On top of that, only 45% of the PCs in offices right now can even run Windows 11.

In a bid to make Windows 11 as secure as it can, Microsoft asked for some pretty hefty system requirements… but they may have gone too far. A recent report shows that 55% of the PCs in businesses can’t run Windows 11, as they don’t meet the operating system’s strict hardware demands.

Lansweeper’s Report on Windows 11 Compatibility With Company PCs

The company Lansweeper performed a survey of the PCs businesses use in their offices. The goal was to see how many PCs were compatible with Windows 11’s hardware requirements.

To run Windows 11 properly, a computer needs to meet every single hardware requirement. If even one piece of hardware is incompatible, it doesn’t matter how good the rest is; Microsoft won’t officially support the Windows 11 upgrade.

The Lansweeper report looked at the CPU and RAM of the PCs in “an estimated 30 million Windows devices from 60,000 organizations” and found that only 44.4% of the PCs scanned had a suitable CPU to run Windows 11. That leaves 55.6% of PCs high and dry for Windows 11, even if the rest of the PC’s hardware meets the requirements.

And it turns out that the adoption rate for Windows 11 is a lot worse than that. Only 1.44% of the surveyed PCs ran Windows 11, with the lion’s share going to Windows 10 with 80.34%. This is a clear sign that businesses neither want to buy new PCs with Windows 11 on them nor do they want to upgrade their Windows 10 PCs to Windows 11.

Microsoft’s Big Windows 11 Problem

This report is a worrying sign for Microsoft. If the lack of PCs that meet the hardware requirements weren’t bad enough, the adoption rate within businesses is even worse.

Microsoft had a tough time getting the public to swallow the bitter pill of Windows 11’s system requirements. Windows 11 needs a processor with TPM 2.0 to help boost the operating system’s security, so any processor without it isn’t natively compatible.

Of course, there are ways to install Windows 11 on an older PC and skip the system requirements, but it seems that this backdoor route still isn’t enough to encourage people to take the upgrade. The very fact that only 1.44% of the workstation PCs ran Windows 11 when 44.4% of them had the necessary system requirements means that people are making the deliberate choice to not upgrade.

This is bad news if Microsoft’s game plan is to wait for older PCs to cycle out and newer, TPM 2.0-compatible PCs to enter the technological ecosystem. If users are choosing not to upgrade despite meeting the requirements, it means that Microsoft has a tough battle ahead of it to convince people to leave Windows 10 behind… that is, if it ever can.

Can Microsoft Win Over Businesses With Windows 11?

With over half of business PCs meeting the hardware requirements for Windows 11, and just over 1% actually running it, it looks like tough times ahead for Microsoft’s new OS. We’ll have to hold on and see how the company plans to encourage people to take the plunge on its new product.