You're in the same boat if you have a Surface Pro 5 (aka Surface Pro 2017), which was the top of the Surface Pro line until its successor was released in October 2018, less than three years ago. No, it's not on the list of compatible CPUs, which means if you go online today and pay Microsoft nearly five grand for their most expensive Surface PC, they won't allow you to upgrade to Windows 11. And what CPU is in that brand-new PC if you pay that lofty price tag today?Īn i7-7820HQ, that's what. Microsoft's most expensive PC, the Surface Studio 2, is available for sale today starting from $3,499.99 and can be configured to cost $4,799.99. Of course, not all PCs with that CPU generation are old. It, too, sets off compatibility alarms and is blocked by SmartScreen, but if you bypass those checks you get a nice graphical display that displays the pass/fail status for each item in the list of Windows 11 system requirements. Since I ran that script, a second open-source compatibility checker, WhyNotWin11, has also appeared on GitHub. The good news is that Windows 11 should run on it, although the upgrade is not recommended. That's a 2015-era CPU, and my PC is about five years old. This open source tool provides more details than the official compatibility checker You might get a SmartScreen error if you try to download this tool and run it, because Windows flags it, for now at least, as 'not commonly downloaded.') Instead, I turned to an open source tool called Win11SysCheck, which is available on GitHub as source code and a precompiled binary. Frustratingly, the PC Health Check app doesn't appear to generate any log files that would make the sleuthing easier. That was the case on a Dell desktop PC I checked. Even some 8th Generation Intel processors (code-named Kaby Lake) are ineligible. It appears that any device running on an Intel 7th Generation (Skylake) CPU or earlier will also trigger that compatibility check. Update: Here, too, Microsoft has edited the pages at its Microsoft Docs site (normally the authoritative page for documentation) and removed all references to CPU Generation and Hard Floors and Soft Floors. Frustratingly, the documentation simply says this is defined by 'CPU Generation,' without going into any additional details.

Yes, there's also a Soft Floor requirement for CPU. If the compatibility checker still insists that you can't run Windows 11, and you've confirmed that the TPM isn't the sticking point, the problem might be a CPU that Windows 11 considers too old.

Windows 11 compatibility checker tool