Although Windows 11 was officially released on October 8, 2021, many people found that Windows Update did not provide an option to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. There are two main reasons why you may not see the upgrade option to Windows 11. The first reason is that many PCs do not meet the minimum hardware requirements. I will talk more about that later. Another reason is that Microsoft is making an amazing upgrade to Windows 11, so even if your PC meets the minimum requirements, it may take a while for Windows 11 to appear as a Windows update option.

If you find that you cannot upgrade your Windows 10 computer to Windows 11 using Windows Update, you can create Windows 11 installation media and use it to solve the problem.

You can download the Windows 11 installation media directly from Microsoft. This site provides three options for users who want to bypass Windows Update and continue to upgrade to Windows 11, as shown in the figure below.

The first option is to use the Windows 11 installation assistant. The Windows 11 Update Assistant provides you with an upgrade experience somewhat similar to using Windows Update to upgrade to Windows 11. You don't have to worry about downloading installation media or similar issues. Instead, the tool simply performs an in-place upgrade directly from the cloud.

The first thing Windows 11 Installation Assistant does while you are running is to perform a quick health check on your PC. If the installation assistant finds that your PC meets the requirements, it will display the screen shown below, prompting you to accept the Windows 11 license agreement. After doing this, the installation process will begin.

On the other hand, if the Windows 11 installation assistant finds that your hardware does not meet the required specifications, it will prompt you to run the Windows PC Health Check application. You can download the application here. As the name suggests, the Windows PC Health Check application is designed to check whether your system is ready for Windows 11. Just install the application and click the "Check Now" button as shown in the image below.

If there are issues that prevent you from upgrading your PC to Windows 11, these issues will be displayed in the results window as shown below.

So, if you receive a warning message as shown above, indicating that your hardware is not compatible with Windows 11, what will happen? If this happens, then you have three options:

Yes, you can usually install Windows 11 on a PC that does not meet the Windows 11 hardware requirements. However, Microsoft strongly recommends that you do not do this. According to Microsoft, installing Windows 11 on devices that are listed as incompatible may cause reliability and compatibility issues. However, what is even more disturbing is that if you choose to continue installing Windows 11, Microsoft does not guarantee that you will receive any Windows 11 updates, including security updates. In other words, you should force the installation of Windows 11 at your own risk.

As you may remember, the Windows 11 download page contains two additional options. One option is to create an installation media, and the other option is to download an ISO file. During the Windows 11 preview stage, you can simply download or create an ISO file, and then use it to install Windows 11, even if the hardware does not fully pass the test. However, when Microsoft finally released Windows 11, they built hardware compatibility checks into the installation media, so this technique is no longer effective.

As an alternative, what you need to do is to open the registry editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\SETUP\MoSETUP. Now, right-click on MoSETUP and select New | DWORD (32-bit) value option in the shortcut menu. The new value you are creating needs to be named AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU, and its value must be set to 1, as shown below. There is no need to restart the PC after creating this registry key.

If you are wondering, if you try to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware (from the installation media) without first creating a registry key, you will receive an error as shown below.

Creating a registry key does not completely eliminate any error messages. Instead, you will eventually see a stern warning message as shown below, and you must acknowledge and accept the risks of installing Windows.

So, what happens if you force install Windows 11, run into problems and eventually want to stick to Windows 10? Well, if it is less than 10 days after the upgrade, you can roll back the system to Windows 10. To do this, simply go to "Settings" and then click "System" and then "Restore". As you can see in the next screenshot, there is an option to return to Windows 10.

Keep in mind that when you downgrade to Windows 10, you may eventually have to reinstall certain applications. You will also lose any changes made since you upgraded to Windows 11. If you have exceeded the 10-day rollback limit, you may be out of luck. This is why you should make a complete system image backup of your Windows 10 computer before installing Windows 11. Then you can downgrade at any time by restoring the system image.

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Brien Posey is a freelance technical writer and speaker with more than two decades of IT experience. Before becoming a freelancer, Brien was the Chief Information Officer of a national chain of hospitals and medical institutions. He also served as a network engineer at the US Department of Defense in Fort Knox. In addition, Brien has served as a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in the United States. So far, Brien has won Microsoft MVP awards in Windows Server, IIS, Exchange Server, and file system/storage categories. You can visit Brien's website: www.brienposey.com.

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