Windows 11 will now show a watermark if you are on an unsupported Insider PC

Windows 11 has some pretty tough requirements to meet for older PCs but Microsoft does offer a way for enthusiasts to download the OS on their machine. Although you can sign a waver and bypass all warnings to install Windows on unsupported hardware, there have been reports that this will leave your machine in an "unsupported" state where you may not even receive security updates.

Now, Microsoft has started showing a couple of warnings for people running Windows 11 Insider builds on unsupported hardware.

As spotted first by Windows Latest, Windows 11 Dev Channel build 22557 - which arrived less than a week ago - has started showing a "System requirements not met" watermark on the bottom right corner of the desktop. A snippet can be seen in the image above.

This is quite similar to the "Windows not activated" watermark but it only shows on the desktop wallpaper, it does not appear on top of other apps or windows.

This is similar to yet another warning that Microsoft has started showing in the Settings app, as noted by Albacore (@thebookisclosed) on Twitter:

It is important to note that this warning has only started appearing in Dev Channel builds in the Windows Insider Program for now, so it's not yet known if it will also make it to the generally available (GA) versions of Windows 11. While it makes sense to show the warning at least somewhere, many might be frustrated if it's visible at all times on the desktop.

The existing "Windows not activated" watermark also locks a couple of personalization-related capabilities until you activate your system, but this does not appear to be the case with the most recent watermark, at least for now. Furthermore, changes in Dev Channel builds are not tied to specific versions of Windows 11, so it's possible that the cautionary watermark doesn't see the light of day on the GA version of the OS at all.

Windows 11 will now show a watermark if you are on an unsupported Insider PC