How to install Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11 requirements | Hacker News Reader

How to install Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11 requirements

support.microsoft.com

65 pointsbelter72 comments

Interesting that Microsoft provides how to install on devices that don't meet minimal requirements. Still seems slightly risky as in they may just decided to enforce TPM 2.0 in future updates....

If you've dabbed in Windows before and how permissive it is with piracy, you also know that any kind of enforcement on Windows CAN and usually IS bypassed rather quickly an easily.

Cracks and patches are on the web only hours after whatever Microsoft does. Especially in places like China, Russia, etc.

Easier it is to use https://rufus.ie/en/

In addition to Rufus, Ventoy (an awesome multiboot USB tool) also supports bypassing the hardware checks and the online account requirement

I also enjoyed Ventoy a lot, but recently I had the weird issue that it would fail installing a distro on a somewhat odd industrial system, where Rufus worked fine. It probably did something that the odd UEFI implementation didn't understand.

You might be able to file an issue on the Ventoy GitHub and get it resolved for all 3 other people with that system

Yeah I just imaged the win11 installer to a usb stick a few days ago using Rufus and was surprised to discover the checkboxes that bypassed all the crap you have to navigate during a normal install.

This is the answer!

I'm a ventoy kinda guy- https://ventoy.net/en/index.html

I sit on the opposite side of the fence. My PC meets the hardware requirements but I've turned off TPM 2.0 to avoid upgrading from Win10.

Thanks for the idea. If it gets rid of these nag screens riddled with dark ui patterns after every update I am willing to try everything.

I've gone down this path.. I have a Skylake Dell Inspiron, it has TPM 2.0 but of course the CPU is not supported.

The problem I've found is that the OS in general just isn't very responsive, everything is sluggish as hell in ways that it simply isn't with Window 10, but only when it comes to things like opening explorer, logging in and out, opening programs.. etc.. but programs themselves all seem to run just as well as they did under 10. shrugs, I think I just need to replace this thing finally.

>I have a Skylake Dell Inspiron, it has TPM 2.0 but of course the CPU is not supported.

As a Skylake owner too, there's a good and well documented reason for that. Apparently, Skylake is full of so many silicon bugs[1](or just google "Skylake bugs") that Microsoft has had its work cut out patching Windows with workarounds based on Intel's erratas.

Maintaining support and testing for older and buggy silicon moving forward, keeps adding to the development cost of Windows, so it's only natural Microsoft would just say "fuck it" and drop further support for that CPU family at one point to save money and support headaches. Apple was also quick to drop Skylake.

Yeah, it sucks as a Skylake owner, but Intel holds a large part of the blame as well for pushing out junk without QA. Honesty there should be class action lawsuist for this.

FWIW, I have Win11 installed on Skylake and it seems to work just fine, so I assume Microsoft has it blacklisted as unsupported just so that if you ruin your accounting business due to some errors from the silicon bugs showing their heads, you can't hold them accountable as it's on you for working around their restrictions and running Windows 11 on an explicitly unsupported CPU.

> I think I just need to replace this thing finally.

Install Linux you mean.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ex-intel-engineer-apple-turned...

I had a daily driver that ran windows 10.

Once a year I would format and reinstall because it would get sluggish.

I got a steamdeck and was blown away by how well everything ran on it.

The next time I was due to reinstall I switched to linux. It has been snappier than windows ever was and everything works fantastically well.

Thanks for the Skylake information.

> Install Linux you mean.

I'll preface this by saying I should have mentioned it's an Nvidia Optimus equipped laptop, a Dell Inspiron i5 7559 and that I've been running Linux to some capacity or another on a variety of hardware for nearly two decades now and will probably never stop using it, so believe me I'm aware that trying Linux on otherwise landfilled hardware is always worth a consideration.

So no, I don't mean 'Install linux'. Until about 6 months ago I was running Fedora on it (historically Slackware and Kubuntu).

Nvidia Optimus is garbage and I refuse to put up with it any longer. Whether it was an Ubuntu derivative with its own means for handling this or not I've found that Nvidia Optimus under Linux is a recipe for tearing, poor battery life, lots of heat when doing seemingly nothing and frequently fighting Nvidia drivers failing to work when I update the kernel.

This laptop does not give you the ability to disable the Intel GPU and use just the nvidia GPU, so the only option that makes the laptop decently usable is to just not install nvidia drivers at all and use only the Intel GPU, but even then it was never stable enough to live with day to day. It didn't matter what distro I ran, it just randomly would freeze without any useful information in the logs as to why. I realize this is Nvidia's fault more than anyone else's but I just don't have the energy to fight it anymore, particularly because it was 100% trouble free anytime Windows 10 was running.

Once Windows 10 goes fully EOL I am either recycling this laptop or giving it away, it can be somebody else's problem. The replacement laptop will either be straight Intel or AMD, I'm done with Nvidia.

A happier story is the Asus U43F. I believe it was a first gen Core i5; it had a bios bug in it that prevented installing Windows 10, it was stuck on 7, didn't have any EFI support. Asus and Microsoft both refused to do anything about it so it was completely abandoned. I installed a linux distro on it and my niece used it during the pandemic when they were forced to do school from home. It worked out great. I got it back later and sold it to somebody who understood they needed to run Linux on it and as far as I know to this day it still works just fine.

>Nvidia Optimus is garbage and I refuse to put up with it any longer.

I heard PopOS works with Optimus out of the box, but I'm still gonna get a laptop with an AMD APU as I don't want the headaches of discrete GPUs and MUXs, plus I don't game too much anyway.

If a lot of games can run on the Steam Deck, then they can definitely run on laptops with similar or better AMD APUs, no need for discrete GPUs anymore unless you're a proper gamer, but for casual and retro gaming it should be good enough.

Optimus proper power management for laptops on Linux (including fully turning the GPU down) only works on Coffee Lake (and AMD Renoir) and later with Ampere or later GPUs.

Prior to that generation, standard power management mechanisms don't work, and so the NVIDIA driver doesn't turn off the GPU when idle on those older platforms.

Then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

So both the iGPU and Discrete GPUs lacked power management all together, that would explain a lot about how miserable this has been.

It will likely be an AMD APU as well, and I'll probably install Fedora or Kubuntu on it. I have no interest in discrete GPUs on laptops anymore, I do appreciate the gaming options it provides but I don't appreciate the heat and poor battery life. I also play a lot of older games that run great on any recent APU, some of which were just too demanding for the intel GPU on that Dell and really needed the Nvidia GPU to run well.

I connect to a win 11 vm in azure across the atlantic.

I mainly login and try to open vscode.

I typically fail the first time and either open device manager or a news story on the start menu about an American footballer called odel beckham.

The new start menu stuff is absolute garbage and somehow gets worse all the time.

I'm not sure how searching a list of a few thousand things can just not return the software you specify by name, but it does.

When I've done this it seems to work for a while, but when a large Feature/Moment/whateverit'scalledthisweek update comes out it won't pick it up - you'll have to do a full install over what's already there (not the end of the world, as you get the Windows.old folder)

I'm wondering if they may change their 'must have TPM' tune as the deadline approaches, because there's already been some bad press regarding e-waste

more interested in 'how to not install windows 11 on a device that you've told 50 times not to install windows 11'

Same. I've had elderly family members unintentionally upgrade despite walking them through declining when they would call confused about the upgrade prompt coming out of nowhere. You could even shut down the "wrong" way and somehow end up upgraded.

I'm not surprised, the W11 upgrade nag screens are riddled with dark patterns.

Don't think it works for Win10 Home, but with Pro use gpedit and go to Local Computer Policy --> Computer Configuration --> Administrative Templates --> Windows Components --> Windows Update for Business, find "Select the target feature update" and set it to 'Windows 10', and '22H2'

Free Software operating system and move that ticket to OBE

OBE?

Overcome by events. A common end state for issue ticketing systems for when an issue was not directly solved, but is no longer an issue :-)

How effective is TPM 2.0 compared to the original ? Are there any reports that demonstrate its effectiveness ?

If a specific version of TPM becomes required to use future versions of Windows, we will have swappable TPM chips ? Eg update your TPM chip just like you update your GPU :)

Most Supermicro mainboards are either an 8-pin or 20-pin header and you can get TPM 1.x and TPM 2.0 options for them.

The other half of the answer, for boards without a hardware swappable TPM the embedded fTPM in newer stuff may be upgradeable to the newer version, depending what exactly changed requirements wise.

Some desktops have a TPM header so yeah, you can replace the TPM chip on those.

The HN headline ("How to Install Windows 11 On A Device That Does Not Meet Windows 11 Requirements") is editorialized and does not reflect the article.

The correct headline is "Ways to install Windows 11". The article repeatedly emphasizes that Microsoft does not recommend installing Windows 11 on systems that do not meet their suggested minimum requirements.

There is a page with the title used: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/installing-windo...

Or close enough: "Installing Windows 11 on devices that don't meet minimum system requirements", it is linked in submitted page, it also contains the caution.

Matches the last half well but still a completely different first half meaning. You can't just take any titles on a site, mash them together based on your takeaway, and call that the original title.

HN editorializes titles all the time.... :-0 In this case I did it to clarify the relevancy of the article. Would you see a title "Ways to install Windows 11" and then ask what is relevance to the HN audience?

The main point is that it's possible, per this official Microsoft document, to bypass the check for TPM 2.0 (at least TPM 1.2 is required) and the CPU family and model.

Help avoid the Microsoft induced eWaste.

"Windows 11 Upgrade Will Put 240M Computers On The Brink Of Becoming E-Waste" - https://www.benzinga.com/news/23/12/36358322/windows-11-upgr...

HN editorializes titles all the time.... :-0 In this case I did it to clarify the relevancy of the article.

I think you are conflating editing with editorializing which are not the same thing. Picking out what you think is important in the article and putting it in the title is editorializing and explicitly disallowed on HN because it puts your commentary above everyone else's. If you want to say what's important about the article, write a comment about it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I agree the rules can be a bit confusing but, in general, if you feel something needs the title edited it's probably better to just use a different source instead of put your wording onto it. Alternatively, specifically for titles which you don't think need to be edited because they are clickbaity, you can always make a text comment with what you feel the main point is/your reasoning behind posting the document. That way your takeaway on the article is on equal footing with anyone else's.

From the HN Guidelines:

>Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not followed for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668237

>unless it is misleading or linkbait

And from the linked thread's source:

>Is there a black hole in the center of the Sun?

>There is probably not a black hole in the center of the sun.

Classic clickbait.

You do realize your comment, is endorsing changing the title of a research paper published by respected researchers of the Department of Physics by Illinois State University, Yale University and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics?

What is next? For example have you heard about this paper?

"Attention is all you need" ? - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf

Atrocious title! And what about

"Everybody Dance Now" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.07371.pdf

Even worst...

If you have a problem with the guidelines you can take it up with dang.

As it stands, the guidelines state do not editorialize unless it's misleading or linkbait.

The original headline for the article linked here is "Ways to install Windows 11", which is neither misleading nor clickbait/linkbait.

>respected researchers

Clickbait is clickbait, whether it comes from bearded wisemen or the drunk bloke sleeping across the street.

"Ways to install Windows 11" would tell nothing of why would be worthwhile to submit.

>Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

TL;DR of this whole saga is Don't Editorialize.

This title wasn't editorializing, it wasn't an opinion, it is just more specific.

It's injecting one's opinion of what is important about the article into the title. This misrepresents the article and puts the personal view of the poster in a favoured position it doesn't merit. One of the most basic not-allowed things in HN titles.

What opinion is expressed by the title below?

"How to install Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11 requirements"

I mentioned it in the comment and it's all over the giant list of moderator commentary about this - it's your opinion about what's important in the piece. You don't get to put that in HN titles.

Isn't any title is an 'opinion' of what is important about an article?

Yes but that's the opinion of the people involved in making the article not, as critic C. Bowdre put it, any geek off the street. I'm not sure I understand what about this pretty settled HN (and other forum) practice with a straightforward rationale appears so perplexing.

Hacker news is swamped with clickbait, I appreciate anyone trying to clean it up. Unfortunately people seems to love it and the short title lengths seem designed for it.

I'm not sure how this is related to the questions raised in this thread. And you can email bad titles in and they get fixed. Titles get fixed on many articles every single day.

This was a bad title that got fixed.

Not by HNs long-standing rules of titlery, as I’ve explained and you can also see from the years of mod commentary linked above.

That would mean that any clickbait title that has detail added is somehow wrong and bad by your definition.

No because clickbait titles should be changed on submssion by a subtitle or other representative language from the article. That's also in the site guidelines and numerous moderation comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This actually has that headline : https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/installing-windo...

People actually want to install Windows 11 when better alternatives like Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Fedora/PopOS!/etc. exist?

There's people who like to play PC games or use Excel natively.

You have to precise recent multiplayer games with anticheats because that's probably the last category of games firmly locked on windows.

For old games, you could even argue that wine has a better compatibility story than Windows itself nowadays with the amount of stuff they broke in Win10 and Win11.

Agreed, was going to reply to parent's comment but yours is spot on. Wine can run some of my old games great. Steam Proton runs all the newer stuff I've purchased (oops, sorry Gabe I meant to say "licensed"!). I don't do a lot of MP except for stuff that has a native Linux client like TF2 and CS2. Well, I do play a lot of NMS and sometimes play it in MP no issues on Steam Proton though their MP can get a bit funky sometimes. I play 7DTD Windows version, usually SP but it seems like I've played it in MP, maybe I'm recalling incorrectly.

See my comment below on games, as for Excel, I use the online version, works great on Chrome, Firefox and Edge on Kubuntu.

Unfortunately, a whole lot (the vast majority) of enterprise engineering software is Windows-only. Be it Patran/Nastran, most of the Autodesk lineup or lots of others.

You can also use Rufus. It has options to customize Windows 11 and one of them is to disable the hardware module requirement (TPM).

https://rufus.ie

So wait Microsoft provides a workaround to their own security feature?

Why wouldn't they? Windows is just a vehicle for ads and telemetry now so it makes sense they want to get it installed anywhere it can.

> So wait Microsoft provides a workaround to their own security feature?

It's their way of admitting that they fucked up and they boost windows 11 installation numbers.

Windows 11 reminds me of the frustrations users of Windows phone 7, 8, & 10 went through because of pointless hardware restrictions, constant app redesigns, only to scrap the OS.

Can someone point me out a common reason why windows 11 (and not 10) is needed? Just curious (the ‘liberty of choice’ ones do not count)

The main reason is Windows 10 leaves free support in less than two years so doing a new install with it basically just leaving the problem for a year down the road. After that there are actually feature changes in Windows 11 (despite the "new windows release" tropes) but they make up a less common reason alltogether.

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