How to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware?

Microsoft requires you to have a supported CPU (Intel 8th Gen or later, AMD Ryzen/Athlon 3rd Gen or later), UEFI BIOS with secure boot and a TPM chip to upgrade to Windows 11. You can bypass this by upgrading your system using the setup.exe in the Windows installation disk folder and forcing it to use the Windows 11 Server product.

Download Windows 11 ISO or use a bootable USB.

Download your language specific ISO from the official Microsoft website or using MSDL. After the download is finished, you can mount the ISO by double clicking on it.

If you choose to use a bootable USB (made using Rufus or Microsoft Media Creation Tool), you can now plug-in your USB stick.

Start setup using CMD.

First you should open CMD and navigate to the ISO or Installation Media. You can do this as folowing:

1. Open File Explorer and navigate to the mounted ISO or your bootable installation media.
2. Click on the top address bar, so the text/path is highlighted.
3. Type cmd and press enter.

CMD will open and the correct drive letter should be loaded.

Alternativly, if you want to do it the manual way, do the following:

1. Open CMD/Powershell/Terminal.
2. Type cd X:, where 'X' is your drive letter.

Now you can start the Windows 11 setup using the following command:

setup.exe /Product Server

Now the Windows setup will launch, you'll notice that it says that Windows 11 Server will be installed, after the upgrade the version you had on Windows 10 will be installed and activated.

You can continue with the setup process as you normally would.