trainers have flooded Youtube with free workouts, everything from pilates to boxing.

If you are just getting started, check out the videos at Fitness Blender. With workouts for both men and women, this channel really excels at walking you through the basics. There are tons of options, with varying levels of intensity. There’s even videos that require zero equipment.

Here are some other great channels:

• MadFit: Real-time workouts, all types
• Blogilates: Focuses on core, arms, legs.
• Tone it Up: Focuses on female fitness.
• Yoga with Adriene: Huge variety of Yoga tutorials.
• Walk at Home: Good for beginners, low intensity / no -equipment workouts.

Learn Gardening

Getting outside during quarantine is ideal, even if it’s just spending 20 to 30 minutes outside tending to a new garden. We like the MIgardener channel as they offer general tips videos as well as walkthroughs on what they are planting.

Here are some other great channels:

• California Gardening
• OYR Frugal Gardening: Good saving money tips.
• Urban Gardening: Great for gardening in small spaces.
• Growing Your Greens: Great for food growing tips.

Learn Knitting / Sewing

We were a bit shocked at how quickly sewing machines have sold out on Amazon, during the coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps a large number of people are taking up crafting during quarantine?

Anyway, you don’t need to pay for any courses when learning to knit or fix your own clothing via sewing. We recommend the Sheep & Stitch YouTube channel to get started. They offer videos with beginner tips as well as full tutorials on making things like hats and scarfs.  On the sewing side, check out Made to Sew. Excellent walkthroughs on specific types of stitches as well as different techniques.

Here are some other great channels:

• Professor Pincushion: Excellent sewing how-to video collection
• Naztazia: Excellent knitting how-to videos.

7 Hobbies you can learn for free while in quarantine

The final season of Game of Thrones kicks off this month and you will need streaming HBO to watch it. HBO does release the streaming versions of their shows at the same time as the show debuts on the East Coast, thus you can watch the latest episode and chat about it at work the next day.

Of course, there are a ton of ways to snag a temporary, 1-week free subscription to the service to avoid paying the full cost.  The GoT final season is a total of 6 episodes, thus you only need six weeks of service if you want to hop around in free trials.  (The 30-day free trial offered in 2018 has expired.)

Two caveats: HBO free trials are limited to new customers, typically. Also, you will have to provide a credit card for payment confirmation. Of course, you can immediately turn off the auto-renew in the settings and the free trial will simply expire a week later.

Free HBO Trial Options:

• HBO Now: 7-day trial subscription, $15 a month after trial. (Use HBO Now app on Roku, Apple TV, Android, Amazon Fire, PlayStation, Xbox)
• Amazon Prime: 7-day trial subscription, $15 a month after trial. (Requires Amazon Prime, 30-day free trial available for Prime.)
• Hulu: 7-day trial subscription, $15 a month after trial. (Requires Hulu subscription)
• The Roku Store: 7-day trial subscription, $15 a month after trial. (Requires Roku Hardware)
• DirectTV Now: 7-day trial subscription of entire service, $50 a month after trial. (HBO is included in trial)
• PlayStation Vue: 7-day trial subscription, $15 a month after trial. (Requires Vue subscription, 5-day trial available.)
• AT&T Watch TV: 7-day trial subscription, $18 a month after trial. (Requires AT&T Watch TV sub, 7-day trial available.)

If you are a spoiler-avoiding ninja, you can also just wait until the week of the season finale of GoT, get a 1-week trial, binge the first 5 episodes and watch the finale without paying a single cent.

Other options:

• If you use AT&T for service and switch to an AT&T unlimited data plan, you can get free HBO for life (or any premium channel you choose). That covers up to 10 devices on your plan. Of course, it’s at a hefty cost, $80 per month. And AT&T reserves the right to slow down your data speeds if you consume more than 22GB of data per month (Which is pretty easy when streaming video)
• If you already have premium TV service, call your cable / satellite provider and ask to cancel your service. They will send you to the retention department, who will always offer a discount on service. In addition, they often package a premium channel like HBO into the mix for a 3 to 6 month period.

Game of Thrones is coming. Here are all the free HBO offers

Trying to begin working out and getting fit can be really daunting.  With what is seemingly a billion different sources and all sorts of things you can buy, a lot of people don’t know where to start.  But, you can start plenty of different types of fitness workouts and regimes, for free, and oftentimes right in your own home!  Here are nine YouTube fitness channels to look at, and get you started on the path to fitness today!

Fitness Blender

Fitness Blender is one of the most popular YouTube fitness channels, and for good reason.  Fitness blender has a variety of workouts available, of different times and different skill levels.  Most of Fitness Blender’s videos are HIIT and cardio focused.

Yoga with Adriene

If yoga is more your thing, then you can’t do better than Yoga with Adriene.  Adriene has a bunch of yoga videos available to choose from, and covers beginner poses, more advanced moves, and also workouts to help relieve muscle stress.

The Fitness Marshall

A lot of people generally think that dance oriented workouts are silly, but nothing is off the table for getting fit, provided you have fun!  The Fitness Marshall has a bunch of different dance videos, focused around cardio workouts that are designed to get you moving and sweating.

Blogilates

Blogilates is a channel that focuses on pilates, which is somewhat similar to yoga but focused more on building a strong core.  This channel has pilates videos for all pilates levels, including some very beginner friendly videos to get you started.

Millionaire Hoy

Millionare Hoy is a very positive trainer, and his videos focus a lot on getting active, and getting stronger.  Other than his motivating mindset, Hoy also has a bunch of 30-day and 90-day workout plans, giving you a structured workout regime to get though and making it easier to stick to a fitness plan.

Jessica Smith TV

Jessica Smith TV is a YouTube channel focused more towards women’s fitness.  Most of Jessica’s workouts are cardio based coupled with light weights, but she also as light, positive videos like the ‘Walk and Talks’ above, which offer motivation and a less hardcore mindset to fitness.

The Body Coach

The Body Coach’s channel mainly focuses on HIIT workouts, which are fast, high intensity cardio workouts.  Like many channels, he has videos for all fitness levels, and this is especially important with an intense cardio workout like HIIT.  He also has videos that feature different types of equipment (or no equipment), in order to inject some variety into the workouts.

Zuzka Light

Zuzka Light’s workout videos are very much focused on strength training, and feature videos with and without workout equipment.  She also has videos of various lengths, including 5 and 10 minute workout videos to get in a quick workout even on the busiest days.

Physio Fitness

When you get injured, it can be really hard to workout and re-strengthen the injured body part.  Adding on the fact that physical therapy can cost a lot of money, and is not always necessary for more minor injuries (that can still affect strength) and it can be hard to know where to begin.  Physio Fitness focuses on exercises and workouts that can help restore motion and strength in commonly injured body parts, making it so you can get back to normal mobility and your normal workout routine.

9 Free YouTube Fitness Channels to Get you Moving