AS YOU DON’T live under a rock, you’ll know we are to be graced with Windows 11 shortly. And as this is a Microsoft launch, you know that somewhere something didn’t go quite to plan. The shiny new OS may be just the job, but the hardware specifications you need to run it haven’t exactly been easy to follow, causing headaches and anger as it appeared that a lot of relatively new rigs weren’t going to make the cut.
The first thing that caught people’s eye was the requirement for TPM 2.0. What is TPM? It’s a Trusted Platform Module, a chip (or integrated into the chipset or firmware) used to authenticate hardware devices. It includes a unique security key, and can generate encryption keys among other things. The Department of Defense won’t buy anything without one. On home PCs, it’s used by Office 365 and Defender, among others. TPM 1.2 has been around since 2011, a standard feature of OEM systems since 2016, and built into most motherboards since 2015, although it might not be enabled by default.