Let's install Windows 11 on incompatible hardware

spapakons · Sep 2, 2022

Bree said:
Well, at least the SSD I bought checks out as healthy.....

View attachment 38103

I've put it in an external USB enclosure and restored the latest system image of the AOD270 to it now. But it could take hours for the poor little netbook to copy over its D:\ Data partition through it's USB 2.0 port.

View attachment 38104

That's the only thing I hate about old systems. They can be annoyingly slow for disk backup/restore operations. But after you have installed Windows 11 on them they are surprisingly fast (with SSD).

Bree · Sep 2, 2022

spapakons said:
That's the only thing I hate about old systems. They can be annoyingly slow for disk backup/restore operations. But after you have installed Windows 11 on them they are surprisingly fast (with SSD).

Well that went rather well I thought. Only took an hour and a half to fit the 4GB RAM and the SSD - I had feared it would be longer

Many thanks to @SIW2 for the initial prompt and the ecouragement to keep going, and especially for finding that video. :thumbsup:

Without that I would have taken a lot longer to get it apart.

I can't say it's fast now, but it's certainly not slow any more. It's certainly up to running a native boot .vhdx of Windows 11 now, which before was no more than a painfully slow 'proof of concept'. Now it's quite useable, in fact I posted this from it.

hsehestedt · Sep 2, 2022

SIW2 said:
it might be x2. Still pretty useful if so. It called expertbook ?

I saw no reference to the name ExperBook, but who knows. The NVMe is an x3. Good enough for a machine of that class.

Bree · Sep 2, 2022

SIW2 said:
Might be worth cleaning the fan of fluff and replacing the thermal paste while you are in there.

Thanks, the fan was remarkably clean and easy to blow away what little dust was there. This little Atom has never got hot, so I think I it was safe to skip the thermal paste. Anyway, I didn't have any to hand :wink:

haisterepair · Sep 3, 2022

I received some Ciara Tech SFF PC's last week and they have ASUS Q170M-C motherboards installed with i5-6500 CPU's and 8GB DDR4 RAM. Pretty cool, much more customizable then the Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc options. I noticed on the ASUS motherboard website that it is considered "Windows 11 Ready." This motherboard supports 6th and 7th gen Intel CPU's, of which only a small selection of 7th gen "X" series CPU are on Microsoft's compatibility list, allegedly. None of which are on the Q170M-C compatibility list.

The motherboard does support TPM 2.0, so I would suppose this is what makes it "Win 11 Ready," despite not having CPU's to support it. It would be nice if there was a direct statement from ASUS on their motherboard webpages outside of an image stating it is Win 11 Ready. It's confusing and misleading as I had to do some research online and still came up with conflicting messages.

I suppose it is similar to the older ThinkPads having Win 11 "drivers." It is possible to install Windows 11, but at the consumer's risk.

hsehestedt · Sep 3, 2022

haisterepair said:
I received some Ciara Tech SFF PC's last week and they have ASUS Q170M-C motherboards installed with i5-6500 CPU's and 8GB DDR4 RAM. Pretty cool, much more customizable then the Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc options. I noticed on the ASUS motherboard website that it is considered "Windows 11 Ready." This motherboard supports 6th and 7th gen Intel CPU's, of which only a small selection of 7th gen "X" series CPU are on Microsoft's compatibility list, allegedly. None of which are on the Q170M-C compatibility list.

The motherboard does support TPM 2.0, so I would suppose this is what makes it "Win 11 Ready," despite not having CPU's to support it. It would be nice if there was a direct statement from ASUS on their motherboard webpages outside of an image stating it is Win 11 Ready. It's confusing and misleading as I had to do some research online and still came up with conflicting messages.

I suppose it is similar to the older ThinkPads having Win 11 "drivers." It is possible to install Windows 11, but at the consumer's risk.

If it can run Windows 10, it will run Windows 11 as 11. Possibly not fully supported, but it will run.

spapakons · Sep 3, 2022

Same old marketing trick. They can't claim is Windows 11 compatible, to avoid legal caveats they say is Windows 11 ready. This means Windows 11 can be installed if some other conditions meet, in your case never without hacking. They just try to attract buyers and they will claim that some conditions are not met, so you cannot currently install Windows 11. They are legally covered.

As with all the incompatible computers, I hardly care. Just bypass compatibility check and install Windows 11. It will be the same as Windows 10 with a new skin.

haisterepair · Sep 3, 2022

hsehestedt said:
If it can run Windows 10, it will run Windows 11 as 11. Possibly not fully supported, but it will run.

spapakons said:
Same old marketing trick. They can't claim is Windows 11 compatible, to avoid legal caveats they say is Windows 11 ready. This means Windows 11 can be installed if some other conditions meet, in your case never without hacking. They just try to attract buyers and they will claim that some conditions are not met, so you cannot currently install Windows 11. They are legally covered.

Sneaky ASUS. I should have known when I didn't see an official Windows logo! Kidding aside, I do like the motherboard for what it is.

To stick with the theme of this thread, it's safe to say that Win 11 will run on this motherboard with an i5-6500 CPU unofficially. 17 of these will be set up for resale and migrated over to custom PC builds, so it will be up to a buyer whether or not they want to run Win 11 long term.

SIW2 · Sep 3, 2022

haisterepair said:
I received some Ciara Tech SFF PC's last week and they have ASUS Q170M-C motherboards installed with i5-6500 CPU's and 8GB DDR4 RAM. Pretty cool, much more customizable then the Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc options. I noticed on the ASUS motherboard website that it is considered "Windows 11 Ready." This motherboard supports 6th and 7th gen Intel CPU's, of which only a small selection of 7th gen "X" series CPU are on Microsoft's compatibility list, allegedly. None of which are on the Q170M-C compatibility list.

The motherboard does support TPM 2.0, so I would suppose this is what makes it "Win 11 Ready," despite not having CPU's to support it. It would be nice if there was a direct statement from ASUS on their motherboard webpages outside of an image stating it is Win 11 Ready. It's confusing and misleading as I had to do some research online and still came up with conflicting messages.

I suppose it is similar to the older ThinkPads having Win 11 "drivers." It is possible to install Windows 11, but at the consumer's risk.

There is a chance the x4 pcie slot can be used for nvme boot. I haven't tested with q170 but I think it might.

edit:
Optiplex 7040 has q170 and an nvme m2 slot. So it is likely a pcie to nvme adapter on the x4 of the asus ASUS Q170M-C will work, it probably has bios support even if they haven't added the m2 slot..

spapakons · Sep 3, 2022

haisterepair said:
Sneaky ASUS. I should have known when I didn't see an official Windows logo! Kidding aside, I do like the motherboard for what it is.

To stick with the theme of this thread, it's safe to say that Win 11 will run on this motherboard with an i5-6500 CPU unofficially. 17 of these will be set up for resale and migrated over to custom PC builds, so it will be up to a buyer whether or not they want to run Win 11 long term.

There is no need to tell a potential buyer the computer is not officially Windows 11 compatible. As long as you provide Technical Support yourself, just install Windows 11 on them and show it to the customer. 9 out of 10 will be excited to buy a Windows 11 computer that they could not care less if it is officially compatible or hacked.

jimbo45 · Sep 3, 2022

hsehestedt said:
If it can run Windows 10, it will run Windows 11 as 11. Possibly not fully supported, but it will run.

Oh dear -- Windows 10 will still run on x386 CPU's -- W11 requires at least a 64 bit cpu processor, I hope you guy's aren't believing all that B/S you might have seen on reddit.

The only way (and I can assure you it's not easy) to get W11 to run on an X386 CPU is that it can't although you can run an X-64 OS as a VM on an OS running a a 32 bit OS so long as it supports 64 bit instructions.

I was bonkers enough to get W11 to run as a VM on a Win 2003 server (roughly similar to XP) !!! but remember without things like "Phar lapp memory extenders" the max for the OS PLUS the VM is still 4GB, Win2003 Server V2 allowed a bit more extended memory though.

I just felt like having a go at this - not of course to use but just to see if it would work -- and in any case there weren't any USB3 drivers around back in those days so external devices limited to USB2 spec.

Cheers
jimbo

hsehestedt · Sep 3, 2022

jimbo45 said:
Oh dear -- Windows 10 will still run on x386 CPU's -- W11 requires at least a 64 bit cpu processor, I hope you guy's aren't believing all that B/S you might have seen on reddit.

Cheers
jimbo

Ok, you right on that point. I should have said: If it can run 64-bit Windows 10 then it will run Windows 11. Almost forgot that 32-bit OSes still exist

haisterepair · Sep 3, 2022

SIW2 said:
There is a chance the x4 pcie slot can be used for nvme boot. I haven't tested with q170 but I think it might.

edit:
Optiplex 7040 has q170 and an nvme m2 slot. So it is likely a pcie to nvme adapter on the x4 of the asus ASUS Q170M-C will work, it probably has bios support even if they haven't added the m2 slot..

I bet an NVME adapter would work fine. I'd like to try that out, thanks for the suggestion. If I see one for a good deal I'll give it a go just for fun.

spapakons · Sep 3, 2022

In general, if it can run at least Windows 8 64-bit with WDDM graphics drivers, then it can also run Windows 10 64-bit and Windows 11 bypassing compatibility check. You may have trouble to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 for various reasons, but 99% of the cases you should have no problem doing a clean installation of Windows 11. Just try it.

Bree · Sep 3, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Almost forgot that 32-bit OSes still exist

I haven't, I still have some on 32-bit W10. They may have 64 bit processors, but my 'ridiculously inappropriate for W11 netbook' has an Intel Atom N2600 which cannot support much more than 2GB RAM.

Intel said:
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 2.44 GB

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...el-atom-processor-n2600-1m-cache-1-6-ghz.html

At a pinch you can fit a 4GB RAM and the OS will see 2.99GB of it, but that's the limit
.

When I'm not torturing it by running Windows 11 its primary OS is 32-bit Windows 10. I reckon that if I can run 11 on that, then it should run on virtually anything.

torchwood · Sep 5, 2022

Not quite as old as some but finally got round to W11 on my old Vista machine

was allready on 10 but what the heck, so performed the upgrade install
took about 90mins

Acer Aspire 6930G
BIOS 2009
Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 @ 2GHz
4GB ram .... 3.96 usable Nvidea GForce 9300M GS....driver dated 2016
Crucial 500 gb SSD

hsehestedt · Sep 5, 2022

torchwood said:
Not quite as old as some but finally got round to W11 on my old Vista machine

was allready on 10 but what the heck, so performed the upgrade install
took about 90mins

Acer Aspire 6930G
BIOS 2009
Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 @ 2GHz
4GB ram .... 3.96 usable Nvidea GForce 9300M GS....driver dated 2016
Crucial 500 gb SSD

Nice. I had a little Core 2 Duo based machine. Was a nice little cube box. Made the mistake of tossing it, now regretting that decision

spapakons · Sep 5, 2022

My test laptop is a similar Vista era model. See my 1st system specs. It is much faster on Windows 11 with 4GB RAM (3.5GB usable) than it is on Windows 10 32-bit (only 2.93GB usable). The PAE patch to use the whole RAM mentioned on another thread doesn't work in my model

so installing a 64-bit Windows version greatly improved performance.