Windows 11 may implement methods to warn if it is installed on a machine with unsupported hardware: both a watermark semitransparent in the lower right corner of the desktop, similar to the one known for years that appears if Windows is not activated, is a notification on the main page of the Settings app.
The message is the same in both cases: “System requirements not met”, clear and succinct. In the case of the watermark, there is information about the build and the SKU (Pro, Home, Enterprise …), while in the notification in Settings there is a link for more information. The novelty had been anticipated by the well-known insider Albacore even before the release of the build, which then arrived just under a week ago and which includes a large number of new features.
Microsoft itself has claimed that it is not said that all the innovations introduced in the Insider builds will then become official features of Windows 11. As has already happened with Windows 10 (indeed, probably even more so) the feedback from the community of testers will have its own weight. That said, it’s clear that the company wants to somehow warn users that their device / system isn’t ideal for Windows 11.
In the past the company has used the watermark to signal, we said, if the build was not correctly activated while restricting the availability of some secondary features, such as dark theme, customization options, and so on. At least at this stage it does not seem that similar measures are envisaged here too, but we will see how it evolves.
PERFORMANCE VS SAFETY
Anyone who has followed the story of the requirements of the new Microsoft operating system from the beginning knows that it is not a question of performance: you need really modest hardware to run Windows 11 decently. The real problem is security: the company has effectively ruled out all processors that are particularly vulnerable to famous flaws such as Meltdown and Specter and that do not implement up-to-date technologies such as TPM 2.0 modules.
To summarize very succinctly, only i 8th Generation Intel Core processors or 2nd Generation AMD Ryzen processors and newer ones are officially compatible with the system, but there are relatively simple ways to install it anyway. At that point, a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 64 GB storage media (not necessarily an SSD) and 4 GB of RAM are sufficient.
