With just a little more than a year left before Windows 10 hits its end-of-life, Microsoft has been busy encouraging people to upgrade to Windows 11. One of the hurdles with getting PCs upgraded to Windows 11, though, are the hardware requirements — and now they’re cracked down on harder. A recent beta build of Windows 11 has patched the well-used “setup.exe /product server” workaround that allowed you to completely bypass the system requirements check and run Windows 11 on a non-compliant machine — in other words, a machine without TPM 2.0. The patch was noticed by X (formerly Twitter) user Bob Pony, and while it’s only in an Insider build at the moment, it will likely be fully rolled out sometime soon. The recently released Windows 11 Insider Build 27686 (Dilithium) has patched the "setup.exe /product server" workaround for bypassing the system requirements check. 😢 pic.twitter.com/G9Q1v3O1uU — Bob Pony (@TheBobPony) August 15, 2024 The little TPM (Trusted Platform Module) microchip deals with encryption-related tasks and has become a common security standard in recent years. Its inclusion in the Windows 11 system requirements isn’t a problem for most people since just about any PC bought within the last eight years will meet the TPM 2.0 standard. However, it has been a thorn in the side for those with older or custom-made PCs that easily meet every other requirement. Over the past few years, there have been multiple ways to get Windows 11 running on such machines, but Microsoft has been slowly but surely cutting them off one by one. This latest patch could prove troublesome for a lot of people since it’s such a simple and commonly used workaround — just one extra argument added to the setup execute file and you’re set. If you find your machine affected whenever this goes live, you have a few options, but they all involve some level of effort or cost.
You can find another workaround — it will probably be more complicated but there’s sure to be plenty of walkthroughs online. You could also upgrade your machine to meet the requirements — more information on that here. You could even try switching to Linux, or just going back to Windows 10 for now. The last option is likely the easiest, and you’d just be joining the many people who never upgraded to Windows 11 in the first place precisely because of the TPM requirement. Microsoft hasn’t made any mention of this patch yet and we don’t know when it might come to a normal Windows update, but we’ll keep you updated.
As AI strides on, it inevitably finds its way onto our personal devices, with tech giants announcing new features that rely on accessing our private information and media to serve us better. While some might find this useful, others are bound to find it creepy, and one such feature is Microsoft’s controversial AI Recall, which takes screenshots of everything you do on a Copilot+ PC so it’s easier to trace back your steps and find something specific later. After being announced last year, and then witnessing a few delays, Recall is finally rolling out to a broader group of Windows 11. Microsoft recently announced Recall is coming to Windows 11 with the latest Release channel update with build 26100.3902 (KB5055627). The feature’s availability in the Windows 11 Release Preview channel, which succeeds the Beta channel in the Windows Insider program, means it is in the initial phases of being available to a wider audience of folks who own Copilot+ PC. This category of PCs currently includes a whole wide range of laptops with specialized hardware in the form of a neural processing unit (NPU) dedicatedly for running AI tasks, though we might see desktops joining the club soon.
Windows 11 and 10 users have reported a mysterious ‘inetpub’ folder after installing Microsoft’s April 2025 updates, as Bleeping Computer reports. Although the folder is typically associated with the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server, it’s now appearing on systems without it installed. Microsoft has confirmed that the behavior is intentional but has not fully explained why. The unexpected folder is empty, and you can find it in the root of the C: drive even if you don’t have IIS installed. If you had IIS installed (web server platform by Microsoft), it would use the inetpub folder to save logs, website content, and server-related files. So, it’s weird you have one without the other after installing Windows 11 KB5055523 update or Windows 10 KB5055518. The SYSTEM account owns the new inetpub folder, meaning an elevated process made it.
