After confirming how easy it is to install Windows 11 on unsupported PCs, many users on the Web have decided to run their own tests under very strange configurations. One that went viral almost immediately is that of Twitter user “Carlos_SM1995”, who discovered that the Intel Pentium 4 661 from 2006 appears as “approved” by Microsoft's official tool. Of course, the story doesn't end there, and we already have a video with Windows 11 running on that hardware...
The Pentium 4 processor family was not Intel's happiest development, but there are still an impressive number of chips out there, and if you want to experiment with retro hardware without spending too much, they are probably your best option. Some users have done some pretty crazy things with a Pentium 4... and one of the most recent involves Windows 11.
Yes, Microsoft explained Windows 11's technical requirements ad nauseam, although in practice they have proven to be more optional than anything else. In fact, everything you need to bypass TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot is to create an image with the new Rufus, or apply a couple of Registry tweaks during installation. But what is the relationship between Windows 11 and a Pentium 4? According to the official compatibility tool, that family of processors is perfectly compatible...
Windows 11 on a 2006 Pentium 4
The Twitter user “Carlos_SM1995” verified that the tool correctly reports the absence of both TPM and Secure Boot, but the processor receives a green mark. It is an Intel Pentium 4 661, the big brother of the 65 nm Cedar Mill chips, with a 3.6 GHz clock and Hyper-Threading support. Microsoft's tool doesn't exactly know what to do with this chip, as it indicates the presence of a single physical core (which should be an automatic fail), but it approves it anyway.
Why does it make this mistake? Apparently, none of the Intel processors belonging to “family 15” were included in the list of unsupported hardware. Maybe Microsoft thought they were too old to bother, but there is always someone willing to do weird experiments combining old hardware and modern operating systems. In the past we have seen Windows XP on a Pentium Overdrive configured to 8 MHz, and a current Linux kernel on a 486.
Honestly, I expected Windows 11 on a 2006 Pentium 4 to have the same performance as a PowerPoint presentation, but the video published by Carlos_SM1995 shows that it works... quite well? Yes, almost everything puts the processor at 100 percent and I don't want to imagine what it must be like installing updates, however, I thought it would be even worse.
