W11 Blog 002 | It’s all about the Processor

In the second of this Windows 11 mini-series, we’re going to look at a potential stumbling block when it comes to you getting Windows 11 installed on an existing computer, which is running Windows 10 for example.

At our office, we’ve been testing out the process and requirements to get to Windows 11. The first thing we ran into, which people will need to consider, is if your Processor is compatible with Windows 11.

What is a Processor?

The Processor sits inside your computer, and look upon it as the brains of the computer. As the name implies, it processors all the tasks you ask the computer to do. The better/newer your processor is, generally, the quicker your computer is.

Why is the Processor a potential problem when upgrading to Windows 11?

In short, Microsoft has a list of Processors that are certified as being compatible with Windows 11. If your Processor isn’t “on the list” (sounds like entry to a nightclub doesn’t it), then when you go to install Windows 11, you’ll get a message telling you you can’t upgrade.

The list of compatible processors is large, so I’m not going to go into every manufacturer and version here. In very general summary terms, the simplest thing I can say is that your Processor needs to be within a few years old to have a chance of being compatible. If your computer is over 3-4 years old, then there is every chance you won’t be able to upgrade (or can you? We’ll get to that…)

For the technical fans reading this, using Intel as an example, anything prior to an 8th Gen Processor isn’t on the list of compatible Processors.

Am I stuck if I have an older Processor, not on the compatible list?

This won’t make much sense. It doesn’t make much sense to us. But you may not be stuck. We’re still testing this out, but there appears to be a Microsoft approved way of getting Windows 11 installed on older Processors…

This begs the question – why have the compatible list in the first place?

What we can say, is that the method used to get Windows 11 installed on older Processors, isn’t something we’d expect your average consumer to be able to – it’s quite techy and quite geeky.

I can sort of see why Microsoft has taken this approach – they just want to have everyone on relatively new computers, and I’ll be honest, that’s our approach as well.

However, there are circumstances when people might have a perfectly useable older computer and would want to stick using it. One real-world example is one of the desktop computers I use as Lucid Towers. It sports an Intel 6th Gen Processor, but given it has 16GB of RAM and an SSD Hard Drive, and given how I work, it’s super fast for everything I do. It’s a perfectly good computer, which will serve us for a good few years yet. But, out of the box, I can’t upgrade it to Windows 11…

We’ll have more on this, as part of this mini-series, as we develop and test things out, but for now – it’s all about the Processor!

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, an IT Business based in Redditch, Worcestershire. He wrote this article on a laptop which has a Processor which is compatible with Windows 11.