Before you buy Windows 11: a five-minute check of your PC

Windows 11 turned away plenty of perfectly good computers when it launched, mostly over security hardware their owners had never heard of. So before you buy anything, take five minutes to make sure yours will get along with it.

The easy way

Microsoft has a free tool called PC Health Check. Download it from Microsoft's website, click "Check now", and it tells you whether your PC qualifies and, if not, what's holding it back. If you get a green light, you're done. Close this article and enjoy your day.

The minimum requirements

Those are the minimums, and "runs" isn't the same as "runs nicely". For everyday comfort, 8 GB of memory and an SSD make a far bigger difference than the numbers above suggest.

If the check fails on TPM or Secure Boot

Don't give up yet. This is the most common failure, and it's often just a setting. Many PCs have the hardware switched off out of the box.

1. Press Windows + R, type tpm.msc and press Enter. This shows whether a TPM is available and which version.
2. If it isn't found, restart and open your BIOS or UEFI settings. The key is usually F2, Del or F10, shown briefly at startup.
3. Look for a setting called TPM, PTT (on Intel) or fTPM (on AMD), and switch it on. Secure Boot is normally nearby.
4. Save, restart, and run PC Health Check again.

If it still doesn't qualify

Then your processor is probably too old, and no setting will change that. We'd rather you found that out now than after paying. Your options are upgrading the machine or sticking with Windows 10 for a while, and we've written about what that really means now that support has ended.

One more thing: 64-bit only

Windows 11 has no 32-bit version. If your PC is old enough to be running 32-bit Windows, it won't make the jump.

All clear? Have a look at our Windows licenses, or read Home or Pro if you haven't decided yet.