Last week I received an email from the Microsoft insiders team. Advising me to install Windows 10 as my hardware could not run Windows 11. A few months ago, I had installed Windows 11 on an Oracle virtual Box. You can read my article on installing Windows 11 Dev if you are interested.
That email piqued my curiosity, and I decided to investigate it further. I then decided to read the Windows 11 blog post linked to the email I received.
The Windows 11 Insider Blog post
The blog post was titled Preparing for insider preview builds of Windows 11. The blog post stated that computer hardware had changed a lot over six years since the release of Windows 10. Due to the advancement in computer hardware. The system requirements for Windows 11 has been updated.
The blog post then went on to say that while Microsoft would advise against using Windows 11 if your hardware didn’t meet the system requirements. Anyone who installed the insider build of Windows 11 before 24 Jube will still be able to install Windows 11 updates as part of the insider program until the commercial release of Windows 11.
After reading the post and writing some notes in this article, I checked out the Windows 11 system requirements link.
Comparing system requirements to my virtual machine settings
With Windows 11 system requirements page open on my web browser. I opened the Virtual machine in VirtualBox and took a look at the information tab. The virtual machine had 8Gb of Ram, the CPU had two cores, and the maximum size of the hard drive was 50Gb. According to the system requirements, Windows 11 requires 64Gb of storage capacity.
It looks like the storage capacity I had set aside enough storage for the virtual machine when I had initially installed Windows 11 was now too low. Suggesting that Microsoft had initially planned to ship Windows 11 with lower system requirements and have only recently decided to increase the requirements for Windows 11.
Conclusion
I’m not going to criticise Microsoft for increasing the system requirements for Windows 11. The operating system is currently undergoing beta testing within the insider program. It is quite likely that Microsoft had detected a significant issue with Windows 11 running on hardware with lower system specifications. So Microsoft has decided to increase the system requirements.
From what I have seen of the system requirements, they don’t look to be too demanding. What are your thoughts on the Windows 11 system requirements?