More than 40% of office PCs cannot upgrade to Windows 11
Around 4 in every ten office PCs worldwide cannot upgrade to Windows 11 due to Microsoft’s stringent hardware requirements for the new operating system.
That is according to research by IT asset management provider Lansweeper, which recently analysed 27 million computers from 60,000 organisations and found that 42.76% did not pass the CPU test for Windows 11.
The OS requires a 64-bit 1GHz or faster processor with two or more cores.
7.15% of the systems also failed the RAM test, for which Microsoft requires a minimum of 4GB.
14.66% of the analysed PCs did not meet the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 criteria, one of the most heavily-criticised requirements of Windows 11.
The graph below shows the results of Lansweeper’s assessment of the Windows 11 requirements met on 27 million PCs across the globe.
TPM 2.0 is used to support several security features in Windows 11 that Microsoft insists are critical to protection, including Windows Hello and BitLocker.
The module is typically included as a dedicated chip on the motherboard, so a simple upgrade is not an easy endeavour.
Its firmware also requires processors no older than the AMD Ryzen 2000 series and Intel’s 8th-gen CPUs.
Millions of PCs facing the dump
If Microsoft sticks to its guns, many computers will have to be trashed or recycled when Windows 10 officially reaches end-of-life.
Windows 10 will continue to be supported until at least 2025, after which Microsoft could provide temporary paid-for life-extension programmes that provide further security updates and support, like it did with Windows 7.
While a workaround exists to force-install Windows 11 on some PCs and avoids some of the requirements, it’s likely not an ideal or long-term solution.
Lansweeper’s other findings include that 2.44% of enterprise systems have made the switch to Windows 11, up from 0.52% in January 2022.
That is a much more conservative adoption rate than in the home user space, particularly within the PC gaming community.
Steam’s latest hardware and software survey found that nearly a quarter (25%) of its users had upgraded to the new OS by September 2022.
According to GlobalStats’ StatCounter, Windows 11 was estimated to be running on around 13.56% of Windows systems overall.
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