How I Got Windows 11 Working On An Old 9 Year Old HP Desktop

So here is the post about the desktop I bought off eBaY, *still working* and upgraded to the max and now it’s my spare PC incase this one shuts down for some reason. Yeah I spent $464 on this machine itself with all the upgrades included but, its still kind of a recent machine, I mean it’s not 20 years old or anything!. Oh and installing Windows 11 on older machines is no secret either, it was posted in many articles about doing this a Microsoft is now allowing it apparently. P.S. you can also get Windows 11 from Amazon for around $150 CAD, this is an affiliate link so please bear in mind that we may earn a commission from what ever you may buy. 

So, all you need to do is, buy a decent sized USB stick from your local computer store (or order one online) that is at least 32GB’s, then you want to go here to download the Windows 11 Media Creation Tool from this link. Below you will see the option to download the Windows 11 or Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. I’m pretty sure by October 2025 the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool will be discontinued so you might as well just go for the Windows 11 tool instead. But if your machine for sure doesn’t support 11 and you already tried to install it, go for the Windows 10 tool instead then (while you can).

You will see the Windows 11 Media Creation Tool in your Downloads folder and it looks like this, double click on that then follow the prompts, make sure your USB stick is inserted into your computer’s USB port.

Below you will see the option to select your language and Edition of Windows 11, for me they were both greyed out because most likely it detected my current system’s settings or something. I think if you click off the box “Use the recommended options for this PC” you might be able to change the Language or Edition.

From there you simply select your USB drive from the installation wizard that you see above then click on Next or what ever it says. Below you will see the option to either download an ISO file or use a USB flash drive. See!, I told you guys you could do this, just click on the option you want and hit Next.

From there Windows 11 will download and install itself onto that USB drive, make sure you don’t remove it until the process is finished. If the power goes out, don’t worry you can try doing this again later. In the next steps you will be on your own mostly because I did not document what it takes to boot from these USB flash drives, but I left a video tutorial for you guys to watch on how to do this, it’s very straight forward. You simply start up your computer with the USB drive connected, then you press a button on your keyboard to bring up the option to boot from USB (before the BIOS screen shows itself), and from there you select the drive and hit enter and then it will boot, installing Windows 11 is super easy and even a chimp can do it.

So basically, that’s exactly how I did it. I was fearless to try installing Windows 11 on an older machine, and I was ready for any error code it would throw at me. That’s why I’m saying you just got to try. Don’t just assume your computer is “too old”, actually try and install 11 on it, if it won’t let you, big deal, just keep using Windows 10 until October 2025 then.