Windows 11 Requirements: Can your PC run it?
Today I want to show you,
How you can check,whether windows 11 will run on your pc microsoft recently announced windows 11, and there are a whole bunch of new features performance enhancements and a whole new look and feel coming and best of all it's going to be a completely free upgrade.
so what's not to like well at the same time microsoft also published these system requirements, and when you compare the system requirements to windows 10.
Windows 11 Requirements checker:
Compatibility checker to see if your computer qualifies :
let's just say that everything's been bumped up a little bit.
we're going to first off look at will windows 11 run on your pc, then we'll talk about some of the rationale for those new system requirements and at the very end.we'll walk through.
what you can do,if your system doesn't meet these system requirements all right let's jump on the pc to check,
whether your computer qualifies for windows 11 we're going to use a compatibility checker tool and the official windows 11 website at one point had a compatibility checker but apparently it caused. some confusion so, microsoft took it down and now it simply says coming soon.
so as an alternative you can look at the minimum system requirements and you can compare these to your system but that's kind of hard and you might not know exactly.
Why does Microsoft have these requirements?
where you can check each one of these values so instead we're going to use a free and open source tool that'll tell us.
whether your computer qualifies the tool is called why not win 11 and you can download it at the website.
why not win 11.org i've also included a link down given below this will drop us on the GitHub repository for the tool and,
if we scroll down just a little bit here. you can see a screenshot of what the tool looks like now. It's not the most elegant tool but hey it gets the job done right here. you can see all the different system requirements and it'll evaluate.
whether your system meets these different requirements to download the tools simply scroll down a little bit more and here you'll see a download link for the latest stable release.
click on download.
once you've finished downloading navigate to your downloads folder and then double click on the why not win11.exe this launches the compatibility results and hopefully you see a lot of green here this will show you.
How your system compares against the syste requirements that microsoft has published and this compares against the current known requirements remember those could change at some point this will help you identify if maybe,some of these components can be upgraded in your computer or even in the case of tpm many computers ship with this but it's simply disabled by default.
so you can go into your bios and enable it,so this will tell you what areas you need to focus on if your computer doesn't currently meet these requirements.
So why even have these system requirements why not just let any machine run windows 11. well microsoft published a blog post recently where they listed out their thre principles for landing on these system requirements and number one has to do with security with these hardware requirements they,found that they're able to reduce malware by a staggering 60 that is a massive reduction in malware also they call out reliability and they claim that they're able to achieve a 99.8 percent crash free experience.
so that means that the blue screen of death is pretty much a thing of the past and lastly there's also compatibility.
If you have an app that says it runs on windows 11 you can be assured that it runs hopefully when we ran the compatibility checker.
What if your PC doesn't qualify?
you found that your computer qualifies but what if it doesn't qualify what should you do do you have to buy a new computer well the good news is you don't have to do anything right now.
you can just continue running windows 10. in fact microsoft announced that they'll continue supportin windows 10 through october 14 2025 that's over four years from now.
you can just keep using your computer and microsoft doesn't exactly have the best track record of hitting those dates in the past they've pushed the dates back. so you might even get another year or two where you can continue running windows 10. but what happens when you eventually get to that deadline well at that point. you can continue running windows 10 it just won't be officially supported by microsoft.
so you might not get the latest updates anymore and that does put you at risk.so at that point you'll have to make the decision does it make sense to buy a new computer that comes with windows 11. all in all i think this was a very difficult decision for microsoft to make,i used to work as a program manager at microsoft and let's just say that on some of the inconsequential decisions that i made there was so much thought analysis and decision making that went into it,i could only imagine how much thought went into a big decision like this and there are.
so many different factors at play you want your security reliability and compatibility to be best in class while at the same time also acknowledging that with a higher bar for
your system requirements,a lot of your customers now are going to have to upgrade their hardware that's going to cost a lot of money and what happens to the old hardware that's
going to now be waste also you have your competition they're constantly investing in their platforms making them more secure and you need to stay competitive and then.
you also have increasing malware increasing cyber attacks and it seems like the victim companies always run microsoft windows and that's a reputational hit.
I think given all of these different factors microsoft had to balance them out and they found that the optimal bar is where they landed it one thing i appreciate is that microsoft is considering lowering the bar a little bit they've now said that they might consider seventh generation intel chips so they are listening to customers.
let me know down below in the comments do you think these system requirements are reasonable or do you think they're ridiculous and microsoft should completely reconsider.
- Free and open source Windows 11 compatibility checker tool: https://www.whynotwin11.org
- Windows 11 Minimum System Requirements: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications
- Windows Blog post on minimum system requirements: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/06/28/update-on-windows-11-minimum-system-requirements/
- Windows 11 supported processors: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors
- Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Overview: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/information-protection/tpm/trusted-platform-module-overview
- Windows 11 Security: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/06/25/windows-11-enables-security-by-design-from-the-chip-to-the-cloud/
