Half of polled Windows Central readers will run Windows 11 on their main PC

Windows 11 Widget2 Razerbook
Windows 11 Widget2 Razerbook (Image credit: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central)

Windows 11 won't ship until later this year, but plenty of people want to get their hands on it as quickly as possible. The first Insider preview build of Windows 11 rolled out yesterday, and many Windows Insiders raced to download it. We wanted to know how many of our readers plan to run Insider builds of Windows 11, and if they are running it, which PC they'll use it on.

Since our poll went up yesterday, it's received over 1,500 votes. Just under half of those voters (49.2% at the time of publication) plan to run Windows 11 Insider builds on their primary PC. Another 21.86% will test out the operating system on a secondary machine. 13.03% of polled participants won't install Insider builds yet, but will do so at some point. That leaves only 15.93% of participating readers left who plan to not run any Insider builds of Windows 11.

It's not that surprising that readers of Windows Central would race to get their hands on the latest version of Windows, but I was surprised to see that almost half would run it on their primary PC. Insider builds can run into bugs, which can be frustrating on your everyday computer. Potential bugs or issues didn't seem to sway many of our readers away.

Many people in the comments of our poll post said they'd like to run Windows 11 preview builds but aren't able to because their PC doesn't meet the operating system's minimum requirements.

Shel Dyck said, "5 of 6 of my machines failed the hardware test. Some of which are fairly new hardware. I'm too pissed off to even look at 11. I wanna test win10 21h2, hopefully that happens soon, as I'll probably be running 10 for years to come."

Microsoft updated a page recently to acknowledge an issue that caused some Insiders to not see the update. If you tried to update yesterday but weren't able to, you may see the option now.

We'll keep the poll open for a while to see if it trends differently going forward than it did over its first 24 hours.

Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com.