Hello All. I have had this excellent Asus P8Z77-M motherboard inside my rebuilt computer in original Acer case for about nine years now. It has an Intel i5 CPU and 16GB of RAM - quite probably DDR3. 512GB SSD C: drive and 1TBHDD D: drive. I am looking at the possibility of 'upgrading' the OS to Windows 11 from Win7 at some point and running TPM.MSC tells me the computer is not currently suitable for WIn11. I checked the motherboard manual and there is indeed a TPM connector on the board - 19 pins iirc, but don't want to be stuck with V1.2, although Microsoft now says 1.2 is the minimum needed for Win11. A quick scout around on Fleabay shows up numerous TPM 2.0 compatible modules. I asked one vendor who said his TPM is only compatible on motherboards with DDR4 RAM. Is that the end of the story for my Win7 PC or is there some other option. I did 'upgrade' to Win10 at one point but hated it - still do - so reverted it to Win7 and it's Running fine. Any ideas or suggestions - appreciated as ever. Thanks all.
Your PC won't be compatible with Windows 11 as the CPU isn't supported unfortunately. You could get round that but I wouldn't recommend it as if you hated 10, you'll dislike 11.
You could try adding the following DWORD 32-bit value to the registry in HKLM\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup: AllowUpgradeWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU and give it the value 1. It's worked a treat for me so far although I think there is a limit on how far back you can go.
3 things to consider: You're unlikely to get TPM 2.0 support, especially on 3rd Gen Intel. My 4th Gen Haswell build is a year newer than your hardware & has no built in TPM. It can take a TPM 1.2 module only. Not sure where you saw that TPM 1.2 is good enough for Win 11 but it isn't. Microsoft were pretty terrible at saying what the requirements were so there may still be articles about it with outdated (and therefore wrong info) but you need TPM 2.0 to get official Win 11 support. Consider replacing your computer. Generally speaking most people I know who had 2nd Gen Intel builds for years have finally upgraded to something newer, especially in the last 2 years when 8 core CPUs have become reasonably priced. Assuming you have the unlocked 3570K, jumping to a 12600K will likely be twice as fast, and that's before benefits you'd get switching to a nvme boot ssd. Win 7 has been unsupported for 2 years. If you use it online in any way, "Running fine" doesn't cut it anymore. Your build will be targeted and Microsoft won't help you out in any way if it gets infected (I'm not interested in any security routines you may have, running an unsupported OS makes those void). If you're using it online, do the right thing and upgrade - to Linux if necessary, or at least to Win 10 (Win 8 is pointless when support ends in July 2023). You may not like Win 10 but it does get security updates. It's part of the reason I'm going to the UK in 2 weeks, my Win 7 based HTPC just isn't safe online - it's been shutdown for some time and I'm replacing it while I'm there. I suggest you do the same.
Yup, no 11 for you but it is a backward step from 10 for a UI perspective IMO though I still use it and just suck it up, 10 though is massively improved over 7 and you should see decent performance vs improvements vs 7 due to the underlying OS improvements, that is probably your best choice. Hard to determine what you don't like in 10 vs 7 as they can be made to look almost identical and then will just feel more fluid.
