• Analysis from Lansweeper reveals 42.74 percent of business workstations meet the Windows 11 hardware requirements.
• Only 2.35 percent of physical servers support TPM 2.0
• Microsoft will no longer support Windows 10 from 14th October 2025, meaning Windows 11 uptake needs to improve dramatically.

Upgrading to Windows 11 is more of a nightmare than anybody could have imagined and if Microsoft stays the course, many enterprises that run Windows may have to look for alternatives.

Last week IT asset management firm Lansweeper published analysis of 30 million Windows devices from 60 000 organisations. The analysis was conducted to determine how many workstations met Microsoft’s stringent hardware requirements for Windows 11. The firm found that 42.74 percent of workstations didn’t meet Microsoft’s CPU, RAM or TPM (Trusted Platform Module) requirements for the operating system.

“Specifically, only 57.26 percent of CPUs for workstations tested met the system requirements for upgrading to Windows 11, while 42.74 percent did not. And while the majority passed the RAM test (92.85 percent), about 65 percent of the workstation TPMs tested met the requirements, while over 15 percent failed and 20 percent was not TPM compatible or did not have it enabled,” Lansweeper reports.

The news becomes even more grim when looking at virtual workstations where only 1.33 percent have TPM 2.0 enabled. When looking at RAM only 67.1 percent meet the requirement and only 55.7 percent have a compatible CPU.

On physical servers, only 2.35 percent had TPM 2.0 enabled and virtual servers do not support TPM.

Looking at a snapshot of 10 million Windows PCs used by businesses and regular people, Microsoft should be concerned. Just under 2.5 percent of businesses have adopted Windows 11 while little over 3.2 percent of consumers have started using the operating system.

We are now over a year into release and Microsoft isn’t revealing just how popular Windows 11 is. Two months into its release, Windows 10 reportedly boasted 100 million installations but Windows 11 hasn’t inspired the same sort of uptake.

Earlier this year Microsoft boasted that it had 1.4 billion installations of Windows 10 and Windows 11. Looking at data from Stat Counter for January 2022 reveals that Windows 11 made up 2.6 percent of all Windows installations so that figure isn’t all that impressive, especially when Windows 7, an operating system that is no longer supported, has more installations.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Windows Version Market Share.

This is going to become a problem not only for Microsoft but the majority of Windows users, very soon. That’s because Windows 10’s end of life is earmarked for 14th October 2025 and if Microsoft can’t get folks to switch fast enough, that could prove problematic come 2025.

Something has to change here. Microsoft’s insistence that users upgrade is not working and should 2025 arrive, we very much doubt the average user will care about a lack of updates, even if they are important.

The next year in Windows 11’s life is going to be rather interesting.