Bypass Product Key Windows 11

[Patrizia Leones]

Ihave a Dell XPS 13 laptop bought in 2016. It comes with Intel Core i5-5200U, 4GB RAM and 128 SSD. When I am trying to install Windows 11 from a USB drive on this laptop, an error pops up and says this pc can't run Windows 11. Is there any way to skip this and bypass windows 11 system requirements during installation?

This is a test computer and I have a complete backup of important staff. I want to give a try on Windows 11 instead of the old Windows 8.1 on this old laptop. Unfortunately, I don't have enough budget to build a new PC that meets all the system requirements of Windows 11.

[Updates on Mar 18]: For quick reference, I managed to install Windows 11 on my old laptop with the help of WinBootMate app suggested by user Menda380. It has a built-in module to bypass the requirements.

I have stopped using these "tricks" for these reasons, as the performance was greatly reduced. Thus the reasons why the system requirements are not arbitrary, even though the communication about the "why" could have been better. There is lot of rumour about these requirements, still.

Sure thing everyone should use fTPM (in CPU) instead of TPM chips (outside CPU on mainboard).

@Karl-WE Thanks for your tip. In fact, this old laptop is not my working machine. I only started the device a couple of times in one year. Currently, I don't own a Windows 11 machine and just want to test it out. I could love to buy a new Windows 11 laptop if everything went fine on this old device.

Apparently, the CPU and RAM don't meet the Windows 11 system requirements. The CPU should be Intel 8th Gen and RAM should be 8GB or more.

One of the easier methods to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware is to modify the Windows Registry during the installation process. This method involves creating a Windows 11 installation media, booting from it, and then making a registry change before the compatibility check.

@Karl-WE Well, If we all could afford to upgrade PCs every 2-3 years, it would make sense, but we can't. The internet has gone from a fun past time to necessity. Not everyone can afford to upgrade constantly and personally, I don't need a OS to basically force that on me.

I have no doubt that these requirements will benefit for a lot of people, but I like options and I want the option to bypass the requirements because I will take responsibility for my own security. I just updated my 12 year old laptop to 10 from 7 and it ran for years after the lack of support for 7 with no problems. I keep images of the C drive, so if someone hacks it...wipe and reinstall the image with OS.

The main concern is limitations of a web browser over time with an old OS. I still use XP and even win 98SE on really old machines that still work, but are not online for specific software/hardware situations, I'll will still use older machines in win 10 if I have to and cannot easily upgrade to 11. Updates really aren't a major concern for me as it would be for a business, which I certainly agree they should upgrade properly.

I like to gauge my own concerns of security based on my usage which can be totally different from other people. Fortunately, my main machine will be upgraded to 11 as it meets the requirements....other machines I use, maybe not so much, but they still work well and are of use to me.

As for Windows 98SE and XP I can tell you that these can barely use the Internet anyway, even if connected. Still you could be compromised, but due to their common lack of tls 1.2 there is not much to reach online in terms of browsing.

Please update your BIOS. This will usually change all settings required for security and you no longer need tricks. Download the latest Windows 11 23H2 iso from Microsoft and upgrade, keep files and settings.

When using Edge, in Windows security App control enable the additional security features for MS Edge. It's still a Chromium Browser, including all extensions, like Google Chrome, Opera etc but offers better security.

@JamieMuff1 the CPU is not qualified for Windows 11. You can use the workarounds and as it supports SSE 4.2 I hope that your unsupported upgrade will last.

you can join the free Windows Insider Program. Choose Release Preview Channel

This ISO with build 26100 will help you. Make sure vTPM and UEFI Secure Boot is enabled (check in Windows Security > Device Security. Alternatively run "whynotwin11" tool from github. and share the output.

Just dual boot windows 10 and ubuntu for now but honestly you won't REALLY need to upgrade anything or update anything untill windows 12 or whatever the next line is which probably be another 3-4 years ish but Linux is known to be a solid option to keep on old running workhorse computer alive for another year or two, you will lose somethings and unfortunately wine is not free anymore but if your primary use is basic internet use maybe youtube type thing linux is just fine.

P.S. Consider adding a larger SSD into that laptop as well, size limitation even windows itself will easily use 80gigs on average let alone anything you save or do, you can get a decent 500gb ssd these days for 30-40 bucks on amazon.

@gta99 I suspect that's what I will do likely on my older machines currently running 10, or just leave them on 10. I have yet to see a PC blow up over lack of support from MS. You just have to be more aware of what you use it for and realize the limitations, which I am used to in the first place. I use a win 98SE box mainly for a dedicated software/hardware combo, and managed to get a USB stick working for pulling things off it. That's all I need it for. Similar situation for other machines I have, repurposing for other occasional uses. some maybe on a couple times a week. My main PC will go to 11 fine, which is likely the only one I need on 11. I have tried a work around with success on one PC from 10 to 11, so i'll look at that option more seriously next year. The only real concern will be the upgrade of 11 on my main PC be able to network with the 10s, but I suspect that's not much of a concern.

@gta99 @PW175 please do not. When the CPU does not support SSE 4.1 check cpu model in Intel Ark, then it will not boot at all in near future. On top it will be super slow even without the new requirement.

Of course the easy way to bypass all of these checks is to just bypass SETUP.EXE, as I already mentioned. Long live DISM or your deployment tool of choice (MDT, SCCM, Tanium Provision, etc.), none of which use SETUP.EXE to do a bare metal install.

My partner recently got given work laptop and if you try and put in a USB mass storage device you get an error saying it is not allowed. Without having administrator access I assume this is via the group policy All Removable Storage Classes - Deny All Access.

This got me thinking about how to bypass this. Just to clarify, neither of us are interested in bypassing it on the specific work laptop, this is just me thinking about techniques to bypass the GPO in general as an academic exercise. I know there are other methods to transfer files to/from a system that uses this policy, so the question is not about how to transfer files in general, it is specifically about defeating this particular group policy.

My understanding is that the Windows USB host controller constantly scans USB ports to see if something is plugged in. When this happens it passes a request to the device driver to scan the bus and sends a request to the device to identify itself. The USB device has some sort of information about itself (vendor ID, product ID, version, device type, maybe some other things?) that it passes on to the device driver thereby identifying itself as a mass storage device, HID, printer etc.

So the GPO looks for a device which declares itself as a mass storage device and says "you can't access this". Using the work laptop as a case study, you can still plug in webcams, HID devices or a phone (to charge but not as a mass storage device).

EDIT: Just to clarify the last point about alternate approaches - I am looking for possible alternate ideas with regards to using a USB device. Privesc techniques, setting up a simple http server etc are outside the scope of what I'm after.

Unless your device is a printer, it won't work because Windows will treat it as printer, not as an USB drive. You could print the file, and OCR it afterwards. Or you can create a microcontroller that identifies itself as a keyboard, and write a script that reads the files and encodes it in changes the keyboard LEDs (NumLock, CapsLock and Scroll Lock).

You can gain admin privileges and remove the restriction. There are several local privilege escalation attacks on Windows. Keep in mind that this is considered bypassing endpoint protection and can lead to employment termination in some companies.

Changing how a USB device identifies itself is easy, at least with microcontroller-based devices (you may have noticed that phones often have multiple options, such as charge only, mass storage, MTP, and modem; they do this by changing how they identify themselves). However, the OS will attach drivers specific to that particular (claimed) identity. If the device is spoofing its identity, it either needs to implement the protocol of the claimed device, or the driver will report an error.

Even if the driver connects successfully though, it won't be a driver for storage, it'll be a driver for a webcam or keyboard or whatever. The OS won't interact with it as a storage device, because in order to do that it would need to attach a storage driver, and it won't do that unless the device identifies itself as a storage device, and if it did then the policy would prohibit the OS from using it.

There are, of course, other ways to transfer data than via protocols explicitly intended for storage. A device claiming to be a combo printer/scanner could send files to the OS as scanned images, and receive them as printouts; in both cases the user would have to run software (scanner software, or a program that can print whatever file you want to transfer) that tells the OS to interact with the device, though; you couldn't just use Windows Explorer or other file browsers. However, on the device side, you could have firmware (running on the device's microcontroller) that e.g. automatically saves "printouts" as files on the storage that the device does, in fact, have.

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