Ineligible Windows 10 PCs shouldn’t upgrade to Windows 11, Microsoft warns

Microsoft has made up its mind about Windows 10’s retirement and won’t make it easy to transition to Windows 11 PCs as well. It’s not budging from the complex system requirements to upgrade to Windows 11 and recently updated a three year old post that lays down rules for ineligible PCs forcibly upgrading to The new OS.

The post hasn’t changed much and still mentions the ramifications of using Windows 11 on an unsupported PC. Firstly, the users will see a long disclaimer that clarifies that users will be responsible for their actions.

Microsoft won’t offer any kind of support for ineligible PCs and warns of compatibility issues with certain apps and features. In addition, it won’t be liable for any hardware damages that might happen to the PC.

If you’ve already taken the plunge and forcibly installed Windows 11 on your ineligible PC by bypassing system requirements, you have a chance to go back to Windows 10 using the Recovery page. But that’s only available for ten days, and after that, only a clean install option remains.

The update portion of the support document clarifies that “Windows 11 minimum system requirements remain unchanged,” which is not a surprise. Last week, Windows Latest covered Microsoft’s intentions behind that TPM 2.0 requirement in Windows 11, which made the Redmond giant’s intentions very clear.

What’s funny is the myriad of problems present in Windows 11 24H2 that prevent many users from upgrading to it. There are more than fifteen such reported issues now, and Microsoft should look into this as well before hastily giving up on Windows 10.

This decision to retire Windows 10 and not allow users to upgrade to Windows 11 is hurting a lot of us.

Ineligible Windows 10 users have no choice

There are perfectly capable desktops and laptops running Windows 10 that cannot migrate to Windows 11 because of TPM and Secure Boot. Since these functionalities are baked into the CPU and motherboard, there’s no way of getting around it.

Even if you bypass them, most new security features in Windows 11 won’t work because of it. Some desktop users can upgrade their TPM module, but laptop users don’t have that luxury.

We support Microsoft’s decision to reinforce security in Windows 11, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of thousands of Windows 10 PCs left stranded.

What’s worse is that Microsoft is also terminating Windows 10 in October 2025, with a $30 Extended Support Program for one year. Come 2026, these PCs will become obsolete and will either run an unmaintained Windows 10 edition or switch to Linux to survive a few more years.