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Comment by MAGZine | Hacker News Reader

I was a little surprised to learn that my four-year-old processor (i7-7700) was locked out of running windows 11. It's certainly not processor speed issue, it's still plenty fast for games today. It's not TPM either, which it supports. The best I can tell, Microsoft drew a line and said "too bad," for everything before a certain generation.

I really only play games on my computer--I have no idea when I'll upgrade the CPU. The last one lasted nearly a decade before I replaced it. I guess it'll be a while before I see Windows 11. I'm not too mad though--Windows 10 is a fine Operating System.

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You can still install windows 11 straight from an image and it’ll ignore the processor and TPM requirements - they’re considered ‘soft’ requirements even if Microsoft doesn’t say so outright. I currently have it running on my desktop with an i7-6700k and my laptop as well with an even older i7 and TPM 1.2.

You’re absolutely correct in that they ‘drew a line’. They have a specific set of guidelines[0,1] they want CPUs to meet going forward, and it’s more of a matter of ceremony and certification rather than anything concrete nor technical.

0. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com...

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...

You also can install it by putting the win11 payload onto a win10 install USB stick. Just don't let it have access to the net while it installs or it'll "download install updates" that stop it from continuing. This is how I installed it on my machine that doesn't support TPM.

I would guess it's TPM based on what I have read, even though you say it is not. It's weird the ark page[0] doesn't specify it.

[0]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97128/i...

I wonder if this is because there is a lot of old legacy code in the codebase, specifically for these older processors, they want to remove?

I can see the logic in wanting to make the Windows codebase smaller/leaner/etc by wanting to get rid of the legacy stuff.

It works on my older CPU (i7-4790K) - I only tried in a VM, however.

Maybe it has something to do with Meltdown/Spectre mitigations.

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