Running And Updating Windows 11 Without A Wire

Not That Most People Want To Pay For Microsoft ‘Support’ Anyways
This topic has been covered before but with the pending demise of Windows 10 in just under a year it is worth repeating for those who would like to move to a supported version of Windows 11 without having to buy new hardware. A writer at Ars Technica have posted their experiences with running Windows 11 on a variety of unsupported hardware, from systems that have most of the prerequisites, barring a supported CPU, to systems lacking TPM altogether. It does require a bit more work than running a supported system, but there were no performance or stability issues using the systems.
Installation is a snap, either with a wee registry hack or by triggering the install with a specific command, setup.exe /product server. The challenge is getting the major updates; security patches flow easily but feature updates like Windows 11 23H2 or 24H2 don’t show in Windows Updates. In order to install those updates you are required to grab the full version from Microsoft and install from scratch. Thankfully in many cases you are able to retain your data, though the older the machine the more likely you’ll have to do a fresh install. You will also want to toss at least 16GB of RAM in the machine to feed Windows 11’s insatiable appetite for memory.
But this is more than just a theoretical exercise; I've been using Windows 11 on some kind of "unsupported" system practically since it launched to stay abreast of what the experience is actually like and to keep tabs on whether Microsoft would make good on its threats to pull support from these systems at any time.
More Tech News From Around The Web
- Google Photos Will Soon Show You If an Image Was Edited With AI @ Slashdot
- $180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don’t join the USB Club @ The Register
- QNAP, Synology, Lexmark devices hacked on Pwn2Own Day 3 @ Bleeping Computer
- AWS Cloud Development Kit flaw exposed accounts to full takeover @ The Register
- UnitedHealth says data of 100 million stolen in Change Healthcare breach @ Bleeping Computer
- A closer look at Intel and AMD’s different approaches to gluing together CPUs @ The Register
- Europe’s Top Court Rules For Intel To End Long-Running Antitrust Case @ Slashdot
- Arm to Qualcomm: See you in court? Oh yes, please @ The Register
- Quick Look: Ugreen Nexode 300W Power Bank @ TechPowerUp
- If you thought Astra was going to go away quietly, you were wrong @ Ars Technica