The hardware requirements for the upcoming Windows 10 as below, according to Microsoft.
- Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with two or more cores on a compatible 64-bit processor or system on a chip (SoC).
- RAM: 4 gigabytes (GB) or greater.
- Storage: 64 GB* or greater available storage is required to install Windows 11.
- Additional storage space might be required to download updates and enable specific features.
- Graphics card: Compatible with DirectX 12 or later, with a WDDM 2.0 driver.
- System firmware: UEFI, Secure Boot capable.
- TPM: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0.
- Display: High definition (720p) display, 9″ or greater monitor, 8 bits per color channel.
Even though the bar is relatively low, not all existing computers are compatible.
Microsoft has a PC Health Check tool that tells you whether you can install Windows 11 on your existing PC but it’s a one-liner that doesn’t tell you which part of the computer has failed to meet the requirement.
WhyNotWin11 is an open-source tool that scans your hardware and lists out all of them against Windows 11 hardware requirements and sees where they are at. Green for meeting the requirement, yellow for meeting the minimum requirement for the Insider program, and red means no.
So, if you have more than one incompatible component on your computer, you now know where to upgrade to meet the requirement.
Download the tool from its release page and since it’s a portable tool as well you can just double-click the tool to launch it.
it is recognized as a trojan by virustotal
I see only one from Sophos that marks this as Generic ML PUA. I happen to use Sophos product and it didn’t mark the executable as malware. So I tend to believe it’s a false positive.