Image Source: "Windows 10 Battlestation - Front" by morrisonbrett is licensed under CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/22183514@N00/19364765383
My maternal uncle was visiting from the U.S.A. to my country to attend a family wedding anniversary, so I requested him to bring me a refurbished laptop because the current one I am using was slowly deteriorating in performance. My current laptop is a potato one with a 3rd gen Intel i5 processor and only 12Gb of DDR3 RAM without any dedicated GPU.
When my maternal uncle came to attend the family wedding, he gave me the refurbished laptop that I requested him to bring with him. It was a Dell latitude 7480 laptop with 6th generation of intel i5 processor, 512 Gb of ssd storage and 16gb of ddr4 ram however the operating system installed on it was windows 11. So i checked the official windows 11 hardware requirements and I found that the minimum processor required is 8th generation of either intel i5 or i7 processors. But still the laptop seemed to be working fine until it started to have some hardware issues. The biggest one was it would get the blue screen of death and also sometimes the laptop would not start.
I took the dell laptop to the technician and he told me that one of the 8gb ddr4 ram was damaged and also the internal battery was also not functional. The technician also fixed one of the IC chips in the motherboard of the laptop. We opened the laptop and that is where I decided to downgrade this laptop from windows 11 to windows 10 fearing that the low specs requirements might damage it.
The process of downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10 was very simple I went to this official microsoft website. and as I did not have a bootable USB I simply deleted all the data in my C drive hence the downgrade was completed.
The Dell Latitude 7480 laptop started to perform pretty well after the downgrade even though now it had only 8gb of DDR4 RAM, so I handed it over to my 11-year-old son, who started playing Fortnite on it without any issues. We might upgrade the ram by adding another 16gb of ddr4 stick in the future to boost the performance further.
Conclusion
I learned from this experience that one should never use Windows 11 below its minimum hardware requirements, whether it is a desktop PC or a laptop, because then you can start to get a lot of hardware issues. Windows 11 is not a bad operating system, but there is no doubt that it is quite demanding. If you are looking to upgrade your operating system to Windows 11 then I suggest you go through these steps to find out whether your hardware is meeting minimum requirements or not.
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