Windows 11 Runs With TPM Disabled

Windows Insider Programme

On Monday I upgraded one of my PCs with a new motherboard, Ryzen 2600X, 32GB of RAM and a 500GB NVMe, on which I installed Windows 10 Pro using a Windows 7 key to activate it — yes, you can still do that! Anyway, curious to see what the Windows 11 fuss was all about, I joined the Windows Insider Programme, which you can do by simply going to Settings> Update & Security.

I knew that TPM wasn’t enabled in my motherboard’s UEFI, which is why I was receiving messages that my system didn’t meet the minimum requirements (yawn!).

TPM On Or Off?

Once enabled and rebooted, I headed back to Update and Security, hit search for updates, accepted the upgrade to Windows 11, hit restart, and went off to make a coffee. This took less than five minutes and on my return, Windows 11’s new Mac look greeted me and I started to poke around for a few minutes. Not long after, I decided to do a cold boot just to check that everything worked as it should, but was then met by a Windows Recovery error that had no bearing whatsoever on my recent activity.

Windows Recovery Is A Bad Joke!

In true Windows Recovery fashion, none of the options available actually worked — Windows Recovery is just a bad joke as far as I’m concerned — except for Esc for UEFI Firmware Settings. Returning to UEFI, I reset everything to default and Windows booted normally but of course, I didn’t know which UEFI setting had corrected the issue. I had also disconnected every other drive except for the NVMe, so it couldn’t have been a hardware problem. In the end, I played with the settings and discovered that with TPM enabled, Windows 11 simply would not boot, so I disabled it, with Windows 11 booting normally and am using it as I type this. This struck me as most odd since TPM is supposed to be a requirement for Windows 11 and one has to ask whether this feature is checked by Windows during the actual boot process. My only conclusion to that question would be a big fat, no. But fear not, I will still receive updates and preview builds from the Insider Programme and frankly, I couldn’t give a monkey’s about TPM anyway because most of us have survived without it for donkey’s years, so will continue to play with Windows 11 on this secondary rig just to see how it performs.

Conclusion

Clearly, I’m running a preview version of Windows 11 so I should expect glitches and yes, I am prepared for that. However, this does seem to be a total contradiction of the minimum system requirements for the new OS in that you will apparently need TPM enabled to install Windows 11, but not to actually run it.

In fact, seeing as I’m an inveterate fiddler, I may well grab a Windows 11 ISO and clean install it without TPM enabled just to see what happens, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: I’ve since discovered that the Windows 11 Dev Preview for Insiders does not require TPM to be enabled. Apparently, Microsoft waived that particular requirement for this build.

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