I was about to update to Windows 11 today, but when I ran the PC Health Check, it told me that my processor doesn't meet the requirements.

My laptop has an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7300HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2496 MHz, 4 cores.
According to the Windows website, the minimum requirements are 1 GHz or faster and at least 2 cores.
I also checked that TPM version is 2.0 and the BIOS mode is UEFI.

Why doesn't my processor meet the requirements?

Can I upgrade that easily or do I have to do a clean install?

I mainly use Linux these days, but unfortunately there are still a few things that I need Windows for. My current Windows 10 PC is very old and more or less unusable. If I haven't used it for a few weeks it sometimes takes many hours just to boot.

What is the lowest spec I could get away with to have a reasonably well-functioning Windows 11 system? I will mainly use it for editing particular documents where there is no Linux editor available. I might also use it for music editing (FL studio), but that is just a hobby. I'm not a gamer, so I don't need a fancy graphics card.

I couple of years ago I made the mistake of upgrading my wife's PC with a very cheap windows box (about £300 new). It runs but it is painfully slow. I really wish I has spent a bit more. I don't want to make the same mistake again.

I will definitely get as SSD this time that should improve things. What processor and RAM will I need to have a system that just runs normally?

I know I may get flamed/downvoted about this but this really has to be one of the most frustrating things that I have come across in, well forever working in IT. I support a non-profit, fairly small as things go, maybe 20-25 seats and I am having to start replacing everone of their desktop pc's since they are using a 7th gen CPU. These are Dell Optiplex 5050's, they meet all the other requirements except the 7th gen CPU. I've read about all the nebulous reasons as to why they are doing it but seems pretty weak at best. This group had just finishing refreshing about a year before they came out with the min win11 requirements, if we had know we would have refreshed with Dell 5060's but now they are faced with refreshing hardware that are from 2018/2019 time period, some are not even 5 years old. Now before folks say you should be refreshing everything over 5 years, they do light desktop work and when we refreshed to go to the 5050 (i5-6500 cpu)they had machines 10-15 years old and there was no complaints. For small businesses and non-profits that try to put their money to other purposes to help people this is going to be a big hit to their budgets and IMHO it's really not necessary. I mean I see how they made exceptions for SOME 7th gen CPU so its kind of laughable at this point. Before anyone states that you can upgrade to win11 unsupported, I understand that is an option but not one that I would ever recommend to my clients that I support since that support could be terminated at any point in the future, its really not an option.

I honestly do not know the real reasons they drew a line in the sand for one of the first times but from an environmental standpoint its just terrible that they are going to force or try to force businesses to refresh their PC's. All I know is I took 4-5 PC's to the recycler last Friday and they looked and worked like they were brand new, sigh. Has to be one of the worst environmental decisions ever...