Updating an unsanctioned PC to Windows 11

Speaking of Windows 11…

Back in September 2021, I wrote about how, although Microsoft was offering free upgrades to its latest Windows 11 operating system, the new O/S’s (seemingly overly) strict system requirements were effectively obsoleting perfectly good hardware (not a Windows-only phenomenon, mind you). This particular obsolescence by design instance affected my Surface Pro 5 (SP5) tablet/laptop hybrid, which (at the time) had been unveiled only four years earlier:

More recently, last November I covered what I’d be replacing both my primary and spare SP5 with: a pair of Surface Pro 7+ (SP7+) systems:

along with their in-advance acquired successors, two Surface Pro 8s (SP8s):

both generations of which are Windows 11-compatible.

After getting the primary SP7+ fully up and running, including installing the full application software suite I needed, I donated the spare SP5 first, at the beginning of this year. A bit more than a month later, the primary SP5 followed it to my local charity; I decided I had no further need of it, as the SP7+ was working fine (and I had a just-in-case spare for it, too), and I figured I’d gift someone else the maximum amount of usable time with it until Windows 10 times out next October. But before I did, to satisfy my curiosity (and because I’d be doing a full factory reset pre-donation anyway), I decided to see what’d happen if I tried updating it to Windows 11 in spite of Microsoft’s warnings that I couldn’t…or more accurately in this case, shouldn’t.

Let me explain. To install Windows 11 “fresh” on a Microsoft-claimed Windows 11-incompatible computer you’ve either built from scratch or previously “wiped”, you need to jump through some hoops, first obtaining an O/S installation ISO either from Microsoft’s Windows Creation Tool or third-party site UUP Dump, then using another unsanctioned service, Rufus, to modify that ISO—bypassing the checks for specific CPU suppliers, families and models, the presence of TPM (trusted platform module) v2.x-generation support, Secure Boot capabilities and the like—and burn it to a USB flash drive. But in my case, since I already had Windows 10 installed on the system (a system that was already Secure Boot-capable, an important nuance), all I had to do was add a Registry entry documented by Microsoft, believe it or not:

noting the all-important warning:

Microsoft recommends against installing Windows 11 on a device that does not meet the Windows 11 minimum system requirements. If you choose to install Windows 11 on a device that does not meet these requirements, and you acknowledge and understand the risks, you can create the following registry key values and bypass the check for TPM 2.0 (at least TPM 1.2 is required) and the CPU family and model.

and then I could upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows Update via the Installation Assistant.

Before plunging in, I ran WinSAT (Microsoft’s Windows System Assessment Tool) under Windows 10 to see how the system benchmarked. Here’s what I got:

Prior to the Registry hack, here’s what I’d seen when attempting to update to Windows 11:

One note on the above: you’ll see that the only disqualifier noted this time was a too-old CPU. Back in September 2021, I’d also mentioned that its TPM generation was too immature. I’m guessing that between then and now, its software-based TPM had been updated by a firmware upgrade, although I very well could have just been mistaken roughly three years back. Anyhoo, post-Registry hack, and after being subjected to one more warning:

The upgrade process began:

When it was done, I was staring at a stable Windows 11 desktop, one even absent the “nag” watermark (I assume this was because TPM 2.x and Secure Boot support existed and only the CPU generation was officially too geriatric):

and judging from my admittedly only modest testing results, both the upgraded O/S and all the previously installed apps on top of it still ran just fine (uniquely identifying info greyed out):

The WinSAT results were even identical to what I’d seen before:

Last, but not least, I reverted it back to Windows 10:

then factory-reset it before donating it.

So, am I saying you all should go ahead, ignore Microsoft’s warning regarding minimum system requirements, and put Windows 11 on your computers? Not exactly…not even close, actually. It’s always been a bit of a mystery how and why Microsoft came up with the dividing line between what CPU suppliers, families, and models were deemed Windows 11-worthy and not. The oldest Intel CPU family fully supported by Windows 11 is the 8000-series “Kaby Lake Refresh” generation; 7^th-generation “Kaby Lake” chips like the one in my Surface Pro 5 (aka Surface Pro 2017) are generally not on the supported list albeit with a few exceptions, including one (the Core i7-7820HQ) which seems to only be included for self-serving Microsoft reasons.

More generally, less than a week after I did my “unsanctioned upgrade” experiment, new test builds of Windows 11 started explicitly blocking install or upgrade attempts (even if the Registry hack was in place) if the system’s CPU didn’t support the arcane PopCnt instruction…and importantly, if other legacy workarounds were used to get around the block, the system subsequently refused to boot. More recently, the explicitly-blocked CPU list expanded further, to encompass any processor that didn’t support the full SSE4.2 instruction set. I’m guessing this has something to do with Windows 11’s burgeoning AI support, which in the absence of a dedicated-function deep learning acceleration chip or CPU-integrated core, presumably can alternatively be passably implemented via SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions):

Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in their Pentium III series of central processing units (CPUs) shortly after the appearance of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD’s) 3DNow!. SSE contains 70 new instructions (65 unique mnemonics using 70 encodings), most of which work on single precision floating-point data. SIMD instructions can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. Typical applications are digital signal processing and graphics processing [editor note: and deep learning training and inference, a key reason why dedicated DSPs and GPUs are now also used for these additional functions].

 Intel’s first IA-32 SIMD effort was the MMX instruction set. MMX had two main problems: it re-used existing x87 floating-point registers making the CPUs unable to work on both floating-point and SIMD data at the same time, and it only worked on integers. SSE floating-point instructions operate on a new independent register set, the XMM registers, and adds a few integer instructions that work on MMX registers. SSE was subsequently expanded by Intel to SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3 and SSE4. Because it supports floating-point math, it had wider applications than MMX and became more popular. The addition of integer support in SSE2 made MMX largely redundant, though further performance increases can be attained in some situations by using MMX in parallel with SSE operations.

Granted, SSE4.2 has been widely supported in x86 CPUs for at least a decade. But this reality misses the big-picture point. The bottom line: any particular system whose specifications aren’t fully encompassed by Microsoft’s Windows 11 requirements documentation is fair game for abrupt no-boot cutoff at any point in the future. At minimum, you’ll end up with a “stuck” system, incapable of being further upgraded to newer Windows 11 releases, therefore doomed to fall off the support list at some point in the future. And if you try to hack around the block, you’ll end up with a system that may no longer reliably function, if it even boots at all. So no, don’t follow in my (experiment, to reiterate) footsteps. And I candidly don’t suggest you pay the Microsoft Windows 10 extended support extortion tax, either. But don’t just toss that legacy system in the trash. Wipe Windows and put Linux or ChromeOS Flex on it, instead.

Does this suck? Sure, especially for those of us long used to legacy hardware able to run newer Windows releases with, at most, only an upgrade license purchase. Except, to the “purchase” point and reiterating what I first noted three years back, for Microsoft, its system, and CPU (and other PC “building block”) partners, who are likely salivating at the replacement-PC-acquisition uptick to come in a bit more than a year. But them’s the breaks, I guess. Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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