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Microsoft cracks down on Windows 11 upgrade requirements

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A photo of the Sensel Click Composer Software running on Windows 11
Arif Bacchus / Digital Trends

With just a little more than a year left before Windows 10 hits its end-of-life, Microsoft has been busy encouraging people to upgrade to Windows 11. One of the hurdles with getting PCs upgraded to Windows 11, though, are the hardware requirements — and now they’re cracked down on harder.

A recent beta build of Windows 11 has patched the well-used “setup.exe /product server” workaround that allowed you to completely bypass the system requirements check and run Windows 11 on a non-compliant machine — in other words, a machine without TPM 2.0.

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The patch was noticed by X (formerly Twitter) user Bob Pony, and while it’s only in an Insider build at the moment, it will likely be fully rolled out sometime soon.

The recently released Windows 11 Insider Build 27686 (Dilithium) has patched the "setup.exe /product server" workaround for bypassing the system requirements check. 😢 pic.twitter.com/G9Q1v3O1uU

— Bob Pony (@TheBobPony) August 15, 2024

The little TPM (Trusted Platform Module) microchip deals with encryption-related tasks and has become a common security standard in recent years. Its inclusion in the Windows 11 system requirements isn’t a problem for most people since just about any PC bought within the last eight years will meet the TPM 2.0 standard. However, it has been a thorn in the side for those with older or custom-made PCs that easily meet every other requirement.

Over the past few years, there have been multiple ways to get Windows 11 running on such machines, but Microsoft has been slowly but surely cutting them off one by one. This latest patch could prove troublesome for a lot of people since it’s such a simple and commonly used workaround — just one extra argument added to the setup execute file and you’re set.

If you find your machine affected whenever this goes live, you have a few options, but they all involve some level of effort or cost. You can find another workaround — it will probably be more complicated but there’s sure to be plenty of walkthroughs online. You could also upgrade your machine to meet the requirements — more information on that here. You could even try switching to Linux, or just going back to Windows 10 for now.

The last option is likely the easiest, and you’d just be joining the many people who never upgraded to Windows 11 in the first place precisely because of the TPM requirement. Microsoft hasn’t made any mention of this patch yet and we don’t know when it might come to a normal Windows update, but we’ll keep you updated.

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Willow Roberts
Willow Roberts
Computing Writer
Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…
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