A few days ago we reported on a newly discovered Windows 11 24H2 bypass trick that also works on non-LTSC systems, although it was initially thought to only work on LTSC computers.

However, if you want to use the trick above, or some of the others available out there, to bypass the Windows 11 24H2 eligibility check on some really old systems, like those with Intel Core 2 Duo, to AMD Athlon (the original early 2000s ), then you’ll be in luck.

Microsoft recently emphasized that it did not block Windows Terminal on such old processors on purpose and there were no conspiracy theories about it. However, it looks more and more like the CPU block in the upcoming 24H2 version of Windows 11 is intentional.

For those who may not have been following the situation, testing enthusiasts have noticed that the Windows 11 24H2 Insider build since February blocks very old, unsupported processors from bypassing testing at the start of installation. Known workarounds will stop working on such old computers.

Later, Microsoft also added a message that said “This computer’s processor does not support a critical feature (PopCnt),” so users could understand what led to the block. PopCnt, short for population count, is a complete instruction that helps count the number of 1’s in a binary representation.

Now, a newer build, 26080, seems to raise this block as CPUs without SSE4.2 are also unable to boot into Windows 11.

Something like this was to be expected given the fact that in a previous version, 26063, Microsoft quietly added SSE4.2 to the compatibility blocklist, and it seems that implementation is now entering testing with some of the latest Windows 11 previews.