This week, Microsoft issued a reminder to IT administrators and system administrators regarding the new policy for managed office and enterprise PCs, which now designates feature updates like Windows 11 24H2 as “optional.”This update follows the company’s announcement of detailed information about the upcoming 2024 update and the LTSC version.
On the home user front, individuals with unsupported hardware are eager to try the latest version of Windows. One popular tool they are using for this purpose is Rufus.
However, several users have reported issues with performing an in-place upgrade to Windows 11 24H2, as the bypass of system requirements is failing. Pete Batard, the developer of Rufus, acknowledged this problem and shared a batch script that addresses the issue. He also mentioned that a future version of Rufus will incorporate this script directly.
Bastard commented:
To perform in-place upgrades, you need to execute the following commands from an elevated command prompt before launching
setup.exe
.
reg.exe delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\CompatMarkers"/f 2>NUL
reg.exe delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Shared"/f 2>NUL
reg.exe delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\TargetVersionUpgradeExperienceIndicators"/f 2>NUL
reg.exe add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\HwReqChk"/f /v HwReqChkVars /t REG_MULTI_SZ /s, /d "SQ_SecureBootCapable=TRUE,SQ_SecureBootEnabled=TRUE,SQ_TpmVersion=2,SQ_RamMB=8192,"
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup"/f /v AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU /t REG_DWORD /d 1This batch script will be included in the created media in an upcoming version of Rufus.
…
Running this script will resolve the new restrictions for in-place upgrades, provided you manually execute a batch script placed in the same directory as
setup.exe
that contains the registry commands mentioned above.For clean installations, this workaround will not impact functionality, since there haven’t been any issues found in the clean install bypasses during testing. Thus, if a clean install of 24H2 fails with Rufus 4.5, it will also fail with Rufus 4.6.
In addition to these updates, the Rufus developer expressed frustration regarding users with very old systems complaining about their PCs being unable to meet the requirements even after using this script. He stated:
Please move discussions about which CPUs are capable of running Windows 11 to another forum, or I will begin to delete posts, as this thread is becoming excessively lengthy. Such discussions are completely off-topic.
For users unaware, Windows 11 24H2 is only compatible with processors that support PopCnt and SSE4.2, meaning that no bypass method, application, or software can assist users with extremely outdated hardware. Those users may continue to utilize Windows 11 23H2 instead.
Leave a Reply