Let's install Windows 11 on incompatible hardware

If it is a Pentium 4 6xx 64-bit socket 775 or newer Intel model, it should meet the system requirements for installing Windows 8/10 64-bit. Hence it is also possible to install Windows 11 if you bypass compatibility checks. No surprise here. Well done.

Interesting.
I still have one of those Pentium 4 64bit processors lying around. Good to see it in action again. :)
Though not worth the try here, you need patience for this experiment. I'm a practical man, that CPU had/has it's glory days in the XP era.

From the screenshot you can tell it's running, better say crawling Win11, where CPU, memory and disk are maxing out in usage.
You could have one of those motherboards that support 4 even 8GB on that config but the CPU itself is busy all the time since there are quite a bunch of new instructions missing that Windows can use for the speed-up.

With DDR1 RAM the highest you can go is 1GB per memory module. So a standard socket 775 motherboard with 4 memory slots can go up to 4GB RAM. More slots would require a workstation or server motherboard. That said these processors would not have noticeable boost in performance with more than 4GB RAM.

Indeed. There would be no boost in performance. For testing and basic usage you can go with less than 4GB.
There are systems that should support more.
But it won't do much good for that Pentium 4 with 8GB RAM. I honestly don't know if it supports that much or more.

Still good to note that LGA 775 uses DDR2 as well. In these cases you do have higher end motherboards that accept 8GB RAM.
My board used with the Pentium 4 in this case has 4GB (max) DDR2 but a board that is Core 2 Quad compatible can go with more, like the ASUS P5QL Pro I fitted a while ago with 8GB. That one can even support a max of 16GB RAM but that filled-up RAM size I have never had on DDR2 boards on my end.

Maximum size of standard DDR2 RAM modules is 4GB (8GB is for servers only). So a typical motherboard with 4 DDR2 slots can go to a maximum of 16GB RAM. I don't think you will notice the difference above 16GB RAM unless you do some heavy gaming which is rather unlikely with such old hardware. I did see a difference from 8GB DDR3 RAM to 16GB DDR3 RAM in my main PC, but I don't think I will be able to tell any difference beyond that, assuming I had 4 slots and could add more RAM (unfortunately I have only 2 slots occupied by two 8GB DDR3 modules).

another reddit poster running Win11 on a very old Toshiba laptop with 2 gigs of RAM (that's right 2GBs!)

Microsoft just kicked my ten year old, incompatible, Windows 11 laptop off the DEV channel. Not changed to another Insider channel, completely off. Still getting ordinary Windows 11 updates, however. Interesting, because the last time I checked my Insiders settings, the option to stop getting preview builds was greyed out.

Ben

There is talk that Windows Update will be disabled on Windows 11 machines deemed to be incompatible.
Microsoft Will Disable Updates on Unsupported Windows 11 Installs
It's still working for me at the moment, but it will be interesting to see if that changes on Patch Tuesday on the 14th.
:)

Ben Myers said:

Microsoft just kicked my ten year old, incompatible, Windows 11 laptop off the DEV channel. Not changed to another Insider channel, completely off. Still getting ordinary Windows 11 updates, however. Interesting, because the last time I checked my Insiders settings, the option to stop getting preview builds was greyed out.

Ben

Click to expand...

that's not good news. how disappointing for MS to do that
now seeing more reports of it today

My 10 yr old 'dev' pc just got axed out of the insider program...It's running 11 without a problem. Well since it's been taken out of the loop so to speak I can turn off all telemetry now! Even better, been wanting to use Linux for a long time, seems like the perfect time.

I first loaded Win11 as an upgrade to an old Dell 7th Gen Intel, using the bypass method, everything worked absolutely fine except the whole thing was pitifully slow, yet it was a good machine on Win 10. I ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 3501 added a second 8gb of ram to use as a Win 11 test machine and that is now like lightning.

As MS now seems to have finally decided on what processors to support and added a very small number, I would guess they no longer need any data from unsupported hardware, a case of we got what we wanted, you were warned what would happen with unsupported PCs, now go away, entirely predictable I'm afraid.

I quite agree MS always said that from the start, there is a way around it I believe using the media creation tool (I think that is correct) I saw an article on Winaero

Question is will any workrounds still work on an actual release version, given they have all been worked out on Dev or Beta builds? I wouldn't like to call on that either way.

I am sure when Win 11 is in full production there will be a lot of people posting many tips, hints and hacks and, I guess company's producing them similar to what we got now for win 10. Like you say it's a hard one one to call as MS may may it more locked down and non customisable

The-Hive said:

I am sure when Win 11 is in full production there will be a lot of people posting many tips, hints and hacks and, I guess company's producing them similar to what we got now for win 10. Like you say it's a hard one one to call as MS may may it more locked down and non customisable

Click to expand...

I just hope the staff can handle all of them properly. I would hate to see illegal information posted here.

Now, I kicked out of Insider, so I'm clean installing Windows 10 in my 2nd partition.

If your system is not compliant you cannot upgrade to the newer builds via Windows Update, you get only other updates. Have you tried to download the ISO from UUP and delete the appropriate file before proceeding with Windows Setup, as described in this thread?

spapakons said:

If your system is not compliant you cannot upgrade to the newer builds via Windows Update, you get only other updates. Have you tried to download the ISO from UUP and delete the appropriate file before proceeding with Windows Setup, as described in this thread?

Click to expand...

I have an limited internet speed, and the boot drive is an HDD. Upgrading through ISO is not an option.
Also, I have an ISO but it will downgrade me to 22000.71

Kari said:

Not only that. I have also created both GPT and MBR partitioned W11 native boot VHDs, added them to host boot menu, disabled host secure boot and TPM in UEFI settings, and then successfully booted to those VHDs.

Kari

Click to expand...

Hi @Kari

on HYPER-V the TPM emulation seems OK but can you also fiddle around with the CPU topography so the HYPER-V VM "thinks" it's running a supported CPU. While this might not be possible via the standard HYPER-V Virtual machine management is there perhaps something in an XML config file where one could manually edit the CPU topography such as in KVM.



Cheers
jimbo