The lengthy advertisement for Windows 11 was highlighted by Windows Latest after it installed the optional January update (in preview) on a Windows 10 machine.
lol my reasonably good gaming pc doesn't even meet the minimum system requirements. I don't have anything with a cpu that's in the "list of approved CPUs" 😎. Guess I can't use Windows even if I wanted to. 🤷
You can. Just make the installation USB using Rufus. Rufus allows to configure the Windows 11 iso to override minimum requirements. Almost all Windows 10 drivers work with Windows 11 too. I'm running Windows 11 on an ancient 1st Gen i7 Laptop with 6GB Memory and an NVIDIA GT 425M. Works better than Windows 10.
I think you are misremembering, since the iso already contains all the microsoft shitware, rufus can't strip those out.You might have used a custom build.