HP Compaq 6910P, Win10 no good, Win11 install fails

[Torben_M]

I've also been wanting to revive my old trusted 6910P. To upgrade the HW, I've purchased a 500GB SSD, 2x4GB RAM and a T9500 CPU. The PC has the AMD ATI X2300 GPU.
It was running W7 32 bit on  spinning HDD and was really slow to start up. I wanted to utilize all of the 8GB RAM, so it had to be a 64 bit OS.
First I installed Win10 64 bit on the new SSD and it became quite fast and responsive. But after I manually installed the Graphics driver the screen started flickering. After consulting the threads on this site, I decided it would be best to move on to Win11. The online upgrade will not continue as MS Upgrade says the the CPU is not supported by Win11.
Instead I made a Flash drive, but it will not install from the Flash drive.
After booting on the flash drive, the install Windows image appears for a while, but the it enters restart loop. If I pull the drive out in the restart cycle, it says files are missing. 
Any advice on how to proceed? I would really love to bring this thing back to life

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

I have the HP 6910p with the AMD x2300 graphics adapter too.

I had the exact same problem with W10.

Manually installing the graphics driver only works on the older builds of W10.

I forgot which W10 release wrecked the graphics, but it was before 22H2.  Might have been 20H2?

So, a few years ago, I decided to install W11 on it and for some crazy reason, manually installing the W7 graphics driver on W11 worked fine and has worked ever since.

Now, the problem why you can't install the latest version of W11 is because Microsoft changed the processor requirements for 24H2.

Now an Intel processor has to support SSE 4.2 which only Intel 1st generation core or newer processors come with.

Microsoft blocks some PCs from Windows 11 24H2 — CPU must support SSE4.2 or the OS will not boot | T...

Microsoft has fixed it so you can't even boot the W11 flash drive with the 24H2 version on it, and when I tried to update my 6910p from 23H2 to 24H2 that failed.

What you need to do is to find a W11 23H2 ISO file and apply the Rufus hardware check bypass method to clean install W11 23H2.

If you are not familiar with how to do that, watch this video:

How to Install Windows 11 on Unsupported Hardware!

On our old notebooks, you set the Rufus partition scheme to MBR not GPT because the notebook does not have a UEFI BIOS.

You should be able to get the W11 23H2 ISO file from the link below.

How can i download 23h2 iso - Microsoft Community

W11 23H2 works fine in my 6910p but will be forever stuck on that version.

[Torben_M]

Hi Paul.

This is really valuable feedback! I must admit that I tried regressing to Win7 64bit and the PC is rocket fast on the upgraded HW. I am however struggling with .Net support to comply between what this very old OS supports and what is on the net today.
I'll give W11 another try based on the links you provided.

Thanks a lot! - I'll post in this thread if successful (and probably also if not) 🙂

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Yes, I installed 8 GB of memory and a SSD in mine years ago when it was running on Windows Vista x64.

For W7, if it is just internet browsing issues, you can download Microsoft Edge for W7 from the link below:

Download Microsoft Edge