Hi everyone and welcome to
another video on Windows 11. As you might have heard, since a few days, Microsoft has released their 2023 update
of Windows 11, better known as 23H2. As I did some earlier videos on getting
Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, this one is no different and covers upgrading
to Windows 11 23H2 on non-supported hardware. There are several scenarios
that might apply for you, so I decided to split these up in
separate videos to avoid confusion. This video is about upgrading from Windows
10 to the latest version of Windows 11: 23H2. Other videos will be about
performing a fresh installation of Windows 11 23H2 on unsupported
hardware or about upgrading to Windows 11 23H2 when you would already
be on a previous windows 11 version. For these different scenarios, I've put a card here and you can find
a link in the description as well. Since Microsoft released Windows 11 in
October 2021, there has been some hardware limitations. These limitations include a
limited list list of processor support, the requirement for secure
boot and a TPM 2.0 module. In case one of these requirements on your
machine is not met, you have an unsupported system and without any workarounds, you will not
be able to install Windows 11 on your machine. For this video, I will use my trusty Dell
Optiplex 9020, which I also used for previous videos on Windows 11. It is equipped with
a fourth generation Intel Core i5 CPU, which is not supported, and it doesn't
meet the TPM 2.0 requirement either. So in short: this machine is
not officially compatible or qualified to run Windows 11 by Microsoft and
currently it is still running on Windows 10. When going to "About this
PC", we can see all of this: the fourth generation Intel Core i5 CPU
and that we are currently on Windows 10. Looking at Windows Update we can see that all
available updates for this machine were installed. If you want to go through this as well,
I would definitely recommend here to make sure that you first install all pending
updates before continuing. This is not a strict requirement but sometimes it results
in strange behavior after the upgrade. We can also see a banner here, to tell
us that our machine does not meet the minimum system requirements to upgrade to
Windows 11. As the banner says as well, we can use the PC Health app
to check why that is the case. I pre-installed this application, so let's
launch it and see what it has to say. After clicking on "Check now" here, as we
already knew, it tells us that we don't meet the requirements because we don't have a
TPM 2.0 module and our processor is too old. There wouldn't be a reason for this video if
I wouldn't have a way around this of course. The way that we will do this, is by
downloading the windows 11 ISO from Microsoft website, copy the contents
to our SSD and modify a single file, which is responsible for the hardware checks.
This will allow us to continue and upgrade our current Windows 10 installation, even though
officially the hardware is not supported. So let's start our browser and head over
to Microsoft's Windows 11 download page. You have several options here, and
earlier, for 22H2, I recommended to continue here by downloading the
ISO with the Media Creation Tool. For Windows 11 23H2, I noticed that if you
use an ISO that is generated with that tool, it would only upgrade to 22H2 and you'd need
to further work around the upgrade limitation from there. That's not a disaster but since we
need to download a lot anyway, it's easier and faster to instead download the ISO directly from
here, so select the only option, in the download Windows 11 disk image part: Windows 11 Multi-
Edition ISO, from the list and click Download. Now comes a tricky part: we need to select the
correct language for the ISO and that's more important than you might think as it has to match
with the base-install language of your current installation, which does not necessarily
matches with the current display language. In order to double check which one that
is, we need to launch a command prompt as administrator. To do so, press
the Windows key or Start button and type cmd. This should select the command
prompt and click on Run as administrator. Here we can type the command "dism /online
/get-intl" and press enter. In the output you get here, you should find the base language
of your Windows installation. In my case it is English - United States, so that is the
language that I need to select for the download. After selecting the correct language,
click confirm and wait for the 64-bit download button to appear. Then click
on it to start downloading the ISO file. While we wait for the download to complete,
it is maybe worth mentioning here as well, as I got that question a few times on previous
videos, that there is no upgrade path from a 32-bit Windows 10 installation. In that case
only a fresh installation will work for you. Our download completed in the meanwhile, so we can close our browser and navigate
to the Downloads folder to continue. Now we need to mount that
downloaded ISO file. This can simply be done by double clicking on the file. As you can see this results in an additional
virtual drive with the contents of the ISO. In case double clicking wouldn't work, you can
also right click on the ISO and choose Mount. On that virtual drive, we have our
required files but these are read only. Since we need to modify that
file to bypass the hardware checks, we will need to take a copy of the contents
of the ISO into a new folder on the desktop. Let me first create that
folder. I'll call it 23H2. And then we can simply drag the contents
of the mounted ISO to that new folder. After all files are copied, you can unmount the ISO by right clicking
on the virtual drive and choosing Eject. If you are low on space, you can now also delete the downloaded
ISO file from your Downloads folder. From here on, we will only work with that copy
of the files which you made on the desktop. If you would try to run the installation without
any modifications at this point, this is what you would see: you can see the setup application
running the "Checking your PC"-step for some time, then comes back with the same information as we've
seen before and we're not allowed to continue. So to work around that, as I mentioned, we'll
modify that single file that is responsible for that check. So navigate to the sources folder
in the copy of the files on the desktop and here find a file called appraiserres.dll.
Right click on it and choose Open with... Click Show apps and then
choose notepad from the list. This brings up the binary contents of the file.
There is no need to understand or read this, just press Ctrl+a or go to Edit > Select all
and press the backspace or delete button to delete everything that's in there.
Then save the file and quit notepad. That's all it takes so let's
navigate back to 23H2 and run setup. On the first screen make sure you
click on "Change how setup downloads updates" and then choose for "Not right now". This will prevent the setup application from
redownloading the file that we modified. Click next now and, as you can see, the
"Checking your PC"-step only takes a very short time and doesn't complain anymore. Simply
because we remove the contents of that .dll file. Click Accept here and eventually you should
end up with the "Ready to install" screen. This is what you need to get here" Install
Windows 11 and Keep personal files and apps. If you don't get the option to keep your
files and apps, something went wrong and in most cases this is due to the earlier
mentioned mismatch with the language. This is how that would look
like and, as you can see, this is also clarified as well
at the bottom of that window. All we need to do now is to click
Install and then be patient. After roughly 30 minutes on this hardware, we
are greeted with our fresh Windows 11 desktop. Let's take a look at Settings > System
> About now. As you can see we we've successfully upgraded our Windows
10 installation to Windows 11 23H2. winver shows us the same information. At this point you can safely delete the
copy of the installation files which we made on the desktop as they are no longer
needed and they take up quite some space. If you would have kept the downloaded
ISO file in your Downloads folder, you can delete that one as well. And while we navigate do that Downloads
folder, we can see that we are definitely on 23H2 as we have the new browser-like
features available in file explorer. We can also check the options for
Taskbar Behavior over here. Since 23H2 it allows you again to not hide
labels or combine taskbar buttons. And after aligning the Start button
to the left, this finally goes back to the way I've always liked it. Nice to see
that this is available out of the box again. And to finish the video, let me also answer a question which many of you
might have regarding updates. Let me go to Windows Update and
click on "Check for updates". As you can see, as has been the case with earlier
versions of Windows 11 on unsupported hardware as well, updates are coming in perfectly
fine here, so no need to worry about that. That was it for the video... Thanks a lot for watching! Let me know how this worked for you and
if you would have any any questions, let me know in the comments and I'll
do my best to provide an answer. If you have liked this video,
a thumbs up is always nice, and if you're into this kind of videos, feel
free to subscribe to my channel of course. Thanks again and I hope to see you back here soon!
