Windows 11 is here and I have to say that this is the first release of Windows that I felt outwardly annoyed by. In the past, a new release of Windows indicated either a smoother experience, or an annoying one, but none have been as annoying to me as Windows 11.

The thing that Microsoft is known for is hardware compatibility. Generally Microsoft goes to great lengths to make Windows run on a wide variety of PCs. Yet, with Windows 11, Microsoft cast compatibility into the wind, and specified requirements that made no sense. Microsoft, in-addition to demanding that users have a supported CPU (for AMD users, this meant nothing older than the Ryzen series and for Intel users nothing older than 8th gen), also required TPM 2.0.

You could be forgiven for not knowing what TPM is. Most PCs do not have a TPM chip, and those that do usually have it disabled. TPM chips are mostly on business-grade laptops, and serve a very specific hardware encryption function.

Windows 11’s installer will stop if you do not have a TPM 2.0 chip activated. It will stop if you do not have a supported CPU. Here’s the thing: these requirements are totally artificial. People have been able to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 via registry tweaks or via modifying installation ISOs.

Microsoft may be counting on people buying new computers in order to restore lost marketshare after Google Chromebooks took a big bite out of it during the pandemic, beating Apple’s macOS as the second-most popular desktop/laptop operating system.

In my curiosity, I did some research on what it took to bypass the blocks Microsoft placed in order to install Windows 11 on my laptop from 2011, a Lenovo ThinkPad T420. According to Microsoft, this computer is unsupported, and their recommendation probably would have been to purchase a new computer, such as a Dell XPS or a Surface Book.

However, I have never purchased a brand-new laptop, and have no interest in adhering to the spurious edicts of Redmond. So I followed this tutorial to create a modified Windows 11 installation flash drive.

And… It worked.

Windows 11 runs okay on my laptop, too, and performance-wise it isn’t bad. Although, I have heard that it does impact performance in some situations, apparently incurring a 30% loss in FPS performance in some gaming contexts. Overall, I’d say it isn’t worth getting. Not now, at least. It’s certainly not worth purchasing a brand-new computer for. If you want to tinker with it, by all means try it, but it isn’t worth buying.

It remains to be seen whether Windows 11 will see widespread adoption, whether people will purchase new hardware in order to use it, or whether people will ignore it ultimately.