Clean reinstall Windows 11 on HP laptop

[Becker240]

The laptop in question belongs to my adult granddaughter. She's had it for less than three years. I noticed a few days ago that it was running slowly--painfully so. Today she brought it to me, and I planned to reset Windows 11 without losing her personal files. The project started poorly. From a cold start-up, it took more than 10 minutes just to get to where it asks for her login PIN. That's how choked up this machine is! I tried going to Settings --> System, but after about five hours, it reported that it is "Canceling (This won't take long)." Hah!

I now have in front of me a shiny new 64GB thumb drive, and I'm prepared to use it. On my own laptop (a MacBook Pro where I run Windows 11 in Parallels), I've downloaded BOTH the Media Creation Tool and Win11_24H2_English_x64. Of course, those files downloaded into my Windows Downloads folder, so I thought I could drag them to the new USB thumbdrive. But no—I got an "Interrupted Action" error. "Are you sure you want to copy this file without its properties? The file ... has properties that can't be copied to the new location." 

Can someone please take my hand and guide me through this process. Thank you!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

The notebook's hardware does not meet Microsoft's minimum processor requirements to run W11.

You have to use the Microsoft Media creation tool and select the option to automatically create a bootable USB installation flash drive so that it is bootable.

Download Windows 10

You can't drag and drop/copy and paste the ISO file to a USB flash drive because it won't boot up that way.

Watch this video:  You do not need a product key as it is encrypted in the PC's BIOS.

Install Windows 10 using a USB Drive (Media Creation Tool)

[Becker240]

You're telling me that this machine should not be running W11 at all. It came out of the box from Walmart with W10 (Home, no doubt), but my granddaughter woke up one morning months ago to find it running W11. She didn't install it, nor did I. It's been running that way for months. My granddaughter, from what I've read, is among a legion of users whose computers were force-fed W11. 

This afternoon, I shut it down and rebooted. It came back with some update to install. I let that run, then tried again with Settings>>System>>Recovery. It would not respond at all to any commands under the Recovery tab. Then I could not close any windows (File Explorer, for one). I shut it down with the power button and let it sit.

 Thank you for the link to the excellent video tutorial. One more question for you: We both know that Microsoft has pretty much washed its hands of W10. My granddaughter is by no means a power user. She uses her laptop mostly to play games: Wizard 101, Pirates 101, and similar fare. Is this machine close to outliving its usefulness?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how that PC was updated to W11 without a software hack.

The minimum W11 AMD processor requirement is a Ryzen 3xxx series processor.

The 15-g019wm notebook came with an AMD E1-2100 processor which has to be the weakest processor on the planet--worse than an Intel Celeron in my opinion.

No wonder the PC is slower than 4th class mail.

You can install W11 on it using a workaround,  but I recommend you use W10 because it uses less resources than W11 requires.

It should run a little bit better on W10 after you get it back up and running again.

Yes, W10 will go out of support in October but that just means that Microsoft won't be releasing any security or software updates for W10 anymore.

So, as long as you are not storing sensitive information on the PC, I don't see any problem with using it indefinitely.

I'm still using XP on an old PC that I have to use from time to time, and it works fine for what i need it for--including going online.

[Becker240]

When I download the W10 installation file, my machine insists on placing the download in File Explorer>>Downloads folder. What must I do to force the download to go into my flash drive?

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You don't want it to go to the flash drive  

After you download the file, plug your flash drive into the USB port, double click to run the file you downloaded, and follow onscreen instructions to create the bootable W10 installation flash drive. 

[Becker240]

Oh! I misread all that. It's working just fine now. Thank you!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime. 

Glad to have been of assistance.