Microsoft officially announced Windows 11 today. There was the usual online comparisons between the announced features and other comparable features in MacOS and Linux, like the centered Task Bar that now looks suspiciously like how MacOS’s Dock has looked for, well, years.
In the tech requirements though, there is an unusual detail – Windows 11 requires a motherboard security module called TPM 2.0. Most new motherboard apparently come with one of these, but Asus has produced a number of motherboards in the last couple of years and chose not to include one of these modules onboard. If you run the compatibility checker on a PC with one of these mobos, you’ll get this notification that your PC, that you most likely bought as recent as within the last couple of years, is not compatible with Windows 11:
Understandably, there’s a number of threads online where people are rather upset that the new PC they bought within the last few months is not compatible with Windows 11.
The good news is some AMD Ryzen chipsets have BIOS that includes embedded TPM 2.0 support, even if it’s not provided by a discrete module on the motherboard. On my Asus X570 Plus motherboard it has an fTPM option in the BIOS settings with two options, ‘discrete’ or ‘firmware’. On mine the default option was ‘discrete’ but changing it to ‘firmware’ added the support that the compatibility checker is looking for:
And now running the checker again, everything is good:
Microsoft is going to catch hell for this as there are tons of Motherboards out there that don’t have a TPM module on them or even a header to add one… if all the new AM4 and intel i series boards have them one the new boards, then thats good, but I think this is going to cause a lot of problems for people wanting to upgrade. also, I think the sale of windows 11 is going to suffer for this. there are just too many older motherboards that work fine on windows 10…. I can run windows 10 on AM2, and AM3 motherboards. but 11 may be the tipping point for a lot of people and hardware… so all we can do is to wait and see…. If they do a free upgrade again, how many people are actually going to be able to do it with their existing hardware…. I hope it will be just like windows 10, which I had no problem with….
This also kills running Windows 11 in virtual machines (Parallels on a Mac)