With Windows 10’s incoming end-of-support, I started to study the destiny of some of my old PCs.
A good idea might be to run the MS PC Health Check for a detailed view of the situation.

Without a maintained OS, I might consider installing some linux distribution, or even dismiss the asset.

My preferred solution would be to find a way to upgrade to W11 with no hack, even though they have an unsupported CPU.

My investigations took me to several warnings that this hardware will not be supported in any way by MS,… but, in my case, ‘better bad than dead’ rules.

This seems to be possible with the latest W11 24H2 image.

The Solution

After having verified the available disk space (about 20-25 Gb), and other general requirements (like backups, …) for a usual Windows upgrade process, you have to:

• download the latest W11 Media Creation Tool (search it or get it from here),
• start it,
• download the suggested media for the upgrading PC and put it on a USB pen drive (minimum 8Gb),
• open a Command Prompt with administrative access rights,
• type the following command line:

<USB pen drive>:\sources\setupprep.exe /product server

The setup procedure will start proposing all the usual options (I choose to keep apps and data) with the correct OS edition (home, professional, …).

After these prompts, the process will start the long process of the system upgrade (40-60 minutes).  Be patient and do not interrupt the process manually.

Once completed, I strongly suggest the additional steps below:

• turn on System Protection (for unknown reasons it is always disabled after the upgrade),
• run Windows Update to apply everything popping up (even the optional ones in most cases),
• run MS Store and update everything

This procedure allowed me, to upgrade a 10-year-old notebook with the latest Windows 11.

It is also possible that this process might also work on PC without the needed TPM, … but actually, I don’t have the chance to verify it.