What Are The Hardware Requirements For Windows 11

Windows 11 is now officially released and in production and all new computers are shipping with this new operating system pre-loaded. 

When is the time to switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and what are the hardware requirements for existing equipment?

System requirements:

• Processor - 1GHz or faster 64 bit processor with two or more cores
• RAM - 4GB or more
• Storage - 64GB or more
• System firmware - UEFI, Secure boot capable
• Graphics - DirectX 12 or later and WDDM 2.0 driver support
• Display - High definition (720p) that is greater than 9" diagonally across with minimum of 8 bits per colour channel
• Internet connectivity - Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 S mode both require an internet connection to complete setup and make configuration changes

There is a handy tool that you can download from Microsoft to check if your computer is capable of running Windows 11 which you can download from here:  Windows 11 PC Health Check

What if my computer doesn't meet the minimum spec?

There are Microsoft authorised hacks to enable people with equipment that doesn't meet the minimal spec but would still like to be able to use the hardware for Windows 11 that bypasses the CPU and TPM chip checks.  

Note: the reason there is a minimum spec is to ensure Windows 11 performs and is secure, by using the authorised hack it may result in an insecure, poor performance and is not recommended.

To bypass the Processor and TPM chip checks do the following:

• Open Regedit.exe with elevated rights (search for Regedit.exe, right click on the application and select run as administrator)
• Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup"
• Click on MoSetup with the right mouse button, select New -> DWORD (32 bit) value
• Rename the new DWORD entry AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU
• Set the value to 1 

This will then stop Windows 11 setup from performing the hardware check to see if the process and trusted platform module chip meet minimal requirements.  This will not help if your computer doesn't have enough memory, storage or inferior graphics.