Windows 11 - You might want to check if your PC will run it

Today Microsoft announced Windows 11, even touting at one point as built for "you the gamer".

They put a system health checker on their site to show if your PC will be able to run the operating system.
No big deal, I thought, as my PC can run the entire Adobe Creative Suite, Unreal Engine and just about any software/game I throw at it.

But according to the system checker, my PC will NOT run Windows 11... because reasons.

Granted it is apparently almost 5 years old and I don't tend to game very much on it these days. But has been constantly upgraded with;

* An i9 7920X processor
* 128GB RAM
* Asus Strix Nvidia RTX 2080ti
* 1TB NVMe M2 System drive
* an additional 5TB of internal SSDs
- all on a Asus X299-Deluxe motherboard.

So, according to Microsoft, it looks like the future is not a place I'm invited to!

I just checked mine also. The application is definitely bugged.

I wouldn't trust a Windows store app with anything, but according to the actual listed minimum requirements both my 5 year old PC and the one described in the OP should be perfectly fine.

Given how unreliable Microsoft's universal app stuff is, I sure hope they'll be relying less on it in 11 than in 8 and 10.

It's seemingly a TPM 2.0 issue for most people.

https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1408101708216078337?s=20

Odds are if you just enable the TPM and Secure Boot settings in your BIOS it'll work. If not you might need to get a cheap TPM chip, assuming your board has a slot.

Who knows, they might even chill out on the TPM 2.0 requirement for people with custom builds.

Does Windows still only require a gig of RAM? Last I checked, that was still the minimum and let me tell you 1 measly gig ain't enough, and wasn't enough a decade ago.

I have a hard time believing that any reasonably modern gaming PC would have a hard time with Windows 10.

EDIT: Apparently you need a TPM 2.0 chip on your motherboard somewhere, which might trip some people up.

I hope there's a bypass for this. I think I meet this requirement, but it would suck to know that my problem isn't with computer power but with this TPM stuff.

As hilarious as it would be to say that I ran PC Health Check on my 15" Surface Book 2 and it failed... it didn't fail. I'm genuinely disappointed that Microsoft is supporting their hardware in this instance because it would have been a good laugh. So my best guess for now is that PC Health Check is flagging a UEFI AMI BIOS, which is the BIOS that my Asus Z390-E uses, as incomparable since it's not Microsoft's UEFI BIOS. ...or something like that. I'm sure that someone that more well-versed in tech can explain it better.

Edit: thelingo and Justin have found a solution. Apparently some people will have to buy a 14-1 Pin TPM module and sift though their BIOS settings, and others will just have to sift though their BIOS settings and enable their Intel or AMD version of TMP 2.0.

Yay, computers.

Apparently these chips are already selling like crazy since the requirement was announced so we might run into a shortage situation with them.

Microsoft themselves apparently only made it a hard requirement for OEMs to have TPM support a few years ago or so which means there might be a lot of newer laptops that might not be able to run Windows 11.

@ben_h: I think the one thing that might make this less of a big deal is that most CPUs from AMD/Intel in the last few years seem to have a TPM 2.0 chip installed.

You just need to search in your BIOS for PTT for Intel and fTPM for AMD. Odds are if you enable some kind of TPM BIOS setting you should be good.

But yeah, kind of crappy how this one requirement is looking to possibly scrap at least a third (if not half) of the Windows 10 userbase.

Just a quick update...

Saw all the mentions of the TPM 2.0 issue floating around the web, so took a look in my Bios.

At first I was dejected as there was no mention anywhere in there of TPM that I could enable and assumed that I was just SOL and would have to buy yet more hardware!

Turns out that on my Asus motherboard, TPM 2.0 is actually called PTT under "Advanced PCH-FW config" (in case anyone else is having the same issue)

After enabling that, and ensuring that Secure Boot was enabled and running Windows UEFI mode, I tried again...

TPM 2.0 Security ... Check!

Secure Boot ... Check!

Windows 11 Good to go? ... "Computer says Naaaah!"

My guess now is that, as a desktop PC without a fingerprint reader or webcam for Windows Hello, logging in with some form of Hardware Security is not supported and so that's where I'm falling short.

Anyway, we've got many, many months to go to sort it out, so I'm sure something will get resolved one way or another...

I think the dumbest anecdote to all of this is seeing people on the leaked Win 11 build run the System Health Checker with a "can't run Windows 11" result lol

Okay that's genuinely funny.

The insider builds aren't going to have the hardware requirements, that is why that scenario in the above screenshot is possible.

Most of us will indeed have TPM 2.0. You don't need an actual security module, Intel and AMD have software based alternatives. That is what PTT and fTPM are.

Here are the 3 key pieces of info to meet Windows 11 requirements.

1. Your install disk needs to be GPT, not MBR. https://www.windowscentral.com/how-convert-mbr-disk-gpt-move-bios-uefi-windows-10

2. Make sure secure boot is enabled in your bios.

3. Make sure the equivalent TPM setting is enabled in your bios. (PTT, fTPM, or if you have an actual TPM chip, that. A lot of motherboards call it discrete mode).

I enabled the TPM setting on my ASUS Z270 motherboard and it still isn't compatible. I can only assume Microsoft is going to relax that requirement eventually, or else their adoption rate for Windows 11 is going to be extremely poor. I'm not upgrading my PC anytime soon, so I'm fine using Windows 10 for a few more years.

Yes, the store once told me my rig cannot run Sunset Overdrive, while the game ran smoothly the few hours I played of it.

I’m always kind of excited for new tech and fancy new UI but then you start using it and it doesn’t support things you’re used to and you can’t find basic options and it’s a pain.

So I’ll happily update but I think I’ll wait a little bit. So far I hear it’s rumored to come out in October.

I don't see why people are so eager to install Windows 11. It's just going to include more ways your actions can be monitored, which is going to create more headaches for people trying to find workarounds to uninstall the underlying spyware. I will probably wait as long as I can, before Microsoft makes it a mandatory update. Hopefully, people will discover all the workarounds, like they did with Windows 10.

@av_gamer: just speaking for myself I’m at an age where I don’t care about any of the “spyware” I just want it to work and that’s good enough for me. I’m never going going to be editing registry files or finding workarounds so that Microsoft doesn’t know how much I use Chrome or whatever. I’m not trying to downplay it because I know this is important for a lot of people and when I was younger I also wanted total control over everything and I would modify windows and install custom desktops etc. Now I’m older and crankier and I’m glad that windows installation is so hands-off and automated. So I’m guessing there is a large percent of people like me out there - although like I mentioned above I’m not super eager to update right away either.

@lettuceman44: Well as a small update, your post was super helpful! Thank you.

My ultimate problem lay in the fact that my boot drive was MBR rather than GPT. (even though my extra drives are GPT) Thanks to the how-to article you linked, the process of converting the drive was quick and easy.

Now the Windows Security panel is happy that my system meets all the requirements for Hardware Security and the Health Checker app also says Windows 11 would be happy to have a home on my PC.

With my luck, I'm sure all this will inevitably come back to bite me in the bits somewhere along the line, but for now it's all peachy!

@humanity: I'm kind of in the same boat as you. I long since gave up trying to drive back the tide of processes wanting to fill up my Task Manager screen. I'm looking at you Adobe and Nvidia....grrrr.

Me from 2012 would probably hit me around the back of the head with my own keyboard after all the trouble I used to go to meticulously pruning startup programs, regEditing and obsessing over single extra processes.

Microsoft "Hey let's release an OS that nobody wants or asked for after we promised we would never do that again. Oh, and let's also make the requirements hardware that most people don't have! We love our customers!"

With that Android convergence they seem to be eager to kill Win32 apps on Windows even faster.
It'll be interesting to see their store changes implemented, it's been speculated that this will allow Game Pass integrate with Steam since the sandbox will be gone or whatever.

I'm fine running OpenSUSE and let Steam take care of Windows game compatibility, I play most of the heavy duty stuff on Xbox anyway. If you care about your data and privacy of data... take it into your own hands, you've got options. You can't reason with corporations like that, too much money is in the space of big data.

@lettuceman44: @wacomole: I had the same problem. This article helped me out with using the MBR2GPT utility so that I didn't need to delete any partitions: https://insights.adaptiva.com/2017/configmgr-geeks-guide-mbr2gpt-exe-tool/

Here are the debugging steps that I took that helped me determine the issue if anyone needs help tracking it down.

You can verify you have TPM 2.0 by:

• Press CTRL-R and run tpm.msc
• In the popup it should show Status as "TPM is ready to use." and the Specification Version at the bottom should show 2.0.
• If it doesn't then you need to enable TPM in your BIOS. The name/location of the specific setting may vary depending on your CPU and motherboard.

You can verify you have the boot requirements by (EDIT: Oh, a lot of this stuff is actually in the article linked by lettuceman44 with screenshots):

• Open System Information
• Verify that BIOS Mode says "UEFI" and not "Legacy"
• If it doesn't say UEFI, your boot drive is probably using MBR and not GPT. You can confirm this in Disk Management - right-click on your boot disk at the bottom, go to Properties > Volumes and check Partition Style.
• If your boot drive is in fact using MBR, you'll need to convert it. You can use the utility referenced at the top, just be careful because there is a risk of data loss or not being able to boot if something goes wrong.
• After the conversion, check that your BIOS is set to use UEFI.

How in the hell does MS expect an average PC user to handle this? Or maybe they don't and they just want to push people to buy new hardware.

GPT sucks, why do they want to force that on people? As soon as something goes wrong, it's super complicated to fix. Who would even run an OS on something larger than 2tb?

What I would like to know is will Win 11 automatically turn on TPM (hardware or software-based) on install? How many people are really going to know how to turn on TPM in the BIOS? Or care?

@deckard: I'm wondering if the Win 11 install will even actually enforce these things being required or if the compatibility check is just especially picky. There's absolutely no way an average PC user would be able to diagnose and fix these BIOS and disk management related issues.

@chaser324: But they told us during the reveal that "It. Just. Works!"
Then again, that really emotional man in the video also told us to go out today and buy a new Windows 11 Ready PC, so that would probably be why.

@wacomole: The way I see it if you’re really that particular about how your machine is running then you should probably be using Linux instead. With the rise in popularity of basic home computing Windows has become the average mans OS. While people bemoan messages like “Ooops something went wrong” and not being able to Google blue screen error codes, that stuff is super scary for casual users and at this point there are a lot more of them out there than the enthusiasts.

@chaser324 said:

Or maybe we're just somewhat exacerbating the issue? I'm not gonna say that you are anyone is wrong in saying that your average person isn't going to instinctually know about TPM 2.0 or GPT if the test doesn't pass, especially since the error message is vague. But it might not matter for those who bought a prebuilt desktop or a laptop over the past few years where I assume that Dell, Lenovo, HP, iBuyPower, Origin, Puget, etc. already has that stuff configured, and it's just people like us who buy parts individually and tinker with settings who are reacting more to this.

That said, I could just be playing devil's advocate for the sake of it since I don't know first had if SI's formats the boot drive with GPT and enabled TPM 2.0 before shipping their systems, outside of my Surface Book 2 at least. And as much as I'd like to get some numbers of custom builds versus prebuilds and laptops to try to get an actual estimate on what portion of Windows users may have TPM 2.0 and GPT be an issue for them when upgrading, getting those numbers is chasing a white whale. So, all I really have is a sneaking suspicion that those who configure things themselves are in the relative minority. Either way, Microsoft should set up an FAQ for TPM 2.0 and GPT instead of having people find the answers on, well... Twitter.

I doubt they expect the average PC user to handle much of anything.

Microsoft currently says they'll support Windows 10 until at least 2025, so average PC users can safely ignore the upgrade for a while. Early adopters will be expected to go to Geek Squad, MicroCenter or the like for IT service if they're unfamiliar with the requirements.

Personally, I'm dreading the upgrade, because I use Legacy BIOS, Veracrypt for disk encryption, and don't have a TPM installed. I still have to read the documentation, but my easiest option may end up being an upgrade from Home to Pro and then starting over with a clean install using Bitlocker.

....sigh....

This is not at all realistic given the (lack of) game support on Linux vs. Windows.

My computer exists solely to play games and tool around this website while I eat, and I have seen nothing about Windows 11 that benefits games in any way.

@ajamafalous: Thats the rub isn't it.

@jagerxbomb: If the changes to the MS Store and Xbox app (support for Win32 and other non-UWP applications) also come to Win10 then I would agree.

So a combination of Proton and Lutris can get you running most games on Linux without much hassle. There's still some, yes, but it's not terribly difficult. At this point in time, the only thing really stopping Linux from being actually viable as a gaming platform is anticheat software and DRM.

However,

The way I see it if you’re really that particular about how your machine is running then you should probably be using Linux instead.

The reason this is not realistic is because of widespread compatibility issues. Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, and all of the Adobe Suite are not compatible with Linux. You can do a lot of fiddling with WINE if you really want to, but even then you're getting a janky, hack-y version of what you should be using. There are alternatives to all of these, but if you tell someone who lives in Photoshop to trade it in for GIMP they're going to laugh you out of the room. I'm sure with a bit of Googling you could find a lot more software that just doesn't work all that well in some flavor of Linux.

As someone who is on a Ubuntu partition right now, I think that's a major shame. Windows isn't a piece of trash, it's a good operating system, but it's also a locked down OS that - over the years - has treated its users more and more with kid gloves while making it more and more invasive.

The good news for Linux users is that the past ten years has been kind to some of the major user-friendly distros, especially Ubuntu. AMD's drivers are open source and they have openly supported Linux, Nvidia is supposed to be releasing some new drivers that allow Linux users to take advantage of some newer technologies, Valve has been paying special attention to Linux with Proton, and Easy Anti-Cheat has supposedly been working with Valve's Proton team to get Easy Anti-Cheat working with Windows games on Linux. Oh, and Unity and Unreal both have Linux versions now, plus you can use Visual Studio Code on Linux. Still, it seems like it's going to be a long while, if ever, before Linux becomes a viable alternative to Windows for most people.

Which brings me back to the topic of this thread - TMP 2.0. If Windows 10 is going to be supported until 2025, then anyone with a reasonably modern gaming PC in 2025 is almost certainly going to have some kind of TMP support, whether embedded in their processor or on their motherboard or whatever. If you're a Windows-only user, there probably isn't much to worry about. I don't know what this means for people like me who dual boot Windows and some flavor of Linux. I can tell you that as time passes, I dislike Windows' invasive practices more and more, and I'm really not a fan of its kid-gloves approach to how you can use your computer, so if push comes to shove I might just give up whatever games don't run in Ubuntu at this point and switch straight to it so that I can start bitching about Canonical as well.

Ok, that's too long and ramble-y, I'm just going to post this and move on.

For me the TMP settings was just not enabled in bios. I have MSI x570 tomahawk wifi with Ryzen 5600x and the setting in question is in Setting/Security/Trusted Computing and from there I had to enable Security Device Support. Now the test says the computer is ready. Bigger worry for me is the fact that I gonna be a their beta tester for this product. Too bad the directstorage is not comming to win10 :/

Hm, seems like my motherboard does have TMP support, but lacks the chip for it.

Oh well, i'll wait and see what's up with this all. Perhaps it'll turn out that Windows 11 can function without it, but it means that certain features won't work, just like Windows 10 is like 'woahh.. we can't background record on your setup!'

Or i'll just keep on trucking with windows 10 for a few more years, or i'll end up buying a chip to flick into my motherboard down the line.

@chaser324: For me personally, I ignore the store app altogether, And I only have Forza, Gears 4, and KI on the Xbox app. What's the significance for other people in regards to support for other apps?

@jagerxbomb: It looks like DirectStorage is going to be Windows 11 exclusive. Which right now most PC hardware is probably not able to handle it, but in the future you are going to need W11 if you want those PS5/Xbox load times.

And support for more apps on the windows store means more games for gamepass on PC, because Microsoft forced UWP for there existing store, which most games didn't use.

@lego_my_eggo: Ah, I see. I can safely ignore Windows 11 then. I'm not in Gamepass, and I don't like deleting games to make room, so every game I own is always installed, and they don't make affordable SSDs in that kind of capacity. I personally will take the hit on load times to not have the hassle. It's one of the biggest reasons I'm pretty much done with consoles.

This is what's so weird for me. They march out a new OS that so far only has mostly superficial changes, announce that it has requirements some relatively newish hardware can't meet, then announce that people can just keep using the old one for 4 more years anyway. It's like they're setting themselves up for nobody to adopt the OS until they get new hardware a while down the line. It could be the Windows Vista situation all over again where everyone who had bought new computers in the early 00's kept using XP and by the time many people were thinking about upgrading hardware Windows 7 was already being released so Vista adoption rates never got close to matching or passing XP. Except in this new case it's more extreme because x86-based computer performance hasn't been making the yearly gains they were back then that made hardware upgrades easier to justify. Now it's not rare to see 10 year old PCs that perform totally fine.

Microsoft released a list of supported CPUs. Anything before the 8th generation for Intel Core CPUs are not supported along with some 1st gen Ryzen CPUs. What's weird about this is that some of the 8th gen Intel CPUs are literally identical to their 7th gen counterparts, just with some of the pins in the socket set to do different things. They didn't add any additional features to these CPUs so I've seen quite a few people trying to figure out why one is supported but not the other. Or maybe they are supported but Microsoft has just made it seem like they aren't in their communication? Nobody knows.

I think it's pretty reasonable to say Microsoft's communication on this hasn't been great. Even the explainer articles on tech sites have a degree of "we have no idea what the heck is going on" to them.

What's weird about this is that some of the 8th gen Intel CPUs are literally identical to their 7th gen counterparts, just with some of the pins in the socket set to do different things.

Could this be related to Spectre / Meltdown? The vulnerable Intel CPU's went up to 7th gen.

Apparently Intel didn't start mitigating Spectre/Meltdown issues at a hardware level until the 9th generation (source). The 8th gen was in production already when the issue became known in 2017 and early 2018. For 8th gen and earlier, they did firmware updates.

I'm neutral to Windows 11 so I rather wait to see the feedback before I consider an upgrade from Windows 10 to that.

@gtxforza: A healthy dose of caution is always sensible in terms of software like this. It's a fine line we tread between being early adopters / enthusiasts wanting the latest hotness and also having to rely on a stable product to get work done.

So after updating my bios (never done that before but it was a smooth process). The TPM options appeared in my bios where they weren't before the update.

Motherboard is an MSI H170 Gaming M3

However, it seems my processor isn't new enough (6th Gen i5 6600). Hopefully that won't be a hard requirement. If it is, I'll stick with Win10. No way I'm buying a new pc for the foreseeable.

Windows 11 will roll out like a Molassesdisaster where everything is sticky and broken for awhile afterward. After the official launch I would give it a solid year before downloading it onto an eligible machine. Let Microsoft knock off the sharp corners, and THEN look if you machine will run it. Because if your machine runs Win 10 stably it will 100% run Windows 11 - don't sweat it.

It appears Microsoft has realized they've messed up. Now suddenly they're announcing they're going to test older generation CPUs. They're starting with the 7th gen Intel and 1st gen Zen CPUs. I do wonder if they'll try going back any further. The way they have things worded in this post, it sounds like they are opening up testing to include PCs that don't meet hardware requirements but are warning of a potentially degraded experience.

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/06/28/update-on-windows-11-minimum-system-requirements/

They also pulled their Windows 11 compatibility test app. They're pointing to the fact that the app doesn't actually properly explain why a PC can't run Windows 11 as the reason for pulling it.

@jagerxbomb: I think the issue with that is once we take the PS4/XOne band-aid off and transition to current-gen you're probably going to require DirectStorage and at least an NVME drive as fast as the Xbox Series S (which seems to be about 2.4GB/s read 950MB/s write, but hard to say until we get proper cross-platform current-gen games). Level design and asset streaming are seemingly going to be built with faster storage requirements in mind if you look at games like Ratchet and Clank. Otherwise, you might get stutters like Star Citizen does on a hard drive.

So if you care about any type of graphically demanding genres you may be forced to upgrade.

@ben_h: Oh man, it would be great if they get the requirements toned down. My Surface Pro 4 works perfectly fine so it would be a major bummer if I couldn't upgrade to 11. They seem to have updated the tablet experience on Win 11 nicely too.

Out of curiosity, what do you play and do you have stuttering issues? I have a mechanical drive for storing things, but for anything else - and especially games - I had to get an SSD because I just had stuttering issues all the time in newer games. It actually took me a while to figure out what it was.

I have a ton of games, old and new, but my main game is Destiny 2. I'm running an i9 with a 1080ti (built a new computer but no video cards available still). I play at 1440p with no issues.