back to article Microsoft accidentally turned off hardware requirements for Windows 11

Microsoft has accidentally turned off its controversial hardware compatibility check, thus offering Windows 11 to computers not on the list. Windows 11 does not install on computers that lack a recent TPM-equipped CPU, although there are exceptions (notably for some of Microsoft's own hardware, which failed to make the cut in …

  1. Ashto5

    Win 10 is good enough

    Don’t want win11

    1. codejunky Silver badge

      Re: Win 10 is good enough

      @Ashto5

      I said the same with win7. Only upgraded because of end of life but didnt want the 'upgrade'. Happy to skip win8

      1. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

        Re: Win 10 is good enough

        Same here... finally moved to W10 in Jan 2019 when I built a new system... Left my mediaserver on W7 until April 2020, when I also rebuilt that system.

        I'm not looking to do a new build on either of my systems until 2024 or 25... I can upgrade my AM4 system from the 3800X to a 5800X or X3D at some point, and of course a new GPU when prices become reasonable again.... if they ever do.

        So I'll be staying with W10... whilst ensuring it's kept in line with OOSU10, and putting the start menu back exactly how it should be. All telemetry shut off along with all of the other snooping and attempts to force you onto the MS store... dead and defeated.

      2. NoneSuch Silver badge
        Big Brother

        Re: Win 10 is good enough

        Windows 10 is commercial spyware.

        The life expectancy of Windows releases will keep shrinking until MS is ready to announce the monthly fee for accessing your copy of Windows.

        It's coming boys and girls. Best to have your Linux escape plan well prepared today.

        1. codejunky Silver badge

          Re: Win 10 is good enough

          @NoneSuch

          "Best to have your Linux escape plan well prepared today."

          My only use for windows is gaming. Everything else I do on linux. Some of the games have ported well and others not so well which is my only reason to use MS

          1. Buttons

            Re: Win 10 is good enough

            Left at W7, W10 was a step too far, use Manjaro for gaming, over the years I've collected so many games that I can avoid the ones that don't work so well, loads of choice if you're not a fashion victim.

            1. martin 62

              Re: Win 10 is good enough

              with valve releasing the steam deck which runs steam OS which is based on Arch Linux. (not to be confused with the stream deck which is a different product by elgato) more games are being ported to Linux so soon you might only need windows for a handful mainly ones with anti cheat and ones which are no longer updated/abandoned.

              1. J. Cook Silver badge

                Re: Win 10 is good enough

                Sadly, the stream deck will not run on a Steam deck, because Elgato only ever made windows 10 drivers for the stream deck.

                Also, I have some sea shells by the sea shore to sell you. - Sally.

                1. 42656e4d203239 Silver badge
                  Coat

                  Re: Win 10 is good enough

                  >>Also, I have some sea shells by the sea shore to sell you. - Sally.

                  Wasn't that Mary Anning?

                  /mines the one with a Titanites Giganteus in the pocket - yes, they are very large pockets.

                2. gc23

                  Re: Win 10 is good enough

                  Elgato's Stream Deck works quite well under Devuan Linux using this: https://timothycrosley.github.io/streamdeck-ui/

          2. cyberdemon Silver badge
            Linux

            Re: My only use for windows is gaming.

            Technically speaking, many games run better on Linux than they do on Windows (better Vulkan support etc) even with non-native games. Proton is so f~~king good. Even my VR games work, thanks to Steam's amazing Linux support.

            Note that the games don't have to "officially" support proton either - you can turn on "use Proton/SteamPlay for all titles" in Steam, and you will find that almost everything works out of the box. A lot has changed in the last few years in the world of Linux gaming thanks to Valve/Proton.

            However, some games try to install windows rootkits under the guise of anti-cheat, and these games do not work well in Proton.

          3. BobChip
            Linux

            Re: Win 10 is good enough

            I implemented my escape plan more than ten years ago, and have never looked back. Simples. (Icon, but you already knew that anyway..)

      3. Piro Silver badge

        Re: Win 10 is good enough

        It was true of 7 though. There are still updates to 7 if you use a special script allowing you to receive them, as Microsoft is still patching it until 2023.

        10 will still be patched until 2032, if you have a very specific version of it, so that's the next best version of Windows once 7 has finally expired.

        Even the XP hold outs had updates until 2019 by using a workaround.

        1. Dave K

          Re: Win 10 is good enough

          I'm still running Windows 7 on my main PC with the tweak to continue getting updates. I do have Windows 10 on the same PC as a dual-boot OS, but I much prefer Windows 7 and will continue to use it as long as it is patched and the software I use continues to support it. Of course, that will unfortunately change over the next 6 months.

          As for Windows 11, I have no interest in it until MS undo some of the stupid decisions they made with it, such as the hobbled task bar and woeful start menu. I imagine in 6 months time I'll have to bite the bullet and start booting into Windows 10. Not ideal from my perspective, but at least Windows 10 is more usable/customisable than Windows 11.

          1. Piro Silver badge

            Re: Win 10 is good enough

            I know this specifically is shallow, but when I go back to a 7 machine I'm always taken by how much more attractive it is than newer versions. And look ma, one control panel!

            1. ChrisC Silver badge

              Re: Win 10 is good enough

              It's anything but shallow IMO. The UI is the very essence of how you, the user, interface with the machine, so being provided with a UI which appeals to your specific preferences damn well ought to be THE most fundamental requirement for any UI design specification...

              The way I see it, modern UI design feels like it's been driven by people who look at the UI as being a static graphical element which has been made to look as beautiful as possible in PR screengrabs, but which doesn't actually need to be useable in any way, shape or form. Legacy UI design OTOH was driven primarily by the desire to create something that worked as a dynamic interactive link between meatsack and silicon, and to hell with what it might look like when viewed as a static screengrab in an advert or whatever.

              Hence why modern UIs seem to focus so much on trying to make the UI look like something that wouldn't look out of place when printed on high quality paper for a coffee-table book about something stylish. All that whitespace and subtle, simple iconography and typefaces looks drop dead gorgeous when viewed as a design concept - there are times when W10 and 11 genuinely take my breath away at how nice the UI can look when you just sit back and gaze upon it from afar.

              As something a human needs to be able to interact with OTOH, it's all a complete pile of shite. Give me skeuomorphic icons, 3D bevelled edges and all the other stuff that modern designers heap scorn on as being oh so out od date and past its best, but which, for those of us who spent several decades using early WIMP UIs, served us just fine across god knows how many different versions of OSs running on different systems, across widely differing screen sizes/resolutions/colour depths...

            2. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

              Re: Win 10 is good enough

              I'm using 'classic start menu' on W10 to revert it back to how it looks on W7... I've only ever used the actual W10 start menu version upon first install... and one of the first things I do, is install that along with OOSU10 to disable all of the telemetry and other MS shite

        2. fandom

          Re: Win 10 is good enough

          A few months ago, we upgraded a CAD/CAM suite to the lastest version that requieres Win10, and I asked "Many computers are still in Win7, will it work?" and they answerd "sure, there is a workaround".

          Yeah, except that after installing the programs in those computers, printing would stop working, first in one computer, then another, then another,...

          And they didn't support Win7, so the only solution was to upgrade to Win10.

          And so it will be with Win11, we may loath it all we want, we may say that not having a local account isn't acceptable, but we will have to bend the knee.

          I may use Linux exclusively at home and have Linux servers at work, but that CAD/CAM suite is not going to be available for Linux any time soon, or ever really.

          1. imanidiot Silver badge

            Re: Win 10 is good enough

            Once enough companies get fed up with Microsofts antics, and the call for Linux support becomes strong enough, those CAD/CAM suites will "suddenly" be ported to Linux. As someone working in engineering, the call is there, and it's strength is growing. Many in the IT department here (and at our clients) detest the latest flavours of Windows as much as we do and the engineers REALLY don't care as long as the CAD/CAM works and they have their 3D mouse working. The rest is all incidental.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Win 10 is good enough

            3D printing Cura announced v5.0.0. It took a while to find that the install was failing on W7 because they no longer support that OS version.

            Fortunately they also have a Linux version - so can run that on Linux Mint on a VirtualBox VM on W7.

            1. Richard 12 Silver badge

              Re: Win 10 is good enough

              That's because Qt 6 dropped support for Win7.

              It's a deal breaker for us, we cannot move to Qt 6 without it.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Win 10 is good enough

              Addendum:

              It did take a little while to realise that the Cura 5.0.0 Linux downloaded file isn't a package to install. Time-wasting dead-ends trying various package installers.

              The unfamiliar downloaded file suffix ".AppImage" actually means you just give it execute permission in Linux Mint. Then it will run like any application program - it is NOT a preparatory install. It is self-contained with all its runtime dependencies. Neat.

          3. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
            Flame

            Re: Win 10 is good enough

            Quote

            " but that CAD/CAM suite is not going to be available for Linux any time soon, or ever really."

            thats our problem, I'd like our CAD/CAM maker to make a linux mint version so that we can dump windows once and for all (it will persist in the office due to the admin 'needing it' to read emails/requests for quotes)

            After all theres nothing better than to have to do an emergency re-program of a job because a custom tool has failed and you need to do it the older/slower way with conventional tools, and the win10 laptop decides "I need to update" and locks you out of the thing because it needs to spend 30 minutes 'updating' all the while you have the manglers going "is it done yet?" every 30 seconds....

            At least mint pops up an icon saying "I need to update...." and not the 'fuck you and your job " way that windoze does...

          4. garrettahughes

            Re: Win 10 is good enough??

            If you still drive the same car you drove 10 years ago, you can stay with 10. But you would be surprised at how much technology changes and, just as surprising, how much it stays the same. The truth is I reluctantly went from 7 to 10. But after I did, I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to move around in this new space once I got the hang of the interface. Same will be true for 11, which I just installed on my beautiful Spectre laptop (not quite ready to update my desktop yet). All my apps port nicely, in fact they were already there, and as I hinted at, function very well in this new space. It's like a city that's gotten a facelift. Some of the streets have been rerouted or renamed to help manage the traffic a bit better, but the buildings remain intact. Listen, as a systems engineer I write a lot of code to model and simulate complex systems. I would really hate to have to give up the Adobe suite of programs, and the Microsoft suite of programs that I use constantly for augmenting and developing my code and the presentation of its results. I have been writing code for over 40 years. I have only had to write code in four languages: FORTRAN, C, C++, and now Java.. On the other hand I have had to put up with at least 20 changes in Operating Systems. In reality they are just Windows dressing; it's the Internals that count, and they don't change very much: regardless of the latest programming fad or OS.

            1. Updraft102

              Re: Win 10 is good enough??

              Yeah, I am still driving the same car I did ten years ago. I'd been driving it for more than ten years at that point... and it was ten years old when I bought it. When something works, it works.

              But I am not touching Windows 10 or 11 with a ten (or eleven) foot pole. Windows 10 was the Windows that was so "good" that it made this guy who dislikes change leave the platform he had been using for 25 years. Linux (with KDE Plasma) is truer to what Windows used to be than Windows itself is anymore.

        3. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

          Re: Win 10 is good enough

          I've been too worried about M$ using an update to brick my Win7 computer, so it's not been updated for years. Still works too, although the case is not long for this world.

  2. b0llchit Silver badge
    Joke

    The version number is an indication of the # of supported windows. You need a new computer with each window in Windows. They are now making you get 11, again.

    1. sreynolds

      If that is the case why were they so keen to get you off 8.0 and 8.1 to 10?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BOLO: TPM to detect Microsoft software...

    ... and immediately shutdown.

    In all likelihood this will be a future bug, but some might see it as a feature.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft can't be trusted!

    I've taken their word on hardware compatibility and disabled TPM on all my machines to avoid getting W11 and now Microsoft has let us all down ? What world are we living in!

    1. sreynolds

      Re: Microsoft can't be trusted!

      You still have to accept the update don't you?

      1. eldakka

        Re: Microsoft can't be trusted!

        > You still have to accept the update don't you?

        For now, yes. But since MS has a documented history of either upgrading without prompting or totally ignoring the response to the prompt, there is zero trust that this will continue.

        In fact, I'd say there is absolute trust that MS will introduce those shenanigans now that the upgrade rate has started to drop. Most of the early adopters or those who need it (e.g. reviewers, people sho's job is to test these new versions) have already upgraded, so the adoption rate has started to decline after that initial hump has been satisfied.

        1. jerkyflexoff

          Re: Microsoft can't be trusted!

          Ain't that the truth, I have been a MS fanboi since my IT career started. All there BS I shining through now. Time for Linux me thinks.

          1. sabroni Silver badge

            Re: All there BS I shining through now

            Ok, so you were here for IE but you think now with this TPM stuff MS have crossed a line? Or does "since my IT career started" mean "a couple of months ago"?

            1. imanidiot Silver badge

              Re: All there BS I shining through now

              Just to make you feel old, someone who started a year AFTER that verdict (came in 2001) will have had 20 years of experience by now!

  5. Gene Cash Silver badge
    Pint

    Gotta love the subhead

    Except sadly it's true.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Worst bug this year, hands down

    Deploys an entire and technically incompatible OS, and removes an essential security feature(preventing lusers from installing OS updates when they shouldn't).

    Can we please get another trustworthy computing initiative going?

  7. Sam not the Viking Silver badge

    The Right Team....

    It's not a question of "...the right team investigating...". It's the left hand that needs to let the right hand know what's going on.

    Perhaps they ought to check which trousers they are wearing because everything doesn't seem to be under control....

  8. Youngone

    I'm confused

    I installed Win 11 on an old Lenovo Thinkcentre, purchased new in 2017 and it runs fine.

    The secret is to download an iso and boot from a USB drive.

    Any time I try to do anything useful it prompts me to log into my Microsoft account, which I don't want to do, but the actual OS does work.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Awooga! Awooga! Abandon Ship!

    I thought my sole Win10 device, a piddling little tablet, was safe from this shit, but now it has to fear for its poor little life.

    Oh wait - no it doesn't! It up and died on me the other day and just sits there with a blank expression, bereft of life.

    Still, better to go that way than to be savagely 'improved' when MS forget that they're supposed to ASK before updating to Win11.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Bad things happen

    When you turn it to 11.

    1. Piro Silver badge

      Re: Bad things happen

      I can't give you another upvote, as you already have 11. Satisfying when things fall in to place.

      1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: I can't give you another upvote

        So you're providing an update instead? I see.

    2. Kane

      Re: Bad things happen

      "When you turn it to 11."

      Why not just make 10 louder better?

      1. Cmdr Bugbear
        Coat

        Re: Bad things happen

        But this goes to 11

        (I'll see myself out)

  11. jglathe
    Unhappy

    cost/benefit vs any linux or linux in disguise

    Using anything on Windows appears o be a hassle these days. I mean, really. Nothing works straight out of the box, and if it does, it's classified as a bug. Go figure. True, the main consoles are still running some Windows here, still, but when it comes to testing new things... actually not much does. Will be another few years, and either Windows is a GUI frontend like X Server on Linux or it will be gone. Maybe for good.

  12. Kev99 Silver badge

    Those minimum requirements have more to do with helping mictosoft's sycophants sell their kit than being needed to run the bloatware.

  13. Dave_A

    It seems that MS wants to bring the 2yr cell phone lifecycle to PCs....

    Ignoring of course that the main reason that 'works' is that most phones batteries are toast after 2-3yrs and people upgrade anyway regardless of software support.

    1. Piro Silver badge

      2 years? Whoops, my main phone is one from 2017. Guess I missed that memo.

  14. TheDrift
    IT Angle

    The Windows Web

    guys, its a trap!

    1. eldakka

      Re: The Windows Web

      Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL windows 11 upgrader!

  15. Sentar

    Microsoft and TPM.......

    I have just purchased/built a NEW desktop computer along with a TPN module.

    I see no benifit to use TPM it seems to offer me NO additionl secutity.

    As for BitLocker it seems to give more problems if you enable/use it.

    My computers are secuted by MS Defender and MS advanced Guard and over the last few years and not be caught out.

    I'm careful and always alert for scam e-mails and what I open CHECK First.

    MS has sold or tried to sell us a lemon regarding the bennifits of TPM.

    Regards Carl

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Sentar - Re: Microsoft and TPM.......

      Those benefits were not meant for you. You knew that, didn't you ?

  16. Richard Pennington 1
    FAIL

    Legendary quality control

    Where quality control is in the land of myth and legend, a fable from the long-distant past, a tale which may once have had some basis in a historical event ... in other words, fabulous.

  17. shaunhw

    Rolled back after an hour

    This week, I had it on my year old compatible Acer machine for just over one hour. After enabling virtualization the Amazon app-store would not install, which was the sole reason I wanted to use it at all. I found out that's because I live in the UK, but it did not tell me that it was only available in the USA. Windows security was missing from settings after the update and gave an error when I clicked on the relevant button in the settings app. Then it mentioned something about Intel USB 3 drivers not being compatible. After taking a good look around, 11 offers me NO improvements to Windows 10 whatsoever IMHO. I then rolled right back to 10, which is in a decent state these days.

    Microsoft should be ashamed of this pile of junk I think.

  18. Potemkine! Silver badge

    It seems MS does whatever possible to kill Windows, at least every two versions. I guess it isn't profitable enough now?

  19. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Manufacturer's Recall

    Isn't this the same kind of situation as where a Manufacturer makes a blunder? What are its' obligations to its' customers under these circumstances?

    Potentially people whose machines have erroneously been upgraded [sic] could have their pc's bricked in an instant. Some of those people could be running software which is Very Important. (Ok, ok, so why run Win in the first place?).

  20. Overflowing Stack

    My 2018 macbook pro could run Windows11, but doesn't because Apple won't release drivers for the TPM on the motherboard.

    My 2017 Dell XPS, shouldn't run Windows 11, but does

    1. 43300 Silver badge

      So far as I'm aware, no Macbook has a TPM chip.

      Apple T1 abd T2 chips are proprietary - they are not TPM chips.

  21. Winkypop Silver badge
    Alert

    Phew

    That was close!

  22. man_iii

    Treacherous Platform

    Long ago when microshit called Linux cancer ... TPM was relabelled correctly by the OSS community.

  23. wolfetone Silver badge

    It used to be said that every other Windows release was awful, and the one after would be better.

    I don't know at what point you start this, but 98 was good, XP was great. Windows 7 was great. Windows 10 is great.

    What was inbetween? Windows ME was shite. Windows Vista was abhorrent shite. Windows 8 wasn't great.

    And so fits Windows 11 in to this odd, not at all scientific, model.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      (*) Your interpretation of "great" differs from the norm!

      1. wolfetone Silver badge

        My version of "great" is "not shit".

        So everything is great, until it's fucking brilliant.

        1. Piro Silver badge

          From that definition, I suppose 10 is passable.

      2. dlc.usa
        Boffin

        Meaning of "great"

        The scope of great in this context is Windows and only Windows. No Windows release can ever be great within the context of all operating systems.

    2. Piro Silver badge

      Eh, the greatness stopped after 7 in my opinion. 10 is tolerable, but not great.

    3. 43300 Silver badge

      XP had issues as released - it was only with a major service pack that it became decent-ish!

      Windows 2000 (derived from the NT line) was good, and formed the basis of all subsequent versions. The contemporary consumer version, Windows ME (from the Windows 95 line), was crap and probably as a result the line was discontinued and all future consumer versions were basically the business version, i.e. the NT line, with a few features such as domain join disabled.

  24. Zebo-the-Fat

    Wyndoze 10 working well, no TPM on my aging motherboard so no upgrade to 11 (not buying a new motherboard, CPU etc just for the latest OS) when the security updates stop I will probably move over fully to linux

  25. rh16181618190224

    Locking to a specific version

    There appears to be a registry setting to block W10 feature updates, which seems to block the W11 update too. It might stop working at any time of course.

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/this-registry-trick-lets-you-block-major-windows-10-updates/

  26. The Central Scrutinizer

    LOLZ.... Microsoft

  27. Edgar Scrutton

    When will people realize that M$'s goal is to make $$$ and that will be to entice users to to monthly subscription on the 'Cloud' where his/her OS will be the current version of Windows updated (daily?) by M$ and accessed though any browser? The software required by the user will be a optional extra monthly fee. Microsoft will escape supporting hardware which is not profitable. The computer joins the phone as a monthly profit source.

  28. steviebuk Silver badge

    The TPM requirement

    is enough that it will end Windows 11 and not many will purchase it and I fear, some older folks will be scammed by rogue engineers into buying it.

  29. Jon 37

    There is a huge difference between "I can install it and it seems to run" versus "all the parts actually work and should continue to do so in future updates".

    Microsoft breaking the install time check does not suddenly make all the rest of the OS work on unsupported hardware.

    To the extent that Windows 11 has support for older processors, that is probably just because Windows 11 started off by copying the Windows 10 source code. Microsoft won't bother writing such support code when they change things in future. And they are likely to remove existing old processor support code when changing stuff in future - such code just makes programs slightly bigger, slower, and harder to test.

  30. Joe Dietz

    Win11 may like _new_ CPUs but that doesn't mean what you want it too....

    I spent a fair amount of time yesterday learning about the 'Bitmask Manipulation Instructionset 2' (BMI2) and in particular why a library I'm using was causing a #UD fault on a brand-new Windows 11 laptop from Asus. The reason is that it's an 'Intel Inside' (aka 'Celeron') and... despite meeting the weighty requirements for windows 11 lacks some Haswell era instruction sets. (Answer is to recompile the library with some defines that do things the hard way). Mind you, I know this is a cheap laptop, that is why I purchased it since I'm developing software and want to know the worst-case performance scenario. Naively I was hoping that win11 at least meant we could count on some sort of baseline of cpu features from say 2013. Nope.

  31. Blackjack Silver badge

    The last Windows I used was Windows 7.

    For anything else I use Linux Mint.

    Maybe I will use 11 if I buy a new computer in the future and I absolutely require it to tun a specific software but for now I am content.

  32. worldtraveller2

    W10 Good Enough

    I have W10 and like all users it took some getting to know the new system. I wouldn't want to go back, but yet again my 7th generation processor is disallowed from joining the W11 club. However, having seen the interface I would need to install a product like Start11 to make it feel friendly again. Why do MS do this with every few issues of Windows and come up with s**t. Will probably wait for W12 to come along to see if they have had a better think about the UI.

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