Hello, I am a College student in a solid modeling class experiencing a unique issue that none of my technical support staff or professors can help me fix. When I try using the setup application after initially downloading and unzipping files in the install manager for SolidWorks 2026, I get this error message:

SOLIDWORKS 2026 products cannot be installed on Windows 10 version 20H2 or earlier. Installation is permitted on Windows 10 version 21H1 and higher, but support for Windows 10 customers will be limited. For compatibility, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade your system to Windows 11.

I'm on windows 11! Nothing I have done can fix it. Nothing was in compatibility mode, and I downloaded everything as instructed. It's really strange because none of the other students seem to have this issue, and I have downloaded previous version of SolidWorks fine for other classes from the same system of student licensing. In fact, I downloaded the 2025 version to see if it worked, and it didn't have this error message. All I could gather from my faculty, web searching, and even AI models is that SolidWorks has a issue reading the newest version of OS, so it thinks I'm on windows 10 when it just doesn't understand what I'm running it on. The suggested solutions are rolling back my version of windows, which seem really inconvenient, and reinstalling windows, which is even more inconvenient. I'm in a really tough spot here, what do i do? I just want to install SolidWorks 2026.