My Take on Microsoft’s Windows 11 Hot Mess

For the past few days, Microsoft has been taking a lot of flak about Windows 11 only supporting PCs made in the past few years. That is a stupid decision, because a lot of five to six year-old PCs are fast enough to run it just fine. But even if Microsoft does go back and enable Windows 11 to work on older PCs, there are a bunch of security requirements that they have also imposed. And that creates a whole bunch of new problems.

So what happened when I tried to upgrade?

I was curious whether Windows 11 would run my Ryzen 5000-series PC that I built about 6 months ago using mostly new parts — the only things I reused were my graphics card and my SSD. So yesterday I downloaded Microsoft’s compatibility checker to see whether I could install Windows 11. The tool told me that my PC wasn’t compatible because it didn’t have secure booting enabled. I figured I would just enable that in my system configuration menu (LOL).

I went into the UEFI setup menu, which is the thing you get to when you push the F2 key when your PC is booting, and enabled TPM (Trusted Platform Module), which I had read about as being one of the major issues preventing Windows 11 compatibility. You may see some acronyms that you don’t recognize in this post. What they mean isn’t really important — you should just keep in mind…