Microsoft has released today an update for its PC Health Check app, which Windows 10 users can download today to check if their PC will be eligible for a free Windows 11 upgrade later this year. The company acknowledged yesterday that it was planning to improve the app in the coming weeks to provide more details about why some PCs can’t run Windows 11, and with today’s update, the messages have started to provide more details.
We've just released an updated PC Health Check app here: https://t.co/Ta8smK1v1e
Navigate lower down to the “Check for Compatibility” section and click “Download app”
We still have more work to do, but this version shows more information about why a device is ineligible. https://t.co/yWp3Q9vHHF
— Steve Dispensa (@dispensa) June 25, 2021
Until today, the app was giving users of ineligible PCs a pretty blunt message. “While this PC doesn’t meet the system requirements to run Windows 11, you’ll keep getting Windows 10 updates,” the app said. After installing the update on two of our own ineligible PCs, we’ve seen one message mentioning that our CPU was unsupported, and another message mentioning that Secure Boot wasn’t enabled.
Microsoft detailed the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11 on a support page, and the “hard floor” includes a 64-bit CPU, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a TPM 1.2 chip, and a motherboard that uses UEFI and is Secure Boot capable. Windows 11 will also require recent processors, but Microsoft also said that PCs using older generation CPUs would just receive a notification that upgrade is possible, though not advised.
For now, the PC Health Check app isn’t yet capable of telling users if their PCs may still be able to install Windows 11 even though they don’t meet the “soft floor” criteria (TPM 2.0 chip, recent CPU). We hope that it will eventually be able to do that, especially since many of Microsoft’s own recent devices such as the Surface Go 2 are currently being given a red flag in the app.
So far, Microsoft didn’t really do a great job at explaining the minimum system requirements for Windows 11. As Brad Sams pointed out on Twitter earlier today, there are some minor differences between what Microsoft says on the Windows 11 landing page and the support page we mentioned earlier. This has led to some confusion among early enthusiasts, especially about the TPM chips that may or may not be enabled by PC manufacturers on recent PCs. As a result, some Microsoft employees have been doing damage control on Twitter since yesterday.
We’ll have a lot more to share about Windows 11 in the coming days, especially with the first Windows 11 preview build coming next week for Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. In the meantime, let us know in the comments how Microsoft’s PC Health Check app has been treating your PC so far.
