If your PC doesn't meet the Windows 11 system requirements, you may still be able to upgrade using the open-source Flyby11 app. Join me for a brief demonstration of how Flyby11 checks your PC's actual capabilities and allows upgrading from Windows 10.
Download Flyby11 here: https://github.com/builtbybel/Flyby11/releases
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Download Flyby11 here: https://github.com/builtbybel/Flyby11/releases
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Official website: https://nerdonthestreet.com
Discord server: https://discord.nots.co
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TechTranscript
00:00Hello everyone, I'm Jacob Kaufman, I'm the Nerd on the Street,
00:02and today I'm showing you how to upgrade unsupported PCs to Windows 11.
00:14Okay everybody, Microsoft released Windows 11 as a free upgrade to Windows 10 a few years ago now.
00:20However, Windows 11 doesn't support all the same hardware as Windows 10.
00:24Microsoft released a list of processor and motherboard features,
00:27basically, that were required in order to do that upgrade.
00:29Up until now, that hasn't really been a problem,
00:31because you could still just keep running Windows 10 if it works on your computer.
00:34However, later this year in October, Windows 10 will be reaching end of life,
00:38which means it will no longer be receiving regular security updates from Microsoft.
00:42That means you're going to want to upgrade to Windows 11 for any PC that you're using day to day.
00:46Now, if Windows is telling you that your computer is too old to upgrade to Windows 11,
00:50you might still be able to upgrade anyway.
00:52You see, certain Windows 11 requirements, like TPM versioning, Secure Boot,
00:56and even some processor features, aren't actually required.
01:00You just need to know how to get around Windows as checks for those features.
01:04Last month, I went to do this for a small business that I do the IT for.
01:08They had four desktop computers all running Windows 10.
01:11While there are several ways to accomplish this, including things like registry edits,
01:15I found a really simple tool called Flyby 11 that basically does it all for you.
01:20It starts the Windows installer in server mode, which skips most of those compatibility checks,
01:25but still installs the regular desktop version of Windows 11 on your PC.
01:29I used this tool on all four of those client computers at that business,
01:33and every single one of those computers, the upgrade went perfectly fine.
01:36Now, the tool has been under active development.
01:38It's actually so active that over the course of the three days when I upgraded those four computers,
01:43each of the different days that I downloaded the tool, it looked slightly different
01:47because the developer was updating it basically every night.
01:50So it might look slightly different when you grab it than what I'm about to show you.
01:53However, the basic steps should remain the same.
01:55So without further ado, let's cut to the desktop and I'll show you how to use this tool
01:59to upgrade your PC and not have to buy a new one to run Windows 11.
02:02And here we are on the desktop.
02:04Now, I'm going to use a virtual machine to show this to you just because it's a little bit easier
02:07for me to capture and demonstrate, but the tool works the same way on physical computers.
02:11Like I said, I used it on four of them.
02:13So I'm going to go ahead and start the virtual machine here.
02:16When it boots up, it's going to display the VirtualBox logo.
02:19Your computer might show the Windows logo there or the manufacturer of your computer.
02:24Again, I'm just using a virtual machine, so that's why it's got that logo.
02:28But I will go ahead and log into Windows 10 here.
02:34And just to quickly run through how this is supposed to work according to Microsoft,
02:37I'm going to show you how to check if your computer can be upgraded officially first.
02:41So we're going to come in here to the Settings app.
02:43We'll go to the Windows Update section.
02:47And inside of there, we're going to have a big banner that says Get Ready for Windows 11.
02:50You can see it's kind of grayed out here, possibly because this is a virtual machine.
02:54Here's a screenshot of what it looks like normally.
02:57And if we go ahead and click the Check Hardware Requirements link within the Settings app,
03:01that's going to open up a web browser.
03:02And this website lists all of the official system requirements for Windows 11.
03:06I'm going to click on the link to the PC Health Check app.
03:09That's going to download a utility that's going to tell us if this computer can officially support
03:13Windows 11.
03:14So that's been downloaded.
03:15I'll go ahead and open it.
03:18It's going to install the utility.
03:22And we'll go ahead and open that.
03:24So as you can see, the PC Health Check utility has a button that says Check Now.
03:28If I click on that, it's going to tell me that this PC doesn't currently meet
03:31Windows 11 system requirements.
03:33It's telling me that for two reasons.
03:34For one thing, TPM 2.0 is not supported or enabled on this PC.
03:38This one's caused by me being in a virtual machine.
03:40My computer actually does have a firmware TPM at least,
03:43but it's not detected here in the VM.
03:46However, this other item actually reflects my physical computer.
03:48I built this computer back in 2018.
03:50It's got a first-generation Ryzen Threadripper processor in it.
03:53And that processor is not on Microsoft's list of officially supported processors.
03:58So I'm not going to get the option here in Windows to automatically upgrade.
04:01And if I were to insert a Windows 11 installation disk in this computer or this virtual machine,
04:06it would also not offer me the option to install unless I were to modify it
04:09to get around those restrictions.
04:11So this is the point that I assume you're at if you're watching this video.
04:14And here's how you can probably upgrade anyway.
04:16I'm going to open up a web browser and this tool is open source.
04:19Not sure if I mentioned that during the intro,
04:21but we're going to go to github.com slash built by Bell, that's B-E-L, slash flyby11.
04:29That's flyby and then the number 11.
04:31So here's the GitHub page.
04:32The source code is on here for the tools we're about to use.
04:35I have had one interaction with the developer so far and it went well.
04:38The developer is pretty responsive on the issues open in this repo,
04:41but we're going to go down here and click on releases in the sidebar.
04:45And that's going to show you the most recent release first.
04:48So underneath the most recent release that's listed, just click on the .zip file to download it.
04:52And once that's been downloaded, we'll go ahead and open it up.
04:55You can actually just close the web browser at this point
04:57and we'll go ahead and extract this folder so that we can run that program.
05:03All right.
05:04Once that's extracted, we'll go ahead and you should see the flyby11 application.
05:08When you've extracted these files, the application should have a little icon
05:11displayed there next to it that looks like a Windows logo.
05:14So I'll go ahead and double click on this.
05:16And it looks like Windows 10 is trying to protect our PC.
05:20We are going to click on more info and then click run anyway.
05:23Again, the app is open source.
05:25Anybody can go there and audit the source code.
05:28We're doing this to get around Microsoft's restrictions.
05:30So I'm not too interested in what they have to say about it.
05:32I'm just going to minimize that folder here.
05:34And when you first open this tool up, it's actually going to run a compatibility check.
05:38Now, like I said, the Windows 10 compatibility check or the official Microsoft compatibility check
05:44failed.
05:44This one is succeeding.
05:45If you see two check marks here, then your computer actually supports the requirements
05:49of Windows 11.
05:50Now, the reason Microsoft has been able to get away with doing what they're doing with
05:54Windows 11 is because they're not entirely lying when they say that new software sometimes
05:58needs newer hardware.
06:00Windows 11 does take advantage of several CPU features and it does require those features in
06:05order to run.
06:05The code to run without them probably would have been a pretty big burden to keep in Windows
06:10alongside the newer code and it has been removed.
06:12So these are two high profile examples of features that Windows 11 actually does require.
06:18However, it doesn't actually require those other things that were mentioned before,
06:21like TPM 2.0.
06:23So this is basically a little bit more of an honest compatibility check.
06:27If you see one or both of these fail, if you see X's here in this compatibility check from
06:32Flyby 11, chances are you actually might not be able to run Windows 11.
06:36So in that case, you're going to want to look at maybe switching over to Linux or else getting a
06:40new PC in order to not be on an end of life operating system.
06:43However, there are a ton of PCs that actually can run Windows 11.
06:47Like you just saw the official check failed, this third party check passes, and we can go ahead and
06:51click on the green start upgrade now button to launch the proper upgrading tool.
06:56You'll see here on the side, the developer did start including a little clippy recreation
07:00just for fun with this tool.
07:01But to get started here, we need to download a Windows 11 ISO file.
07:05That's the same type of file that you would use if you were creating an upgrade disk,
07:09like a USB drive to perform a clean installation.
07:12And you can do that yourself from the Microsoft website,
07:14or there's actually a tool we can launch right here.
07:17It says download via Fido.
07:18I clicked on that and it's going to give us a menu to download this automatically.
07:22So here in the Fido ISO downloader, Windows 11 is selected by default.
07:27I'll click continue.
07:28And next up, we've got our release.
07:30Now, one important thing to note, Microsoft has stated that future updates are not guaranteed
07:35if you install Windows 11 on an unsupported PC.
07:38Now, minor updates seem to be going through normally for everyone who's used tools like this.
07:43However, Windows has these major updates every now and then versioned by these codes,
07:47such as the current 24H2, released in 2024 October.
07:52So in the future, it's possible that major upgrades to Windows 11
07:56might not be installed automatically on an unsupported PC,
07:59the way that they would be if your computer was supported.
08:02However, assuming that the actual Windows 11 requirements do not change,
08:05you should be able to just run Flyby 11 again in the future,
08:09and at that point, you'll have the newer release available to install using this same process.
08:14Just wanted to mention that for you to keep in mind
08:16if you notice that you're not getting an update later on in the future.
08:19For now, we're just trying to get on Windows 11 in the first place,
08:21so I'll click continue on the only release available.
08:24The addition, the only one available here is home slash pro slash education.
08:28They don't really separate the ISOs out too much anymore.
08:32And here under the language dropdown, this one is actually important.
08:35If you're here in the United States like I am,
08:37your PC is probably running the English US version of Windows 10.
08:41The default ISO that's downloaded is the English international version.
08:45If you select this version, then the installer that opens in a moment
08:48will tell you that it's not able to keep all of your files, apps, and settings.
08:52It may still be able to keep some of your files,
08:53but it'll tell you that it's going to reset your settings and or installed applications.
08:57So in order to have an actual upgrade,
09:00an in-place upgrade where everything else is kept on your computer,
09:03you're going to want to make sure this language matches what you have installed.
09:06For me, that's English United States.
09:08So after that, I'll click continue.
09:10That's going to give us one more option at the bottom here for architecture.
09:13This is a regular old PC with an AMD processor.
09:16If you have an Intel or AMD processor, you probably want to select X64.
09:20If you're not sure which one you have, you probably want to select X64.
09:23ARM 64 would be for things like certain tablets
09:26and possibly very low powered laptops or all-in-one PCs.
09:30But I'll keep the default there.
09:31I'll click download and that's going to open up the web browser directly to a download link.
09:35So there's not even a webpage that will be displayed here.
09:38And up here at the top right, you'll see that a download is currently running
09:41for the Windows 11 ISO.
09:42It's going to go pretty quickly because Microsoft can afford a lot of bandwidth for their servers.
09:47Once that's finished downloading, just close your web browser again.
09:50And back here in Flyby 11, we're going to go to this more options drop down on the left side of
09:55the app. And we'll go to the first option select from computer. That'll give us a browse window
10:00here where we can navigate to our downloads folder and select that ISO that was just downloaded.
10:05After we click open, Flyby 11 is going to open up that ISO, which contains the Windows installer.
10:11After it's done reading that, it's going to launch a PowerShell prompt.
10:17And you can see we get a message that says,
10:19success, Windows 11 installation can now proceed. Please follow the instructions in the setup window.
10:24As you can see, sometimes other things can pop up over that. The installer can pop up over that.
10:28So you might need to move some windows around to see everything that's going on here.
10:32I'm going to click OK to dismiss that prompt. And over here, we've got our install Windows Server
10:37window. Like I said, Flyby 11 is running the installer in server mode just because it doesn't
10:42have those compatibility checks from Microsoft. It's not actually installing Windows Server.
10:46It's still installing desktop Windows 11. Now, I'd recommend just clicking next. If we click on
10:50change how setup downloads updates here, you can see the default option is to download updates while
10:55we're installing Windows 11, which is what we want to do because otherwise you're going to have to
10:58install those updates afterwards anyway. The analytics checkbox at the bottom left is unchecked
11:02by default. So we'll go ahead and click on next here.
11:08And after a few more screens, we'll accept our license agreement from Microsoft. And on the choose
11:12what to keep page here, again, if the keep files, settings and apps option is grayed out,
11:17that means that you selected the wrong language when you were downloading the ISO a few minutes
11:20earlier. So if that's the case, and you want to keep your files, settings and apps, close out of
11:24the server setup, run the tool again, and select the proper language. In my case, I did everything
11:29correctly. So this option is here available and it's selected by default. I'll click next again.
11:41And after a few more checks, the installer is ready to proceed. Once you click install here,
11:46it's going to launch a full screen overlay with a progress indicator. And this is going to take a
11:50little while it is going to reboot the computer. So before you get to this part of the setup,
11:54make sure that you've closed any open applications or files that you were working on. But we'll just go
11:59ahead and wait for that to finish. The screen will turn off from an activity after a few minutes,
12:03so if you want to watch the progress, just move the mouse to turn it back on. As you can see,
12:07after we get through that first percentage counter, the PC will restart.
12:18And you can see that spinner is already the Windows 11 style while we're booting up.
12:30And we'll have one more update screen to sit through once we're on Windows 11.
12:41And after that, we're taken straight to the login screen. So we can sign in the same way we did with
12:48Windows 10. We have our lovely high introduction that I'm sure is incredibly soothing when you are
12:58doing this on a lot of PCs or fighting with PCs.
13:08And finally, we will be taken to the Windows 11 desktop with our taskbar taking another second to
13:14load in there. And as you can see from the start menu, we are now on Windows 11. If we open up our
13:19updates page in the Windows settings, right down here at the bottom of the sidebar, you can see we
13:26are up to date as of right now. Again, in the future, Microsoft has stated that PCs that do not meet
13:32their purported hardware requirements may not receive updates. So even though Windows these days is
13:37pretty good about installing updates automatically if you've got it configured to do that, if you've upgraded
13:41manually like this, you will want to go into your settings, check out Windows update just every
13:46now and then every couple of months, make sure that you do have all the updates installed that
13:50are available. You can see it just found a few after I clicked that button. And in the future,
13:54there may be some versions of Windows 11 that are not automatically installed on your system.
14:00And if that is the case, you can just use Flyby 11 again to upgrade to those. But in the meantime,
14:04as you can see, I am receiving updates as expected through Windows Update. So that's how easy it is to
14:10upgrade your PC to Windows 11 with Flyby 11. It's really just a few clicks. It's not much more
14:14complicated than the official Microsoft way of doing it. It just bypasses those completely
14:19artificial restrictions that Microsoft put in place, trying to require people to buy new computers.
14:23And to be fair, you know, some of those features are nice. It's nice to have a TPM of version 2.0,
14:29especially if you're using types of encryption that can actually utilize that. But if it's not required
14:33and you already have a PC that's working, yeah, no reason to throw that hardware out, save the money,
14:38help the environment, keep your PC running longer. If this tool helps you, especially if you use it
14:42on a lot of computers, the developer does have a link to his donation page here in the releases.
14:47It's a PayPal donation page. The developer also does some other Windows utilities that you can
14:52go and check out on his GitHub profile. And if my video was helpful to you, bringing this project
14:57to your attention and showing you how to use it, you can go to nerdclub.knots.co to consider joining
15:02the Nerd Club for $3 a month. Help me keep my content online and make more videos in the future.
15:07But for now, that's everything I wanted to show you. I'm Jacob Kaufman, I'm the Nerd on the Street,
15:10and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.