Windows 11: Is Your PC Eligible For The Update?
June 26, 2021Microsoft’s Windows 11 is an incremental upgrade to Windows 10. It’s window borders are more rounded, icons look nicer, has improved performance and it can also run Android apps. Surprisingly, it will be offered to Windows 10 users as a free upgrade sometime toward the end of this year. However, it won’t be made available to every PC out there.
Related: Windows 11 What You Need To Know
Instead, Microsoft is concentrating support on newer machines that have been built in the past several years. The company has also released a PC Health Check app that you can use to find out if your machine will be able to receive the Windows 11 update. In most instances, when its done scanning your PC hardware, a message will pop up saying that it’s compatible with Windows 11.
However, that might not always be the case because Microsoft has placed certain restrictions on the type of hardware that can run the new operating system. The company has released a list of compatible CPUs that are accepted, but allow me to I digress for a moment. The Verge reported on Microsoft’s restrictions in great detail.
If you do receive an error message from PC Health Check, despite your hardware far exceeding the minimum system requirements, there is a simple solution for this problem. All you need to do is enter your motherboard’s bios and enable Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. For AMD based motherboards it may be mentioned as AMD fTPM. When you run the app again, you’ll pass with flying colors.
Credit: Microsoft
That said, Microsoft has released a list of compatible CPUs for Windows 11 and its fairly conservative. For instance, Intel CPUs that are from the 7th gen or older, will not be supported. For its Xeon line, Skylake architecture and above are supported. If you are on team Red, then you should have an AMD Athlon 3000 series, Ryzen 2000 series, Threadripper 2000 series or something more recent.
Take a look at the list of compatible Intel CPUs, AMD CPUs and Qualcomm SoC here. Take a look at our recent article to see what you can expect from Windows 11. We wait with bated breath for the release of the new OS, and hope that Microsoft has come up with a solution to Windows 10’s intrusive update policy.
