Microsoft continues with its particular tug of war with respect to restrictions on installing Windows 11. The company has not made it entirely clear for more than two months whether or not it will allow Windows 11 to be installed on computers without TPM. Now, the company seems to have cleared up and given new details about it.
Microsoft has announced that it will not block manual installation using a Windows 11 ISO on older, unsupported computers. Although the company continues to recommend using TPM-compliant hardware , the restriction will only be present if you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 using Windows Update. This implies that a computer with officially unsupported hardware can download the ISO and install Windows 11 using a clean install, or even apparently keeping the Windows 10 files and programs.
Windows Update may be restricted
However, that installation of Windows 11 will be limited. In this case, Microsoft confirms that if we do not have compatible hardware, we may not receive updates through Windows Update . That includes security updates, updates with new features, or driver updates through Windows Update.
Thus, even if the hardware manufacturers release compatible drivers, the use of Windows 11 would be very limited, and it will leave the computers that install it exposed to vulnerabilities. The only option in that case would be to manually install the latest versions of Windows 11 ISOs to stay up-to-date on security.
This can be seen as a positive for many users, as Windows updates will not bother until the user wants to install it. In return, this will expose millions of people to vulnerabilities and hacks, as they will not receive security patches to fix the vulnerabilities.
This decision is to shoot himself in the foot, and the company itself may back down later. It is silly to stop offering updates to these computers, as there will be more vulnerable versions that will give bad publicity to the company and the operating system. At the same time, if they stop releasing updates, but they do stop releasing security updates, they will have to offer compatibility with security updates to very old versions of the system, which will mean more work for them.
Microsoft is that company that, even when it said that it was going to stop supporting operating systems forever , then has come to release security patches, as is the case with Windows XP. Therefore, it would not be unusual for them to back down again and at least launch security updates for Windows 11, although again that is going to involve more cost and work. Therefore, it may be a simple threat, and surely users will already look for mechanisms such as installing the new ISO on top of their current installation. Even that can be an incentive for Windows 7 users who don’t want annoying updates every month.
New Windows 11 Compatibility Tool
Among the compatible hardware, it will be necessary to have an 8th generation Intel Core processor or a 2nd generation AMD Ryzen or later to be able to install Windows 11 with all the guarantees. Only the Intel Core i7-7820HQ will be the only compatible 7th generation. It will also have to have 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of internal memory and a 64-bit processor. Using old hardware implies, according to Microsoft, 52% more kernel crashes, where users with officially compatible hardware have, in 99.8% of cases, a use experience without crashes.
Finally, Microsoft has launched a new version of the PC health check tool to check if our computer is compatible with Windows 11. In this tool they detail the compatibility problems that we may have, instead of the first one they launched in the that we couldn’t know.
