Installed Windows 11 on my daily driver, which is "incompatible" hardware

[britechguy]

After a recent conversation here in another topic, I decided to bite the bullet and do an in-place upgrade to Windows 11 on the HP laptop I'm typing from that has an AMD A12-9600P APU. It met all the Windows 11 requirements except for the CPU, and since I'm perfectly capable of going back to Windows 10 and restoring files that have been updated/created after the jump, I thought why not.

It's working without a hitch so far, and typical Windows Updates are applying as they always have. I will post any issues I encounter, and what happens when 23H2 hits the streets.

 

[phaZed]

Hey,

I actually just hit my first "incompatible" hardware - actual. Custom built Asus P8Z77M board with a Intel i5-3570K.

Customer did the Win 11 install and it was all FUBAR from there. The event logs fill up with "'disk' - has a bad block", messages and the performance is absolutely horrible - 30 second start menu, constant hitching and stuttering. Got him back on Windows 10 and everything is fine. Looks like the SATA controller driver on 11 is screwy, to me.

 

[britechguy]

Whenever "custom built" is involved, there are all sorts of potential pitfalls that are not characteristic of off-the-shelf machines from major makers. I've got a SATA SSD as the system drive with zero problems. Smooth as silk.

But this is a great data point to have. Whenever something like this is being undertaken, every cautionary tale is of great value.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Hey,

I actually just hit my first "incompatible" hardware - actual. Custom built Asus P8Z77M board with a Intel i5-3570K.

Customer did the Win 11 install and it was all FUBAR from there. The event logs fill up with "'disk' - has a bad block", messages and the performance is absolutely horrible - 30 second start menu, constant hitching and stuttering. Got him back on Windows 10 and everything is fine. Looks like the SATA controller driver on 11 is screwy, to me.

Did you try drivers from ASUS?

 

[nlinecomputers]

3rd gen is pushing it even for Windows 10.

 

[phaZed]

Did you try drivers from ASUS?

Ya, their latest drivers for that board are beta and old.. and not WHQL. I ended up trying a few driver combo's with Snappy Driver Installer Origin with not much change.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Ya, their latest drivers for that board are beta and old.. and not WHQL. I ended up trying a few driver combo's with Snappy Driver Installer Origin with not much change.

3rd gen is pushing it even for Windows 10.

Like I said.

 

[Diggs]

3rd gen is pushing it even for Windows 10.

I'm not sure I understand why? I have some Core 2 Duo machines out there (with SSDs) that were supposed to be Pandora machines and people have adopted them as their primary machines and love them compared to their new (hard drive powered) but slow i3/i5 laptops.

 

[nlinecomputers]

I'm not sure I understand why? I have some Core 2 Duo machines out there (with SSDs) that were supposed to be Pandora machines and people have adopted them as their primary machines and love them compared to their new (hard drive powered) but slow i3/i5 laptops.

Good for you. Not all 3rd gen devices have drivers. The OP mentions that the only Windows 10 drivers available for use are beta drivers.

 

[britechguy]

I can definitely say that I've put Windows 10 on a number of machines that "shouldn't" be able to run it, and it did just fine.

The only two issues, if you can call them that, so far that I've had is that Edge Dev seems to not want to update to its latest version, so I'm waiting for the next one to see if that goes away, and Windows Security was giving me a warning that some sort of security feature that's supposed to prevent code injection was not on, and after checking that virtualization was already enabled on my machine, I pretty much assume that whatever drivers it is that it needs don't exist, so I just permanently dismissed that warning.

Otherwise the last two days of use have been very smooth and without incident. There are a number of things about the Windows 11 UI that I really do like and prefer, as well as a couple that I don't. But isn't that always the way. And for the "I don't" category, utilities like WinAero Tweaker allow me to set those back to more "Windows 10 and earlier-like" if I so choose.

I'm finding that I like the centralized location of the taskbar, and really thought that I would not. And the rounded corners of the windows are pleasing to me as well.

 

[sapphirescales]

Not all 3rd gen devices have drivers.

Literally never seen this. Just because a manufacturer doesn't list "Windows 10" in the list of supported operating systems doesn't mean you can't install the Windows 8 or heck, even the Windows 7 driver. Windows 10 even comes with a 32 bit version so you can install it on absolutely ANCIENT hardware. The only hardware that's going to have a problem is if it's so old that the latest OS it officially supports is Windows XP. Even Windows Vista drivers work on Windows 10. So you don't want to be installing Windows 10 on a Dell Dimension 2400 from 2003 with a socket 478 Pentium 4 processor. Windows XP drivers don't usually work in Windows 10.

Of course, another issue is if the manufacturer never created 64 bit drivers for certain components and you're trying to use Windows 10 x64. It's really annoying when you install Windows 10 x64 and every driver installs except one and then you realize it's because the manufacturer never wrote 64 bit drivers for that one component. Thankfully this usually only happens on Core 2 era machines. Maybe 1st gen. I don't know. I don't deal with anything older than 8th gen in my shop anymore. Though I personally still use an old Acer laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor. I don't know if I'm going to upgrade it to Windows 11 or not. It has 64 bit drivers for everything so it should work.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've installed W11 on three different "incompatible" machines. One VM, one 12 year old HP business desktop and on Lenovo T430. No problems on any of them though my daily Winderz driver is still 10. But that because it's usually used in NOC's, MDF's etc and no one else wants W11.

 

[NviGate Systems]

Maybe I'll try on my Gen 4 Haswell Lenovo M73.

 

[britechguy]

Just because a manufacturer doesn't list "Windows 10" in the list of supported operating systems doesn't mean you can't install the Windows 8 or heck, even the Windows 7 driver.

This is what I used to do, routinely, for years. Just because a driver wasn't created specifically for Windows 10 did not mean it was not perfectly compatible with and functional under Windows 10.

Most times I could find a Windows 8 era driver, but occasionally had to reach back to Windows 7.

There was one, and only one, thing I could never locate a driver for that worked under Windows 10, and that was an Elon touchpad that was used in a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop. And apparently I was not alone. I searched for several years, just for my amusement, and during my research I encountered a lot of people who'd gone down the same road and never found their "way to Rome," either.

I only had one Windows 7 era machine that would not upgrade to Windows 10, and that was an ASUS laptop that I still have. Windows 10 refused to install and told me, explicitly, that it wouldn't install, and why. Those details are long gone in the mists of memory.

 

[NviGate Systems]

Same here. Only glitch will be if the Windows 7 drivers aren't signed, which back in the day was totally ok.

 

[britechguy]

A few more details/updates:

The complaint I'm getting from Windows Security on both this laptop and the other one I upgraded from 10 to 11 (both with AMD APUs, but of different generations) is this:

I'm just dismissing it since it appears that neither one of these APUs supports virtualization in a way that Windows needs it to be for this function to work. Didn't have it under Win10, so not a big deal.

Here's a shot of the "What to keep" dialog when I was installing Windows 11 on the first machine, where I did NOT have the registry hack in place but was using a Rufus created bootable drive (and running directly from it, firing it off under Windows 10):


On this machine, where I did do that registry hack, I got a dialog that I had not received on the machine that didn't have it that warned me that this was hardware that was not fully compliant with Windows 11 minimum specs and trying to ward me off of upgrading. I suspect that since Microsoft is the one that distributed that registry hack this is a built-in feature during Windows 11 install triggered from within Windows 10 if that key is present.

Today I had my first issue with Windows 11, but since it occurred after I was making some changes with WinAero Tweaker I can't say whether or not that might have been a factor. That being said, web searching shows that others have encountered it, too. The search button stopped working and so did the Windows Key (virtual and physical). If the search button was activated the search window would pop up, but with nothing on it, and you could not type in the search box. It would then keep disappearing and reappearing sometimes with a solid background and sometimes transparent, but you could never interact with it. Hitting the Windows Key and immediately typing a search wouldn't work, either. I tried a DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth, which found no issues and did not fix the problem. One web solution on this answers.microsoft.com page suggested following up with running, DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /startcomponentcleanup. This did remedy the problem.

I decided to run an SFC /SCANNOW afterward, just for good measure, and it's been runnig for several hours now. I've never had SFC proceed quite this slowly, but it's still showing increasing percentages, at a glacial pace, so I'm going to let it finish. I don't expect it will find anything, though.

 

[britechguy]

Just looked at CBS.log, and the date-time stamp on it is 12:57 PM today, so SFC /SCANNOW has been running for 5.5 hours now and is at 65% complete.

Addendum: Finished at 8:47 PM, and did find several files to fix. From CBS.log:
----
2023-01-08 20:45:40, Info DEPLOY [Pnp] Corrupt file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\BthA2dp.sys
2023-01-08 20:45:40, Info DEPLOY [Pnp] Repaired file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\BthA2dp.sys
2023-01-08 20:45:40, Info DEPLOY [Pnp] Corrupt file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\BthHfEnum.sys
2023-01-08 20:45:40, Info DEPLOY [Pnp] Repaired file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\BthHfEnum.sys
2023-01-08 20:45:40, Info DEPLOY [Pnp] Corrupt file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\bthmodem.sys
2023-01-08 20:45:40, Info DEPLOY [Pnp] Repaired file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\bthmodem.sys
2023-01-08 20:47:42, Info CBS Trusted Installer is shutting down because: SHUTDOWN_REASON_AUTOSTOP
----

 

[GTP]

You have the patience of Jobe.
I would have just restarted the PC and run it again so it completed in 5 minutes.

 

[britechguy]

You have the patience of Jobe.

Sometimes. I was just in no rush today, and was curious to see just how long this would take.

Seven and three-quarter hours is a record. But I've never had any SFC complete in 5 minutes, either.

 

[GTP]

Clean and well maintained systems complete an SFC in 5 mins or less, or that's been my experience.
I've never had a PC, mine or clients, take longer than that.