So you have a $2,000 Core i7-6950X HEDT processor, which you thought would last forever, but Windows 11 Setup stands in your way with its steep system requirements that include TPM and Secure Boot. What do you do? With Windows 11, Microsoft introduced new requirements for compatible hardware, and these are purely software-only checks—nothing really requires it. Besides the much-talked about TPM 2.0 spec compatible hardware Trusted Platform Module as a system requirement, there’s also new requirements for UEFI Boot, and installation on a GPT partitioned drive (no more MBR boot for Windows 11).
While these requirements do make some sense going forward, this walls off a lot of potential users, i.e. everyone without a TPM 2.0 add-on card, or those with processors older than 7th Gen Intel Core "Kaby Lake," or AMD Ryzen 2000 "Pinnacle Ridge" series. We have discovered a quick and easy way to defeat these checks during Windows 11 Setup, including for that nagging TPM 2.0, and Secure Boot. Here’s a step by step guide for fresh installations.
Update Oct 7th: At the end of this article, which is focused on "clean installation", we added a method that lets you perform the upgrade of an existing installation to Windows 11, without any TPM. For this same scenario Microsoft offers a method that downgrades the TPM requirement from 2.0 to 1.2, our method works without any TPM and also relaxes other requirements, like memory size, UEFI and MBR.
Update Oct 10th: Improved the steps for the "upgrade" installation, to mention that updates to the updater should be turned off.
