A recent compressed version of Windows 11, Tiny11 strips Microsoft’s flagship operating system down to its bare essentials, making it usable on older and lower-spec hardware. But that’s not all. new release From the developer NTDev gives 64-bit Arm users such as the Raspberry Pi 4 the chance to try out Windows 11 on their board.
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The initial release claimed that Windows 11 could run on hardware with as little as 2GB of RAM and used only 8GB of space (20GB for a typical install). So how does a Raspberry Pi 4 running at 1.5 GHz and with just 2 GB of RAM perform on a Tiny11? We did that for the purposes of this story.
The files are provided as 4GB ISO images. Unlike typical ISO images, simply copying the files to a USB drive using Rufus or Raspberry Pi Imager is not enough.should be used instead Windows on Raspberry (WoR) tools Install the image to a micro SD card / USB 3 flash drive. The installation process isn’t the fastest, so configure your Raspberry Pi to boot from USB and use a USB 3 flash drive or SSD caddy. The installation is almost a typical Windows installation. The only thing missing is signing in to a Microsoft account, instead the installer prompts you to set up a local user account. I was never asked for activation details.
Once installed and configured, Windows 11 performance on the Raspberry Pi 4 was poor via micro SD, again confirming that a USB 3 based solution was the best. That said, the main menu was responsive, and I had no trouble using the apps or system tray.
Browsing the web through Edge wasn’t the best experience, but it worked slowly.of tom’s hardware The site took a long time to render. Images pop up all over the place.
What about Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? The first bad news is that the Tiny11 was unable to detect the Raspberry Pi 4’s Wi-Fi. Ethernet worked great, Bluetooth was successfully detected and connected to my smartphone. Although the success was short-lived, I was unable to send files between Bluetooth-connected devices.
Tiny11 comes pre-installed with Microsoft Store and Microsoft Edge, so you can use familiar tools to install apps and browse the internet. Software available from the Microsoft Store is likely to work, but your mileage may vary. Executables built for x86 and x86_64 do not work and throw an error. Unless you can source a compatible app, you’re left with just what the store offers.
Do you have GPIO access? The answer is no. I installed the latest version of Python from the store and used the pip package manager to install the two GPIO libraries. One of the oldest GPIO packages for the Pi, RPi.GPIO, completely refused to run. GPIOZero lured us into a false sense of security before doing the same. If you need GPIO, use the Raspberry Pi OS.
The system ran at its maximum available speed of 1.5 GHz and used 1.2GB of the available 2GB. More RAM and overclocking will also help with this, I tested a small overclock of 1.8 GHz. This is currently considered the default speed for Pi 4 and Pi 400 by Raspberry Pi. The extra speed makes the experience much better and with the extra RAM and USB 3 storage this could be a viable machine if managed properly according to expectations. Achieved by entering the BIOS. We recommend choosing one of the best cases for active or passive cooling before overclocking too high.
Now this is the first 24 hours of Tiny11 on Arm 64, with two releases in between, one of which fixed the installation failure issue. There will always be bugs, but as this project matures, it could be as good as the highly anticipated Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi. Treat it as a curiosity rather than daily driving for now.
Tiny11 for Arm64 is now internet archive,
