Windows 11 has been out for some time now, yet it is now common knowledge that its predecessor, Windows 10, still remains the most widely used operating system, by virtue of the fact that support for Windows 10 has been extended until 2025. A similar fate to what happened in the past to Windows XP and Windows 7, two of Microsoft’s most widely used operating systems.
The requirements for being able to install Windows 11 assume that the user has “adequate supported hardware” on their computer, what is supported hardware? Having basically these three requirements:
- A UEFI booting SSD with a GPT format partition;
- TPM 2.0 security chip on the PC motherboard;
- An Intel processor from the eighth generation or higher (or AMD equivalent).
Not all computers meet these requirements, to be on the safe side perhaps only systems with hardware produced from 2018 onward will almost certainly meet these requirements. Older computers certainly do not meet at least one of these requirements. There is, however, a way to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11 legally, circumventing this block, although Microsoft on its official website advises against this practice, warning the user about the possibility of problems due to hardware incompatibility or receipt of security updates.
In this article we will give directions on how to carry out this procedure. We will take as a reference a clean system that already has Windows 10 installed, but does not have supported hardware to be able to upgrade to Windows 11.
Warning! We recommend that the information given here be used only for testing purposes on systems that do not have important or sensitive data inside. We take no responsibility for any misuse of the information we will report. Anyway, if you do not have recent hardware, staying with Windows 10 remains the best option, as it is currently considered the most stable operating system for those with hardware not officially supported by Windows 11.
Step 1 – Preparing Windows 11 ISO image
Download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft’s official website, using the Download button under “Download Windows 11 Disk Image […].” Then you can proceed in several ways: either mount our ISO image with the native tool already present on Windows 10 (right-click on the downloaded file and select “Mount”), otherwise you can create a bootable media using software such as Rufus (our tutorial about that is here).
Step 2 – Replace a dll file within the ISO image
Connect to the Github repository called Windows 11 Bypass and download the file named appraiserres.dll .
We extract the contents of the previously downloaded ISO to any location on our PC (desktop is fine), go in and look for the “sources” folder. Once in this folder, we will need to replace the file previously downloaded from the repository on Github with the one already in the “sources” folder.
Step 3 – Upgrading
Once we have followed the above steps, we will simply run the executable setup file and start the upgrade to Windows 11. We recommend that you do not select automatic update downloading during the installation, but run Windows Update only when it is finished.