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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

I have a perfectly good gaming computer that plays every modern video game out there with quite good graphics (RTX 2070 Super), but because bought it slightly too early for it to come with their security requirements, it won't install Windows 11 on it until I buy new hardware. I bought the computer in May 2021 also, it's only three years old.

Got my laptop in November 2021 and it was able to install Windows 11 (but came with Windows 10), so my computer must have been bought just before the hardware cutoff.

That's the only reason I haven't upgraded to Windows 11 yet. For all other Windows upgrades it's only been I couldn't install it because that computer was ancient. Feels dumb that I'm going to be forced to upgrade a 4 year old computer just to get security updates.

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For what it's worth, I've been running Windows 11 full-time on both Skylake ("sixth generation") and Ivy Bridge-EP ("third generation") systems without issue, though not for gaming.

Assuming your system meets all other Windows 11 system requirements (TPM 2.0, etc.), you should have no problem installing Windows 11. You'll have to download it yourself and trigger the upgrade manually (mount the ISO and run "setup.exe"), and click through a warning message, but AFAIK no other workarounds are required.

Whether doing so is advisable depends on your appetite for risk, but I'd personally be more worried about application developers than Microsoft when it comes to breaking changes in the future: Windows 11 updates have to remain compatible with every CPU on the supported list*; new applications and version upgrades have no similar requirements.

* AFAIK, this does not necessarily apply to new Windows 11 versions, though even here, I'd expect fewer breaking changes than with applications and games that typically have stricter CPU requirements to begin with.

Pretty sure the reason that computer can't upgrade is because it doesn't have TPM 2.0 on it.

"To continue the install, sign in to your Microsoft account..."

Of all the downgrades when 'upgrading' to Win11, this one bothers me the most.

well, it's quite easy to evade - I've got new laptop recently and did RESET THIS PC couple of times, so my experience is less than 1 month old ;)

it's not due to some arbitrary cut-off date, it's that windows 11 requires TPM 2.0. It's likely that your PC just either lacks a motherboard that supports a firmware TPM on AMD CPUs, or is just missing a TPM module. Accordingly, I've prevented my system from being auto-upgraded to 11 by just disabling my system's TPM.

It’s not just TPM but a large number of CPUs Microsoft is just unwilling to support.

Yeah I know it's because of TPM. But presumably at some point computer manufacturers added TPM to their motherboard/CPUs to be able to say they have or can upgrade to Windows 11.

Not saying there's a definite time cutoff, just generally speaking it seems like somewhere around there more computers started including the TPM capabilities.

Still three years isn't that long. I'd hate to have to trash my motherboard and/or CPU just to get security updates.

A PC from 2021 should have a TPM in the processor.

Pretty sure it said it was because it didn't have TPM. I'll double check tomorrow.

Probably the fTPM of your processor is just disabled in the BIOS/UEFI. You can just enable it in case you really want to upgrade.

Yep, turns out it wasn't enabled in the BIOS. Discovered this myself when I clicked the more info today after getting the 'You don't have TPM on this device' from the Windows PC Health Check. That was really confusing. I definitely thought I didn't even have it on my hardware from its messaging the first time around (and even the second time around I wasn't sure until I went through the instructions and checked all the menus on the BIOS).

So if I got confused and thought I didn't have it on my computer, probably many, many other people less tech savvy than me were similarly confused (or just wouldn't bother. BIOS changes can be weird and scary anyway, Windows couldn't even give good instructions on that part because BIOS menus tend to be pretty different).

Not true. I have a PC (Dell OptiPlex 7040 SFF) with TPM 2.0 and a CPU (i7-6700) that's definitely not on the supported CPU list, which, for Intel Core CPUs, seems to literally be "number greater than or equal to 8000".

If this is not true, what CPU features do the supported ix-8xxx "Kaby Lake R" and "Kaby Lake G" processors have that the unsupported ix-7xxx "Kaby Lake" processors lack?

The fact that the current supported CPU list for Windows 7[1] excludes all fourth generation and earlier Intel Core CPUs leads me to believe that these lists aren't derived from feature requirements alone, unless Windows 7 requires features that first became available with CPUs released in 2014.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...

It doesn't require tpm as proved by windows 11 iot ltsc not havig that requirement. That version doesn't even have the arbitrary cpu requirement except for needing sse 4.2

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