Microsoft cracking down people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware
23 comments
·February 4, 2025ch33zer
I built my own PC years ago and it came without a tpm so I can't upgrade. The motherboard does have the plug for a tpm so I bought a cheap one and tried plugging it in. Windows still doesn't recognize it. I did my best but the obsoleting Microsoft is doing here is heavy handed
poizan42
How old is your PC? My 10 years old laptop has a TPM built into the CPU (Intel PTT), which Windows 11 is perfectly happy about once I figured out how to enable it in the boot options.
DanielHB
My PC built around 2021 can't either, apparently (for ASUS motherboards at least) you need to manually update the bios and enable it:
https://www.asus.com/microsite/motherboard/ASUS-motherboards...
AnotherGoodName
I really have no choice but to install Linux now. The nag screens in Windows 10 are already getting unbearable. The over 5 year old system is still running games at high detail just fine (3950x CPU, 2080 GPU, 32Gb ram running at 2k resolution).
TPM 2.0 was finalized in Nov 2019 after the above system was built. Hardware isn't progressing that quickly anymore which makes a hardware requirement like TPM 2.0 very arbitrary honestly.
Microsoft could have easily made Windows 11 work without TPM 2.0 as the workarounds attest to. It could have been "if you don't have this, you don't get some security features but otherwise it's fine".
My conspiracy sense is tingling at the hard requirement for TPM 2.0 that really doesn't need to be there. We don't need to be asking people to throw away perfectly performant hardware to upgrade. There's actually nothing in Windows 11 enabled by the requirement since Windows 10 also supported TPM 2.0 already, it just didn't require it. I've also never been subject to the attacks TPM 2.0 protects against. There may be cases where TPM 2.0 is wanted, i can imagine it's useful for servers, but i really don't need it.
fishgoesblub
Not often a software company stops users from using the latest version of their product. Why does Microsoft not want more people to be running the latest version of Windows? Wouldn't it be best for them given the data collection in Windows 11?
jmclnx
Nothing like alienating your most knowledgeable user base. In the early days (MS-DOS), these are the people who helped Microsoft get to where they are now.
So by alienating them, they are probably steering the "unwashed" masses to alternate environments, ie: Linux, MACs and even *BSD
Good job Microsoft in helping out your competitors.
giancarlostoro
I switched to Linux, and when my Surface Book 2 stops being supported by Microsoft, I'll switch that over too. I'm done.
t1234s
W11 IoT does not require TPM https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise...
lenerdenator
I'm mainly a Mac guy these days but when the time comes for my Windows 10 machines, I'm sorely tempted to put a Linux distro on them. I don't really game and mainly use it for ham radio programs.
giancarlostoro
You can still game on Linux, Steam is phenomenal. ;) I havent gone back to Windows.
Goronmon
Playing PC games on Linux through Steam is pretty decent, if imperfect, setup these days.
But I still get tripped up when it comes to the non-PC game stuff. Such as mods, streaming from other platforms (playing my PS5 on my PC), or other community tools that have a tendency to be Windows-focused.
I still haven't been able to pull the trigger on running Linux on my main desktop.
lenerdenator
What do you find yourself playing on there? Is it something that can be done with any distro, or is it something that some are more suited to?
oaththrowaway
Most games "just work" at this point because of how well Proton works: https://www.protondb.com/
The biggest issue is certain DRMs aren't supported in Linux yet, but others are, so it's just game dependent. I mostly play single-player, but the multiplayer games I do play work fine.
I don't have Windows on any machines at this point. I've converted everything to Fedora Silverblue and it's fantastic.
visnudeva
I have been gaming on Linux for many years, nearly anything I played worked really well, even modern games like cyberpunk or elden ring, for the distro I am using an immutable distro based on atomic fedora called bazzite but I tried fedora and arch and they work as well. I don't think anyone needs windows for gaming.
dmbche
This lists the compatibility of most games on steam with Linux - you just need to enable proton in steam and you're good to go.
Any distro should work - distros really don't matter (or if they actually do for you, you're computer-literate enough to not need to ask)
lelanthran
Haven't played in ages, but I used to play Dirt Rally, torchlight, victor vran and about 20 other games.
A few of the far cry games worked as well.
sickofparadox
https://protondb.com is a community run database of game support on Linux. Nearly everything modern is supported, and with older games I have found Proton to actually work better than modern windows with some games. Furthermore, games like OpenTTD and OpenRA bring classic games natively to Linux for free. Distro wise, pretty much any of the major ones will work fine for gaming, though it seems Pop_OS is trendy for Vidya. Valve is about to (maybe they already have) release it's modified version of Arch called SteamOS for public use.
bluedino
I'm on 7 for that kind of stuff because of Windows 11 not letting me change the display resolution, and 10 contains just enough extra crap...
snozolli
I'm surprised that anyone is upgrading older hardware to Windows 11 in the first place. It's shocking how many performance issues I've come across. Explorer bogs regularly. I can't game and stream a video anymore due to some rendering change that was made in Win 11 (I forget the details).
frognumber
Older hardware isn't always slower hardware.
Intel 6950X is unsupported. That's 10 cores at 3.5GHz. It's about 10x faster multicore and 2x faster single-core than a modern, supported Intel Celeron N4500.
Moore-style scaling where chips are faster (rather than just denser) ran out a while back. Expensive computers from a decade back beat cheap computers of today. A modern 20-core PC is perhaps 1/10th the CPU cost as compared to when the 6950x came out, but not a lot faster.
If that 6950x was maxed out to 128GB RAM and set up with a decent GPU, it can be a very good system.
That's among the oldest processors not supported, but many computers with somewhat newer CPUs don't work either due to motherboard / BIOS issues.
danielzaaui
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danielzaaui
[dead]
As someone who owns a machine which gets reminders to update to Windows 11 despite not being allowed to, the whole thing is bizarre. There's no cited explanation for the TPM "requirement", and it's obviously not a requirement since you can turn it off. It makes me very suspicious that there's some ulterior motive.