Microsoft’s haphazard messaging on Windows 11 hardware compatibility requirements has confused its customers over the past three years. This week, a simple update to an old support article sparked a series of breathless headlines claiming that the company had abandoned those hardware compatibility requirements and would soon allow any PC Any old upgrade.
That’s not right. But that hasn’t stopped some tech-focused blogs from getting caught up in the confusion.
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It’s difficult to identify Patient Zero in either of these incidents, but as far as I can tell that honor belongs to Germany’s PC-Welt. Its sister publication in the US, PC World, Translating the article for American readers: “Despite years of warnings, it is now officially possible to install Windows 11 on PCs that do not meet the requirements. [I]And in an unexpected and confusing move, the company is issuing instructions for installing Windows 11 on incompatible PCs.”
And the race has begun.
None of that is true. Nothing changed this week. Nothing unexpected, confusing or surprising.
So what actually happened? The story is truly comforting as is technology news and is typical of Microsoft’s clumsy communication on Windows 11.
Someone in Redmond has updated an old support article, originally published on Windows 11 launch day. Those latest updates are extremely minor, including some copy edit cleanup and deletion partly on the old PC Health Check app.
They then released the lightly edited article under a completely different URL, with no reference to the previous support article. A tech blogger saw it, called it news, and came to some unacceptable conclusions. Even some of my well-connected colleagues saw the news and called me and asked “Is Microsoft really giving in?”
I found an older copy of that article, which is still available on Microsoft.com but appears to have been deleted.
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Then I copied its contents to a Word document, copied the contents of this week’s article to another Word document, and used Microsoft’s own redline feature to see the extremely small changes.
After a few days of this, a red-faced tech writer in Redmond certainly heard from a manager who was tired of receiving queries from other tech sites asking what was going on. and included a note at the top of the newly published version:
Important: Updated December 12, 2024
This support article was originally published on October 4, 2021, when Windows 11 was first released to the public. At the time of publication and to this day, the intention behind this support page is to detail considerations so that customers understand the impact of installing Windows 11 against Microsoft’s recommendations on devices does not meet the system requirements for Windows 11. If you installed Windows 11 on a device that does not meet the Windows 11 system requirements, Microsoft recommends that you Go back to Windows 10 right away.
Windows 11 minimum system requirements remain unchanged and can be found in the article Windows 11 specs, features, and PC requirements.
Like I said, nothing has changed from last month, last year or three years ago. Microsoft really doesn’t want you to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, but it provides mechanisms to do so, primarily for the benefit of business customers. You can read all about it here: “How to upgrade an ‘incompatible’ Windows 10 PC to Windows 11: Two ways.”
And here is a message for busy technology journalists at Microsoft headquarters. One point in that article may need another edit. The article says that when Windows 11 is installed on a device that doesn’t meet the minimum system requirements, a watermark is added to the Windows 11 desktop. That’s true for preview releases of Windows 11 in 2021 and early 2022, but to my knowledge it has never been applied to official releases. My testing as well as reports from hundreds of readers indicate that this does not happen on versions of Windows 11 released in 2024 (soon to be 2025).
I will let you know if that article is updated.
