By Stede Bonnet in windows —

How to update any Windows 10 PC to Windows 11

Lately the media has been full of articles regarding the end of support of Windows 10, presumably in 2025, and how it is the end of the world for many old but useful computers. This is not true. You can update virtually any PC that runs Windows 10 to version 11.

The trick is to download the Windows 11 installation media, disable compatibility checks and perform an offline in place upgrade. Some computers, such as Surface Pro 3, 4 and 5, will work and drivers are available, even if the device is not officially supported. Some are trickier. I have a Lenovo M73 Tiny for media playback purposes and neither Intel or Lenovo provide drivers for Windows 11. I upgraded it successfully using the in place upgrade.

The update procedure

  1. Check all the updates and updated drivers for your Windows 10 PC. Optionally, if your installation is old and has a lot of garbage, you can start by clean installing Windows 10 and then updating everything to latest.
  2. Download Windows 11 installation media as an .ISO file from Microsoft
  3. Flash the .ISO file to a USB stick using Rufus
    1. Before starting the flash, Rufus will ask whether it should make some changes to the installation media, including the disabling of hardware requirements check (4GB+ RAM, Secure Boot, TPM2.0). Choose this option.
    2. You can also make other adjustments to the media, like disabling the BitLocker encryption and mandatory Microsoft account.
  4. Do an in place upgrade for your PC, not a clean install. This way the Windows 10 drivers are used in case no Windows 11 versions are available. The update can be performed by running the installer from the USB-media or by booting the USB and choosing accordingly.

Microsoft has a support article and a YouTube video documenting the update.

Final thoughts

The risk in this method is that Microsoft may of course break your setup at will continuously rolling updates. This installation completely unsupported in case you run into issues, so don't base any critical business on PC's updated using this method.

And remember that you don't have to use Windows. You can always go for Linux or ChromeOS Flex.