How To Get Windows 11 Early With Microsoft’s Insider Program

The first step before looking to get involved in the Windows 11 Insider Program, should be to see whether or not your computer will even be able to run Windows 11!

We advise that you check out our Windows 11 System Requirements for a thorough explanation on the best way of doing this before you go any further.

1. Navigate to the Windows Insider page, then click Register, which should be located near the top left of the page.
2. You will then be prompted to sign in to your Microsoft account.
3. Once you have done the above you will be asked to check through a list of the various warnings about issues you may face with running the operating system at this stage of development. Besides this, you will also have to agree with the data-sharing policies as pertaining to the Insider Program.

Flighting is essentially Microsoft’s terminology for when Insiders test out the pre-release versions of their operating systems.

To take Windows 11 for the first test flight, simply search for ‘Windows Insider Program’ in your Start Menu search bar and click on it when it appears.

Alternatively, you can open up the Settings menu, click on Update & Security, then click Windows Update to achieve the same effect.

Follow the update wizard to go through the process.

Partway through the update wizard you should be prompted to select your channel:

• The Windows 11 Dev channel – is mainly for those that are really interested in the in-depth mechanics of the operating system, and is primarily for software designers, developers and the like who want to test things out on the OS at a deep level. It will give you the earliest access to Windows 11 (i.e. right now) but it’s probably not advisable for the majority of people reading this article as it is the most unstable. It may be worth installing the OS on an entirely different PC or harddrive to the one you normally lose, or at the very least, make sure your data is backed up elsewhere!
• The Windows 11 Beta channel – this gives you the second earliest access to the Windows 11 operating system (expect it sometime over the summer), with the newest features that have made it through the dev channel phase, though still expect a degree of instability.
• The Windows 11 Preview channel – will give you the latest access to Windows 11 (approximately one month before the official release) but will give you the most stable version of Windows 11 of the three channels, and is the one we’d recommend for most users.

If it turns out you’re not happy with your pick of channel, you will have to roll back to Windows 10 again and then go through the above process once more and reselect the channel.

The final step in the process is to restart and update your machine.

Once your machine boots up and the updates are all installed, you should be good to go on your Insider version of Windows 11!