PC Health Check & Unsupported CPU

So now PCHC is stating my CPU is unsupported. It's an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00GHz. I'll buy that as the thing is ten years old now, but I'm wondering if it's because MS hasn't certified the processor yet for W11. I'm not planning to upgrade to W11 until just before the free upgrade is withdrawn, so is it reasonable to wait awhile and see if MS ultimately certifies the CPU or just buy a new tower then? We have no real high tech. use of the system, just internet and office apps plus lots of disk files.

jamis said:

So now PCHC is stating my CPU is unsupported. It's an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00GHz. I'll buy that as the thing is ten years old now, but I'm wondering if it's because MS hasn't certified the processor yet for W11. I'm not planning to upgrade to W11 until just before the free upgrade is withdrawn, so is it reasonable to wait awhile and see if MS ultimately certifies the CPU or just buy a new tower then? We have no real high tech. use of the system, just internet and office apps plus lots of disk files.

CPU is definitely not on the list...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...tel-processors



But... that doesn't mean you can't install Windows 11...
@NavyLCDR could you link to your "remove the appres during install" post on Eleven Forum. I can't find it.

jamis said:

So now PCHC is stating my CPU is unsupported. It's an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00GHz. I'll buy that as the thing is ten years old now, but I'm wondering if it's because MS hasn't certified the processor yet for W11. I'm not planning to upgrade to W11 until just before the free upgrade is withdrawn, so is it reasonable to wait awhile and see if MS ultimately certifies the CPU or just buy a new tower then? We have no real high tech. use of the system, just internet and office apps plus lots of disk files.

In other words: in Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00GHz, the "2" has has to be "8" or greater in order to support W11 plus the other requirements, as Megahertz mentioned.

jamis said:

So now PCHC is stating my CPU is unsupported. It's an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00GHz. I'll buy that as the thing is ten years old now, but I'm wondering if it's because MS hasn't certified the processor yet for W11....

They never will. They have determined that only 8th gen or later Intel CPUs are capable of running W11 well. The choice of 8th gen as the cut-off point is due to a number of factors. One is driver support from the manufacturers.

Bree said:

MS has chosen to only support processors for Win11 where the manufacturer supports the 'new Windows Driver model' for that processor. Basically that rules our anything earlier than 8th gen, except for a couple of specific 7th gen that MS later added to the supported list as they do have such drivers.

Windows 11 Drivers | Page 2 | Windows 11 Forum

Another factor in the choice was that some security functions natively supported in 8th gen and later have to be emulated by earlier processors, leading to a performance hit. You'd get the same performance hit in W10 if you turned on the security features that use them. In W10 they are off by default, W11 has them turned on by default.

David Weston, Microsoft’s director of OS and enterprise security said:

“From a feature perspective, there are two things that eighth-gen and up really give us—and that is mode-based execution control, which is on the Intel platform as an optimization for virtualization. And then the assurance that TPM and secure boot are there,” he said. “So Spectre and Meltdown are not a significant factor here.”

Microsoft Exec: Windows 11 CPU Requirements Allow Key Security Features To Run ‘By Default’

That not to say an old processor can't run W11, just that it may be slower than W10 on the same machine and is not supported by Microsoft. I have W11 running on a 1st gen i5, for example.

Thanks Bree. I appreciate your detailed explanation. I had seen the "1" series i5 CPUs as being supported and thought there was hope the "2" series might eventually be certified, but your explanation makes that hope unrealistic. The system doesn't have the TPM 2.0 module either. I think I will wait until support for W10 is expiring, just buy a new W11 installed tower, and move the contents of the old tower over to the new one. Hopefully, that will be a viable plan. The existing ASUS tower is ten years old and I think we got our $400 dollars out of it.