Install Windows 11 on Any PC with Ventoy

This application lets you install Windows 11 on machines that are not compatible due to their hardware. 

Installing Windows 11 can be a complete headache and, in fact, many people still use Windows 10 simply because their hardware doesn’t pass Microsoft’s official compatibility checks. TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, a supported CPU — the list of requirements has locked out millions of perfectly functional machines. The good news is that Ventoy, a free and open-source tool, lets you work around all of that and get Windows 11 running on virtually any PC.

What Is Ventoy and Why Does It Work?

Ventoy is a utility that creates bootable USB drives in a slightly different way than tools like Rufus or the official Media Creation Tool. Instead of flashing a single ISO to the drive, Ventoy installs a small bootloader onto the USB stick and then lets you simply copy ISO files onto it like regular files. When you boot from the drive, Ventoy presents a menu and loads whichever image you pick.

Starting with version 1.0.86, Ventoy introduced a feature that’s particularly useful for unsupported hardware: it can inject bypass options directly into the Windows 11 installer before it even starts. This disables two things the installer normally enforces — the hardware compatibility check (TPM, CPU, RAM requirements) and the mandatory Microsoft account requirement during setup. In practice, this means you can get to the desktop on hardware that Microsoft’s own installer would otherwise refuse to touch.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

The process is straightforward, but you do need to gather a few things first:

• A USB drive with at least 8 GB of storage (16 GB is safer, since the Windows 11 ISO itself is around 5–6 GB)
• The latest version of Ventoy, downloaded from the official site at ventoy.net
• A Windows 11 ISO file, which you can download for free directly from Microsoft’s website
• A PC that can boot from USB — you may need to adjust the boot order in the BIOS/UEFI

One thing worth pointing out: the USB drive will be fully wiped when you install Ventoy onto it, so back up anything on it first.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up the Bootable Drive

Once you’ve downloaded Ventoy, extract the ZIP file and run the Ventoy2Disk.exe application (on Windows) or the appropriate script on Linux. The interface is minimal — you select your USB drive from the dropdown, make sure you haven’t accidentally selected your system drive, and click “Install.” The whole process takes about a minute.

After Ventoy is installed, your USB drive will appear as two partitions in File Explorer. The larger one is a normal partition labeled “Ventoy” — just copy your Windows 11 ISO file directly into it. No extracting, no special steps. That’s the beauty of the tool.

Now here’s the critical part for bypassing the hardware checks. Before you boot from the USB, open the Ventoy folder on the drive and look for the ventoy.json configuration file (or create one if it doesn’t exist). You need to enable the VTOY_WIN11_BYPASS_CHECK option, which tells Ventoy to skip the TPM, Secure Boot, and RAM checks during installation. There are detailed instructions on the Ventoy wiki for the exact syntax, but it’s only a few lines of JSON.

Booting and Installing Windows 11

Restart the target PC and enter the BIOS/UEFI by pressing the appropriate key at startup — usually F2, F12, Delete, or Escape, depending on the manufacturer. Set the USB drive as the first boot device, save your changes, and let the machine restart.

Ventoy’s boot menu will appear. Select your Windows 11 ISO, and when prompted, choose to boot in normal (non-Grub2) mode. The standard Windows installer will load, and you’ll move through the familiar setup screens — language, keyboard layout, product key (you can skip this), and partition selection. Because Ventoy already injected the bypass, none of the compatibility warnings will stop you.

During setup, when Windows asks you to sign in with a Microsoft account, you can bypass this too if you prefer a local account. Simply disconnect the PC from the internet before reaching that screen — the installer will then offer an offline account option. This also happens to be one of the bypasses Ventoy enables automatically.

Common Problems and How to Fix Them

A few issues come up regularly when people try this:

• PC won’t boot from USB: Double-check the boot order in BIOS. Also, if your system uses UEFI with Secure Boot enabled, you may need to disable Secure Boot temporarily — Ventoy can run with Secure Boot, but it requires enrolling Ventoy’s key first, which some older machines handle poorly.
• Installer still shows compatibility errors: Make sure you’re using Ventoy 1.0.86 or newer, and double-check that the ventoy.json bypass configuration is saved correctly. A syntax error in the JSON file will silently prevent it from working.
• Windows won’t activate: If the machine previously had a genuine Windows 10 license tied to its hardware (via the motherboard), Windows 11 often activates automatically. If it doesn’t, you can enter a product key later or continue using Windows in an unactivated state with minor limitations (like a watermark and restricted personalization settings).
• Drivers missing after install: On older hardware, some drivers won’t be included in Windows 11 by default. Use Windows Update first, then check the manufacturer’s website for any remaining gaps — particularly for Wi-Fi adapters and GPUs.

Is It Worth Doing on an Old Machine?

That depends entirely on the hardware. The method works, but it’s worth being realistic about performance. If your PC is more than ten years old — think pre-2013 hardware with a spinning hard drive and 4 GB of RAM — Windows 11 will technically install and run, but the experience is likely to be sluggish. Microsoft’s requirements exist partly for marketing reasons, but partly because Windows 11 does lean on newer hardware features for some of its performance optimizations.

On the other hand, machines from around 2016–2019 that fail the checks only because they lack TPM 2.0 (a chip requirement, not a performance one) are excellent candidates. These machines can run Windows 11 smoothly without any real trade-offs. If you’ve got a solid-state drive, 8 GB of RAM, and a mid-range processor from that era, you’re in good shape.

As always, installing Windows 11 on devices that are not officially supported is done at your own risk. Microsoft won’t provide security updates indefinitely for unsupported configurations, so keep that in mind as a long-term consideration. For now, though, Ventoy gives you a practical path to staying current without being forced into a hardware upgrade.