In October last year, we covered a very simple bypass trick that involved just a single command when running the Windows 11 Setup. While this passthrough got popular in the tech community during this time as a result of the media coverage from Neowin as well as others, it was actually something even older.
To use this, all a user had to do was add “/product server” when running the setup, and Windows would just skip the hardware requirements check entirely.
As it turns out, Microsoft has blocked this bypass method on the latest Canary build 27686 as discovered by X user and tech enthusiast Bob Pony. When trying to use the Server trick now, the hardware requirements check is not bypassed.
↫ Sayan Sen
It’s such an own goal to limit Windows 11 as much as Microsoft is doing. Windows 11 runs pretty much identically, performance-wise, to Windows 10 on the same hardware, so there’s no reason other than to enable the various security features through TPMs and the like. The end result is that people simply aren’t upgrading to Windows 11 – not only because Windows 10 is working just fine for them, but also because even if they want to upgrade, they often can’t. Most people don’t just buy a brand new PC because a new version of Windows happens to be available.
There’s been a variety of tricks and methods to circumvent the various minimum specifications checks Microsoft added to the regular consumer versions of Windows, and much like with the activation systems of yore, Microsoft is now engaging in a game of whack-a-mole where as soon as it kills on method, ten more pop up to take its place. There’s a whole cottage industry of methods, tools, registry edits, and much more, spread out across the most untrustworthy-looking content farms you can find on the web, which all could’ve been avoided if Microsoft just offered consumers the choice of disabling these restrictions, accompanied by a disclaimer.
So Microsoft is now in the unfortunate situation where most of its Windows users are still using Windows 10, yet the end of Windows 10’s support is coming up next year. Either Microsoft extends this date by at least another five years to catch the wave of ‘natural’ PC upgrades to a point where Windows 10 is a minority, or it’s going to have to loosen some of the restrictions to give more people the ability to upgrade. If they don’t, they’re going to be in a world of hurt with security issues and 0-days affecting the vast majority of Windows users.