Earlier this month Neowin noticed that Microsoft had begun releasing the KB5001716 update, one which it periodically releases to nudge users to jump from a previous Windows version to a newer one. While typically the update was known to quietly download and install in the background, following our report, Microsoft clarified that this was no longer the case.
However, it may have still triggered a Windows 11 feature update, even on systems that do not officially support the upgrade. According to a report from German news blog Borncity, Microsoft seemingly offered Windows 11 on a PC that does not meet the requirements. A reader of the blog notes that their system had TPM disabled in order to avoid any forced in-place upgrade, and despite that, their Windows 10 PC got the update offer to Windows 11.
The user has the Lenovo IdeaPad S145-15IWL [81MV014QGE] laptop, a notebook that is powered by an Intel 8th Gen i5 processor, and is officially supported by Microsoft for Windows 11. The company did recently update the system requirements guidance for CPUs, but that is mainly for its new Windows 11 24H2 AI PCs, and as such, the TPM eligibility criterion remains unchanged.
The report also speculates that perhaps there may be some other BIOS setting that could be in play here or whether this could be a bug in the feature update delivery.
Microsoft has time and again cited that the requirement of TPM on Windows 11 is to benefit users in several different ways, which is why it has been labeled last year as a "non negotiable standard" by the Redmond company.
Also interesting is that this is not the first time that Microsoft has offered Windows 11 on a Windows 10 PC that does not officially fulfill the criteria; something similar happened last year too when a long time active Neowin forum member warwagon was able to perform the upgrade on an unsupported machine.
Source: Borncity