Single-command Windows 11 system requirements bypass trick for unsupported PCs blocked

It is no secret that there were few who appreciated the steep system requirements put forth by Microsoft when it announced Windows 11. The supported list of CPUs excluded several processors that were less than five years old at that time (mid-2021), including powerful chips like Ryzen 1st Gen 6-core and 8-core CPUs, as well as Intel's 6th and 7th gen i7 models.

As such, users with unsupported systems have resorted to running Windows 11 using bypass tricks. Even those with really old chips like Core 2 Duos, Pentium 4s, Athlons, Athlon X2s, and Phenoms, among others, would bypass the system requirements and get Windows 11 up and running on their systems (though that will no longer work on the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 feature update).

The performance difference between Windows 10 and 11 on a similar class of hardware is much the same, indicating that such requirements were not necessary only from the performance point of view, which is why Microsoft had reasoned that security was the main reason they had done so, and pointed towards features like MBEC (on Intel) and GMET (on AMD).

In October last year, we covered a very simple bypass trick that involved just a single command when running the Windows 11 Setup. While this passthrough got popular in the tech community during this time as a result of the media coverage from Neowin as well as others, it was actually something even older.

To use this, all a user had to do was add "/product server" when running the setup, and Windows would just skip the hardware requirements check entirely.

As it turns out, Microsoft has blocked this bypass method on the latest Canary build 27686 as discovered by X user and tech enthusiast Bob Pony. When trying to use the Server trick now, the hardware requirements check is not bypassed.

There are still multiple ways to get around the requirements, and you can even use Microsoft's own official Windows 11 LTSC 2024 which has far more lenient eligibility criteria.