Windows 11 Upgrade

This may be a question for the Windows 11 forum. I have not registered on the 11 forum yet.

My laptop is not that old and running Windows 10. Update says my system does not meet the minimum requirements. All is good except the CUP which is a 7th generation i7. My machine has Secure Boot, TPM2, plenty of RAM, is 64 bit and has 2 or more cores.

It seems that Microsoft will only recognize 8th generation and later CPU's with the exception of a few 7th gen. That confuses me, there is not that much difference between the 7th and 8th generation i7 CPU's.

There is a registry edit I saw on the net that bypasses the CPU check. I'm not that concerned that my machine will run Windows 11 without issues but I am concerned after reading that Microsoft may not support modified installations of Windows 11.

Has there been any confirmations that modified Windows 11 installations do or do not update through the Windows update site?

Thanks, Cheers!

I agree - you may want to visit ElevenForum if for no other reason to browse the multitude of information there on this topic.

I'll give you the brief synopsis:

There are MANY, MANY, people who run Win 11 on ancient hardware (including myself) who have no problem whatsoever with it. Personally, I have machines as old as 13 years now that run Windows 11 flawlessly. In fact, a common theme is that many say it runs better on their old hardware than Win 10 did!

That said, if you run Win 11 on what is technically unsupported hardware, Windows 11 is updating just fine. In other words, security updates, monthly updates, all these are working fine. However, Windows will not present new upgrades to major feature releases automatically. At least up until now, this is exceptionally easy to work around.

I cannot predict what Microsoft will do in the future, but I strongly suspect that they will not make efforts to block the workarounds currently in place to running Win 11. After all, those settings in the registry (as one example) are workarounds provided by Microsoft themselves for "enthusiasts". If they were going to block older systems completely, my suspicion is that Windows 12 is where that will happen since the current expectation is that Win 12 will remove a lot of support for legacy features.

The bottom line is that at this time, in by far the majority of cases, Win 11 is running fine on unsupported hardware.

My suggestion would be this: Just to be on the safe side, before you go to Win 11, create a full disk image backup of your OS drive just to be on the safe side. That way, if something does not work as expected, you can easily revert back.

Here is just one of many threads to help get you started:

Let's install Windows 11 on incompatible hardware | Windows 11 Forum

If you should have any specific questions, or are just looking for general info, give a shout and we'll be happy to help.

However, I really do encourage you to check out ElevenForum. There are many very helpful people there!

Thank you for the reply, I will join the Windows 11 forum

Thank you for the information. My current OS shows Windows 10 Version 22H2, so would I need to perform the ISO upgrade?

Bree said:

You're not actually modifying the installation, all you are doing is bypassing the checks that Setup makes while installing of upgrading to Windows 11. Once installed Windows 11 never checks again, it's only Setup that checks for compatible CPU, etc.

Yes, an unsupported device will get all the W11 cumulative updates, same as a supported one would. The only thing it won't get offered in Windows Update is the upgrade to the next version (eg. W11 21H2 to W11 22H2). For that you need to do an in-place upgrade with an ISO and bypass the checks again.

As a test I have had Windows 11 running well since it was first released on machine with a Legacy bios, no TPM, and a 1st gen i5. Windows Update has kept it fully up to date. The only thing I had to do for myself was the upgrade from 21H2 to 22H2.

See, I told you that there are a lot of helpful people there

Bree brings up a really good point. You are actually not modifying Windows 11 at all. You are simply bypassing the Win 11 requirement checks during installation.

This is not important to know, but simply serves as an example:

The registry entries that you make during a clean install are never even stored in the Windows 11 registry. Those registry changes effect on the setup environment that is running in RAM during installation. As soon as Windows setup reboots the first time, POOF! Those registry entries are gone, having already served their purpose by that point in time.

My point is simply that this is a very safe, ultra clean operation .

I'm a little cloudy about this. My current Windows 10 version is 22H2. If I modify the registry will Windows Update allow me to do the upgrade through Update? If so what version will the upgrade be, Windows 11 21H2 or 22H2.

If Windows Update does not offerr the Windows 11 upgrade through Update, then I would need to perform the 22H2 ISO upgrade. Or, through Windows Insider?

Once I have upgraded to Windows 11 22H2 will I have to do manual Feature Updates every time there is a OS Version update?