Welcome to the Windows 11 PC Health Check tempest in a teapot! In a post on the Windows Insider blog prepping Insiders for the Windows 11 builds to come starting next week, Microsoft announced some changes to hardware requirements for the new operating system.
Basically, minimum specs in order to run Windows 11 have been updated from Windows 10, including a requirement for TPM (Trusted Platform Module, a hardware security measure) 2.0, along with some tweaks to CPU, graphics card, and RAM specs. The blog post noted that Windows Insiders already in the Dev Channel will be exempted from the requirements at least during the length of the beta.
The post then linked to a PC Health Check app that checks your PC to see if it meets the bar. Unfortunately, that’s set social media into a tailspin as lots of people who think they should be all set have been failing the test. This could be due to the lists of supported Windows 11 AMD processors, Intel processors, and Qualcomm processors, which seem to have stricter guidelines than the spec sheets indicate is necessary to run Windows 11
Microsoft has heard the complaints however, and this evening posted this on Twitter:
Sorry for the irritating experience! We're going to improve the PC Health Check app over the next couple of weeks. Hopeful that the first update will be out tomorrow.
— Steve Dispensa (@dispensa) June 25, 2021
So if you’re worried that you won’t be able to test Windows 11 via the Insider program, hang in there, you may yet be able to, no matter what the PC Health Check app says.
We’ll have more on some of the issues surrounding TPM 2.0 (or 1.2), Microsoft’s minimum specs for Windows 11, the seemingly overly restrictive list of supported CPUs, and lots more, so stay tuned to OnMSFT.com
