Which is the cheapest upgrade path to a Win11 Laptop

[Deleted User]

My criteria was it had to have a 15.6" screen and an optical drive. 

I settled on a Fujitsu Lifebook A3510 for my wife and the A3511 for myself. The latter can be bought for about £230 and the other for about £170. Both were refurbished. I simply don't like boot usb much preferring a CD to do this.

It would be interesting to know the path you took and why.

Newcad

Cheapest? How about free?

I have put Windows 11 on an 12 year old Toshiba Tecra M9 (originally XP, yes that old) - and Win 11 worked fine on it if a bit slow by today's standards.

Of course this wasn't a standard upgrade as the old Tosh didn't meet a single one of the MS "Minimum Requirements" (which tells you something about those).

So it's not a route for everybody, but it can be done as easily as upgrading a fully does-meet-requirements Win 10 machine to Win 11.

Of course MS say they wiil block the ways that let you bypass their "minimum requirements. (Again that tells you that they are not technical requirements, but MS choices).

[Deleted User]

Newcad said:

Cheapest? How about free?

I have put Windows 11 on an 12 year old Toshiba Tecra M9 (originally XP, yes that old) - and Win 11 worked fine on it if a bit slow by today's standards.

Of course this wasn't a standard upgrade as the old Tosh didn't meet a single one of the MS "Minimum Requirements" (which tells you something about those).

So it's not a route for everybody, but it can be done as easily as upgrading a fully compliant Win 10 machine to Win 11.

Of course MS say they wiil block the ways that let you bypass their "minimum requirements. (Again tells you that they are not real, but MS choices).

What did you do about the TPM 2.0 chip?

Newcad

It only had a TPM1 so I bypassed the requirement for TPM2.

Sorry I'm not going to give any links because despite being Money Saving they would fall foul of the moderation for being considered 'grey'.(i'm half expecting my posts here may dissappear anyway).

Google is your friend but make sure you are looking at up to date stuff from the last few months, best ways change.

Of course doing something like this is at your own risk and should only be on a "spare" or unimportant machine.

interstellaflyer

As Newcad says currently it's not difficult to get unsupported hardware to run Windows 11, the workarounds are out there, seek and you shall find them, I have a built from cheap 12 year old secondhand parts core duo system in my mancave which is perfectly useable running Windows 11, also I'm typing this is on a 7th gen i3 laptop running Windows 11 perfectly well, also I was running a desktop with a core i5 7700K system on Windows 11 until I bricked the motherboard.

[Deleted User]

interstellaflyer said:

As Newcad says currently it's not difficult to get unsupported hardware to run Windows 11, the workarounds are out there, seek and you shall find them, I have a built from cheap 12 year old secondhand parts core duo system in my mancave which is perfectly useable running Windows 11, also I'm typing this is on a 7th gen i3 laptop running Windows 11 perfectly well, also I was running a desktop with a core i5 7700K system on Windows 11 until I bricked the motherboard.

To be honest, I could'nt be ar*ed, but you have to take your hat off to people like yourselves who reuse old tech; officially its not supported by Microsoft. My wife has an i5 CPU whilst I have an i3. I was dissapointed to discover these mobile CPU are Gen 3 PCIe. The i5 desktop versions are Gen 4. Have you kept Bitlocker encryption turned on and are you running 23H2?