Tricks for installing Windows 11 will no longer work!

Windows 11 24H2 is the next major update that Microsoft will release later this year, and it could finally put an end to the practice of running Windows unofficially on super old PCs. The software giant appears to be in the process of updating the minimum hardware requirements. This makes the POPCNT (stands for Population Count) feature of the CPU necessary to be able to boot Windows 11 24H2. In other words, the tricks for installing Windows 11 on older PCs will no longer work.

Tricks for installing Windows 11 will no longer work!

All the best modern CPUs support POPCNT, so if you recently bought a new PC, that won’t stop you from booting the next version of Windows. Instead, people who still have PCs that are more than fifteen years old will be affected by this change. Why fifteen years? Well, the POPCNT instruction was first introduced by Intel in the processors Core i7 based on Nehalem, launched in 2008 as mentioned by XDA. If you have PCs older than that, you’re out of luck.

Bob Pony’s post on Platform X indicates that Microsoft quietly made POPCNT a requirement to run Windows 11 last year. The change first arrived with Windows 11 Insider Preview build 25905. It consists of several system files that require CPUs capable of executing POPCNT instructions. For example, USB XHCI drivers, which are responsible for managing USB 3.0 and later, now use the features of that instruction.

There are several ways to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, but all these tricks probably won’t be able to help you bypass the CPU POPCNT functionality requirement. Because, unlike times before, not having POPCNT support means that your PCs with unsupported CPUs simply won’t boot.