No idea why I chose to upgrade the laptop today, but I'm Very Happy I did... Win11 gave it almost as much of a performance boost as swapping out the HDD for an SSD. I was concerned about driver issues regarding the touchpad, camera, and touchscreen, but other than an unidentified device in Device Mgr., which I uninstalled, everything *seems* to work so far. The laptop has an Intel i3 CPU, one generation too old to meet the cutoff for Win11's requirements -- otherwise it's OK. Secure Boot is available but turned off from the factory -- I left it off, both in case of problems with setup, like I had with this PC, and because I'm still leery of Microsoft's upcoming boot loader setup, where I may have to turn off secure boot to keep the laptop working. Because it did not meet the Win11 requirements I used the new version of Rufus with an ISO I downloaded today from Microsoft.
Rufus now creates a wrapper for the setup.exe file on the ISO, & that performs an unattended Windows installation, using an answer file that includes the necessary modification to the registry. It also sets the privacy settings at the same time, saving a few minutes setting up the new copy of Windows. The only thing different I saw was an extra warning screen from Windows setup that required me to acknowledge that all sorts of bad, nasty things might happen since the laptop didn't meet Win11 spec. As with the other 24H2 upgrades I've done so far, it took an uncomfortable amount of time to find and load setup once the device restarted... normally the BIOS goes through its post routine, taking inventory of the attached components & setting up whatever connections so everything works, then near immediately starts Windows boot loader, where you see the circular thing rotating and then get Windows logon screen, but with Windows setup running, wound up waiting a long time -- much longer than expected -- before setup's sparse dialog showed the update progress.
That said, the one thing that stands out, other than the performance boost, is that the installation process for Win11 24H2 has been MUCH smoother on out-of-spec hardware than on PCs meeting all of its requirements.