Windows 11 will switch Memory Integrity on for you next month

Microsoft has said it will enable memory integrity by default on eligible Windows 11 machines starting with October's Patch Tuesday, 13 October 2026. If the name means nothing to you, that's fine. It's the setting buried in Windows Security under Device security, Core isolation, and what it does is check the lowest-level software on your PC, the kernel-mode drivers, inside a walled-off area built by your processor before Windows lets any of it run.

The reason it matters is that attackers have spent years walking in through drivers rather than through Windows itself. Load a signed but flawed driver, and you own the machine from underneath the operating system. Microsoft's reasoning points at how fast AI-assisted research is now turning up kernel bugs, which makes shutting the door cheaper than patching every hole behind it.

Your PC only qualifies if it has an Intel 8th-generation chip or newer, AMD Zen 2 or newer, or a Snapdragon 8180 or newer, plus 8GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD, virtualization switched on in firmware and drivers already confirmed to work with it. Windows runs a readiness check on each machine first rather than flipping the switch on everything that meets the spec. And if you deliberately turned memory integrity off at some point, it stays off. This is opt-out, not a forced override.

The one thing to watch is an old driver that refuses to load afterwards, usually something from a printer, a capture card or RGB software nobody has updated in five years. Event Viewer records those under Applications and Services Logs, Microsoft, Windows, CodeIntegrity, Operational, as event 3087. Getting current drivers on before October is the easy fix, and Tendvane's driver Auto-Update plus Back up drivers lets you do exactly that without losing the set that already works.