I recently was contacted by a small business owner in Whitney, Oxfordshire who was having issues trying to upgrade his Windows 10 laptop to Windows 11. Specifically, the issue had something to do with “not meeting some system requirements”.

Windows 10 users can normally upgrade to 11 free of charge. However, with Windows 11 Microsoft introduced certain (and somewhat arbitrary) computer hardware requirements. The most relevant ones are CPU (Processor) and TPM (Trusted Platform Module Chip). If these don’t meet Microsoft standards, you will see a message similar to the one below when trying to upgrade.

What options do you have?

• Stay with Windows 10. Windows 11 doesn’t have any magical new features and Windows 10 is supported / updated until October 2025.
• Buy a new computer.
• Use the workaround below to bypass CPU/TPM requirements and upgrade to Windows 11 regardless.

The best proof that Microsoft’s hardware requirements are arbitrary is that they gave users an option to bypass them by making a simple registry change:

• Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup
• Create a new DWORD type entry:
  • Name: allowupgradeswithunsupportedtpmorcpu
  • Value: 1

Restart your computer and try the upgrade to Windows 11 again.

If it doesn’t work, or if none of this makes any sense at all, feel free to contact us.