Annoying desktop watermark appears for users of unsupported Windows 11 PCs

Windows 11 has more stringent system requirements than any previous version of Windows and is dropping support for a wide range of PCs until 2018 in the name of improving the security baseline of the Windows platform. You can bypass these requirements to install Windows 11 on unsupported PCs with relative ease, but Microsoft added warnings to its installer and threatened to withhold updates for those systems. So far, the company has not carried out this threat. But using Windows 11 on those somewhat older PCs is about to get even more annoying.

The new Windows 11 update adds a “System requirements not met”watermark to the desktop of unsupported PCs, similar to the watermark you might see if you were running an early beta or non-activated version of Windows. The screenshot below shows a PC that supports TPM 2.0 and secure boot but uses an unsupported 6th generation Intel Core CPU.

This message is expected to appear if your computer does not meet one or more of the basic operating system security requirements: a supported Intel, AMD, or ARM processor ; secure boot support; TPM 2.0 hardware or firmware. This means that it may also appear to PC users who are fully compliant with Windows 11 but who have Secure Boot or their TPM disabled, either by accident or by design (many motherboard BIOSes have shipped with one or both disabled by default for a period of many years), although recent updates have changed these settings).

The new version of Windows 11 (build number 22000.588) is currently in the Windows Insider Release Preview channel, reserved for updates that will be available to everyone in a few days or weeks. This means that most people with unsupported hardware will see this message sooner rather than later, provided they update their computers.

Similar reports were found in beta builds of Windows 11 in early February, suggesting that Microsoft has been considering these changes for some time now. For now, the watermark does not affect functionality and these Windows 11 PCs will continue to work as they did before. The watermark can be disabled via a registry edit , if that’s convenient for you. But it’s proof that Microsoft can continue to distinguish between supported and unsupported PCs after you’ve installed the operating system, and that the company can use that distinction to refuse updates or disable certain Windows features in the future.