Microsoft wants you to buy a new machine for Windows 11, its because the difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is vast under the hood and requires much faster hardware, along with a TPM chip and Secure Boot (which uses the TPM chip) however there are workarounds for this. Would I recommend that? Definitely not. Your computer will run like a sloth.
TPM chip
The Trusted Platform Module or TPM chip is a chip that stores secret codes used for encryption. The earlier generation TPM 1.2 is not supported by Windows 11 and has to be TPM 2.0 to install Windows 11.
The hard drive is encrypted with the encryption keys found in the TPM chip. If the hard drive is removed, it is unreadable in a different machine.
Secure Boot
Secure Boot ensures that only certified operating systems run on the computer. If the hard drive gets a virus that adds something to the loading of the computer, the certificate is invalidated and the computer refuses to boot from that drive.
Additionally, the computer will not be able to boot a different operating system like Linux unless that operating system is added to the BIOS.
UEFI
Older BIOS chips in computers allowed for a simple boot method of looking at physical locations on the disk to load the operating system. However, UEFI simplifies the process to having a single place where there is a boot partition that tells the computer where the operating system is located.
Installing Windows 11 on older hardware
There is currently a way to do this, it involves disabling support for TPM and Secure Boot in the registry during installation.
There are two ways to do this. The first is if you have a UEFI formatted drive, you can download the ISO from Microsoft and follow this guide.
The second way for legacy BIOS is a bit more involved, as you need a Windows 10 ISO prepared on a USB stick. There is a guide that explains how to do that here.
If the issue is with the amount of memory required, there are additional registry changes outlined here.
Conclusion
The installation of Windows 11 on your computer is at your own risk. The instructions call for removing partitions from your drive which will mean you will lose your data if you haven’t backed it up.
Your computer will not be fast, and it may not be stable. Your computer was never designed for such a modern operating system.
Windows 10 on a Windows 7 machine is painful, Windows 11 on an early Windows 10 machine will be much worse.
If you have Windows 10, you don’t have to upgrade until 2025 anyway.
