Watch what is next for Windows event on June 24, 2021

sgage said:

The new PC Health app tells me no-go - CPU is not supported. My CPU is a Core i5 7400. But it has 4 cores and is 3.5 GHz. It is outrageously stupid to disqualify my computer based on this.

It has nothing to do with raw processing power. Microsoft is basically claiming that Core processors prior to 8th-gen Core processors are not secure because they lack some hardware security features. I think it's nonsense, but that's their position.

Just read this. Sounds a bit more hopeful about the TPM requirement. See the bit about someone from Tom’s Hardware changing his firmware. Initially the test app said his machine wouldn’t run W11 but after changing his bios firmware it passed the test. Off to see if I can do this in my bios with firmware.

Windows 11 TPM requirement is confusing everyone — what you need to know | Laptop Mag

CountMike said:

It's leaked version (of course) boot/installation USB made usual way, Fat32 formatted USB stick with ISO contents copied to it. It installed alright when I enabled firmware TPM.What I found confusing that one of requirements is Secure Boot but it installed with it disabled in BIOS. If enabled it can't be installed because Secure boot by it's function disables writing to boot sector on system disk. Frequently it even disables updates.

By secure boot do you mean the UEFI Secure Boot feature? Because that is not about write prevention, that is more like a whitelist for the bootloader.
Think of it like an integrity check: if your bootloader image is signed by a trusted vendor such as Microsoft AND it passes various integrity checks, then it allows booting from that media. If not, then it will stop the boot process.
On some machines you're able to set Secure Boot into manual mode, where you can alter the key database, effectively you can control what is allowed to boot and what is not.
Though it is not the primary usage of it, but in a corporate environment, given that I am able to sign and get approval for my own bootloader image, I could use secure boot to enforce a configuration that only lets my recovery media and the installed OS to boot, nothing else, greatly reducing the possible attacks by rogue USB install media.

It is a nice feature but it has certain drawbacks (such as Rufus's NTFS driver cannot be used with it because it is not signed) and besides verifying the bootloader against it's own "trust database" with the keys, it doesn't really secure anything. It does not do write prevention and it should not impact your install results, whether you enable it or not.

If you are not able to install Windows with this feature enabled, then you probably have some other feature in the way because this thing alone does not do that to the best of my knowledge.

Ground Sloth said:

It has nothing to do with raw processing power. Microsoft is basically claiming that Core processors prior to 8th-gen Core processors are not secure because they lack some hardware security features. I think it's nonsense, but that's their position.

Oh well, too bad for me. I easily exceed all the other requirements. If they don't end up including 7th Gen Intel, this rig will be Win10 to the bitter end.

RingTailCoon said:

And not a WORD about the SecureBoot thing. That's good news!

Yes, that is good news for now, because there are many PCs on which this feature is not set up correctly, or not at all.

Secure Boot is a real deal-breaker as it can't be used in some scenerios such as for certain Linux installations with 3rd party drivers, such as Broadcom's BCMWL 43143 series WiFi (which isn't even a Linux driver, but an extracted "essence" of the Windows driver).

People who use such installations must not enable secure boot or it will stop their OS from booting. Also famous USB writer software Rufus has an NTFS driver that is not signed for various reasons, also incompatible with secure boot.

This would pose just as much, perhaps even more headache and incompatibility than the TPM requirement. I am still shocked on the latter though. I can see why they did not dare to make secure boot a requirement though: because the picture is not as clear with this one. It is not a simple yes/no question like your PC has this or not. The question is whether it is set up properly or not. It is somewhat hard to write a guide for that as this is a setting in UEFI BIOS SETUP and there are different implementations, with some being a simple enabled/disabled checkbox, others allowing auto/manual mode while others require manual configuration (or hitting the auto install factory keys button) even for auto mode to work. It's a pain.

Ground Sloth said:

It has nothing to do with raw processing power. Microsoft is basically claiming that Core processors prior to 8th-gen Core processors are not secure because they lack some hardware security features. I think it's nonsense, but that's their position.

Intel 7th gen and 8th have the same microarchitecture and the same errata document 7th Gen and 8th Gen (U Quad-Core) Intel(R) Processor Families...,

In fact Intel released the 8th gen as a response to AMD Ryzen with 8 cores, Intel 8th gen is exactly the same as 7th gen, just slower and more cores (6 cores instead of 4).

It is totally an economical decision so that an average user will buy a new PC, both hardware manufactures and Microsoft will benefit from it,

I am really hoping that people will be aware of this fact before they are forced to buy a new PC.

I am already running Windows 11 on vmware machine with my Intel i7 7829hk with no issues,

f14tomcat said:

Look at my specs. I have done a clean install, and in-place on my Insider partition, and an install in VM. All on an i7-7700k.

Nice rig! Encouraging to hear about your successful installs...