Windows enthusiast Albacore has discovered a method to enable the Recall feature on Windows 11 laptops with older ARM chips that lack a neural processing unit (NPU).
Recall is a new AI-powered feature for Copilot+ PCs running Windows 11, which Microsoft unveiled at the recent Build Conference. For Recall to function, the PC must have an NPU, making Albacore’s achievement of enabling Recall on a PC without an NPU quite noteworthy.
In a video shared by Albacore, Recall is demonstrated running on a Windows 11 PC without an NPU. This was achieved on hardware with the Arm64 chip, and Albacore believes the same can be done with PCs equipped with x86-64 chips from Intel and AMD.
It’s worth noting that the video appears to show some lag, leading some viewers to question whether the slowness is due to unsupported hardware. Addressing this, Albacore mentioned that the slow performance could be partly due to a screen recording app running in the background, and noted that the feature often works faster without it.
Recall is designed to record all activities on the user’s PC and save snapshots for future reference. To ensure privacy, all screenshots are processed and saved locally, meaning they are not uploaded to Microsoft servers. Users can also manually delete snapshots and exclude certain apps and websites from Recall’s recording.
Despite Microsoft positioning Recall as an innovative feature to help users quickly find elements from their past activity, concerns about its potential impact on user privacy have been raised. Many are worried that Recall will not hide sensitive information, such as passwords and financial details when logging into websites or performing banking transactions. Additionally, the feature will be enabled by default on all supported PCs, although users can turn it off from the Privacy and Security option in the Settings app.