User-Made Patch Lets Owners of Next-Gen CPUs Install Updates On Windows 7 & 8.1 (bleepingcomputer.com) 218
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: GitHub user Zeffy has created a patch that removes a limitation that Microsoft imposed on users of 7th generation processors, a limit that prevents users from receiving Windows updates if they still use Windows 7 and 8.1. This limitation was delivered through Windows Update KB4012218 (March 2017 Patch Tuesday) and has made many owners of Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Bristol Ridge CPUs very angry last week, as they weren't able to install any Windows updates. Microsoft's move was controversial, but the company did its due diligence, and warned customers of its intention since January 2016, giving users enough time to update to Windows 10, move to a new OS, or downgrade their CPU, if they needed to remain on Windows 7 or 8.1 for various reasons. When the April 2017 Patch Tuesday came around last week, GitHub user Zeffy finally had the chance to test four batch scripts he created in March, after the release of KB4012218. His scripts worked as intended by patching Windows DLL files, skipping the CPU version check, and delivering updates to Windows 7 and 8.1 computers running 7th generation CPUs.
Dilligence? (Score:3)
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I thought MS caved and said they wouldn't support new CPU features on old OSes?
Everyone thought this because the alternative was just too stupid to comprehend even coming from a company like Microsoft. No they actually meant it when they said they won't support windows. Despite the version of windows being within the mainstream support period and running on compatible hardware. It wasn't a typo which every sane person in the world assumed.
https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
How Long Until M$ deliberately breaks this... (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW: It is no big effort for M$ to continue to test this as almost all testing by M$ is automated. There is an alter-motive behind this. Which I knew what it was.
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There is an alter-motive behind this.
The word you're looking for is, "ulterior."
Re: How Long Until M$ deliberately breaks this... (Score:2)
I'll stick with "alter"
Thank your ego for me; that was funny.
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Definition is one thing, but grammar is also important. A "verb-noun" compound like "watch-tower" means a tower for watching. A "motive for altering" is not what you're looking for.
Uh, "watch-tower" is "noun-verb". It's when a watch is really big and towers over something, duh.
Re:How Long Until M$ deliberately breaks this... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be deja-vu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Since December 1991 a pre-release version of Windows 3.1 was designed to return a non-fatal error message if it detected a non-Microsoft DOS.[6] This check came to be known as the AARD code.[9] With the detection code disabled, Windows ran perfectly under DR DOS and its successor Novell DOS. The code was present but disabled in the released version of Windows 3.1.[10]
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You probably get asked this a lot; but what do agencies created by Bush Jr and Truman have to do with Obama?
Re:How Long Until M$ deliberately breaks this... (Score:5, Insightful)
The motive is simple: Force Win10 on everyone so they can force the Windows Store on everyone so they can get everyone's money.
Re:How Long Until M$ deliberately breaks this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How Long Until M$ deliberately breaks this... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm half convinced that money is only part of what they're after. Windows 10 gives them more or less complete control over the computer; they can use your computer for whatever they want, and you have no say about it unless you yank the plug out of the wall or wipe the drive and install something else.
It also means they can put anything they want on your computer or remove anything, and they can sell this ability to the US government (and/or the highest bidder) in exchange for continuing to turn a blind eye to MS's shenanigans.
With Win10, using parallel construction to discredit/destroy/imprison government whistle-blowers, political/ideological enemies, or other "inconvenient people" is as easy as point-and-click. Ah, progress!
Strat
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Serious tin foil hat time pal. You may want to install foil around your house too.
I guess you missed the whole Snowden/NSA thing, and all the other revelations about US domestic spying/mass-data collection and analysis, "parallel construction", "Stingray" IMSI-catchers, etc etc, huh?
Sorry AC, but now all but the most "fringe" people who used to be labeled tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy-theorists regarding the lengths the US government has gone and is willing to go to monitor the domestic populace are now labeled "prescient" and are running around shouting "See!? I *told* you so!!"
Strat
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Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't also out to get you.
see below [slashdot.org]
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How obtuse do you have to be to think it's a good idea to copy your username into the body of your post.
You use this word, but I do not think it means what you think it means. Besides, I'm so old you're lucky I didn't sign it using hieroglyphs and sent it using RFC 2549.
My lawn, off it you'll get!
Strat
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you have no say about it unless you yank the plug out of the wall or wipe the drive and install something else.
It doesn't have to be that drastic. Whitelist IP ranges you need on your Windows box at an external firewall. Do most all your browsing/networking in a VM. The Windows 10 side will never be able to phone home again. No telemetry, no forced updates, and you have reigned in the beast.
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No matter. Job forced (literally!) Win10 on my work computer, and I've 'sanitized' it as much as I possibly can, but I'm still on XP at home, and the Sandybridge system sitting on a phone book next to that has Linux Mint on it. Switch over as soon as I get the kinks worked out of it.
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Yes, that's a solution until the day that Windows 10 updates with a new "always on" feature that requires windows to be able to open whatever ports and connect to any IP in the world in order to let you log in to your own damn PC. MS saw how successful Apple has been with the walled garden, the problem is they are building a damn prison, complete with the rubber hose and regular guard beatings...
The other problem with your approach even now, is how many people using Windows will be able to set that up? Th
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The bigger problem is: We won't know which "patch" M$ will 'break' to induce this problem.
I thought we weren't going to be getting individual patches anymore anyway? They're rolled up into weekly or monthly packages now.
A.K.A. riders A.K.A. how the legislature perverts the bill you wants to pass to force you to give them unrelated stuff they want
Why Update? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope to not require Windows in the future but Windows Update is disabled on my Win7 machine and everything's in its right place.
Thanks, but no thanks (Score:2)
Thanks for thinking of people who won't run Windows > 7, but no thanks. I've got enough machine to run the Windows software I've got now, and except for very cheap games (of the sort which have already been released now, or older) I'm unlikely to ever give a crap again.
The next machine I build with a more advanced architecture than this FX-8350 will just have to run Linux.
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Windows 10, M$'s 'a bridge to far'(or would that be a probe to far). What is mind boggling, they can see the reaction but the still emphatically push it (phone sales or the extreme lack there of), in a giant fuck you to their customers. When they push it that hard, it starts to look extremely nefarious, when establishment governments remain silent about those levels of consumer abuse, it looks even worse.
We'll see (Score:4, Funny)
And yet...... (Score:2)
Re: hmmm, yes (Score:5, Funny)
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"Windows 10 ain't done until Kaby Lake don't run".
Wait, wasn't there something similar from Microsoft in the 1908s?
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Re: hmmm, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you afraid of? That he'll install something which listens to every word you say? That it'll record every mouse click? That it will uninstall your applications? That it'll change your defaults in preference to it's own?
Uh...I kinda forgot if I was talking about zeffy or MS.
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Yeah, this is a choice between the possibility of malware vs. the certainty of it.
(The real right answer is "Linux," of course. And the other right answer is to avoid the newer Intel chips that are infected with the Intel Management Engine [techrepublic.com] backdoor and the newer AMD chips that are infected with the Platform Security Processor [reddit.com] backdoor to begin with.)
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As bad as major-corporation spyware is, spyware by a random hacker is much worse. If Microsoft does anything truly horrible, it has identifiable executives who can go to jail for it. A random hacker does not have the same disincentive.
Re:hmmm, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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I heard that some people were installing patches from some dude named "Microsoft" and that company got caught red-handed, writing and distributing malware. (They wrote Windows to work directly contrary to the interests of the user. For example, they went to extra trouble to make it not be installable on modern hardware.)
Installing unaudited software written by people you don't know may sound crazy, but the vast majority of users routinely do something far worse: they install software written by people they
Re:Neat--until... (Score:5, Informative)
This is probably doing the opposite of what you're thinking--letting older software run on newer CPUs.
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Though they weren't really relevant to PCs or Windows, the Coldfire chips are a good example of this kind of design change. Though they were marketed as having a m68k heritage, they basically took away most of the instructions and addressing modes that made the original 680x0 so incredibly convenient to program in assembly language.
RISC processors were developed to be efficient and cheap. The m68k was developed to be convenient for assembly-language programmers. The 680x0 family indulged programmers in ways
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Intel x86 and derivatives still have instructions for BCD manipulation. Never used them, myself, so I don't know how they compare to what m68k had.
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Sort of. Newer processors can also eliminate or replace instructions,
They Don't, Period. Intel goes through great lengths to make sure every later generation of X86 is fully backwards compatible with all the previous generations, all the way back to 80386.
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It wasn't intended to make it believable or to silence disagreement. Writing "Period" means the same as "the end" as in there's nothing more to it than the sentence that preceded it. That is "Intel goes to great lengths,... Period" Not "when they feel like it", not "when they aren't doing something dodgy", not "when management tells them to" just period.
Do you even English man?
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There's no legitimate disagreeing viewpoint; It is a fact that Kaby Lake is backwards compatible all the way back to Nehalem with no dropped instructions, and no instructions modified in a way that introduces compatibility issues; they Kaby Lake processors are not "Designed for Windows 10" as MS would imply, And in fact, the differences between the 7th generation and 6th generation CPUs that are still supported are so miniscule as to be dismissed as mere footnotes, or
minor tweaks, which hav
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Use of the word 'Period' to indicate that the writer is interested in finalising the discussion after having made their point
Except that is not what it means. I don't know where you got that from. In fact it has nothing to do with persuasion at all. It is not an attempt at persuasion. It is not an attempt to end the discussion either. I can see how you might make that mistake if you based the meaning entirely on context, but you have been misunderstanding its meaning all these years. It's really just a form of emphasis I guess. Like a semantic form of italics. It is a way to convey meaning. Not to convince.You may not like it jus
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In this case it's somewhat analogous to a thing they do in German, where words that have no literal meaning (e.g. "denn") are inserted for emphasis.
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I don't know of any recent Intel cases
Implying you know of any cases? No really please name an x86 instruction (that was official and documented when the processor was released) that has been removed.
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Yeah, hardware compatibility is the problem.
This has already been explained many times over, it really isn't that hard to understand:
Windows 7 was designed nearly 10 years ago before any x86/x64 SOCs existed. For Windows 7 to run on any modern silicon, device drivers and firmware need to emulate Windows 7’s expectations for interrupt processing, bus support, and power states- which is challenging for WiFi, graphics, security, and more. As partners make customizations to legacy device drivers, services, and firmware settings, customers are like
Re:Neat--until... (Score:5, Informative)
Linux had similar problems with running on Skylake and newer processors on kernels earlier than around [....]
Windows 7 and 8 have been running FINE (or reasonably well) on these Newer processors for over a Year; these operating systems are BARELY serviced anymore at all, Only occasional Defect updates come out for the latest bug in Internet Explorer, Flash, etc.
Even though Windows 8 is still under its promised MAINSTREAM support period which includes New hardware enablement, they're getting cut off for new security patches too.
The security updates Are not CPU-related. They work fine except for the arbitrary forced update disablement. MS is going out of their way to maliciously attack people who run Windows 7 and Windows 8 on newer hardware, that probably means they downgraded their OS and are running Windows 7 and 8 just fine, Because the old OSes will run on new CPUs just fine, and power management differences are not all that significant (And can be disabled, anyways).
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> How long until they do something to break this?
Don't worry, it's rando github scripts all the way down.
Re:DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly right. If you don't like the way your OS vendor treats you, then stop bitching and whining about it and find a vendor that gives you the service you want.
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^5
Re:DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run... (Score:4, Insightful)
and find a vendor that gives you the service you want.
The vendors with the right service have the wrong product and the vendors with the right product have the wrong service.
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Wrong. Complaining is fine, but only if it's productive. If it's non-productive, then you're just an annoying whiner.
If your complaining actually serves a purpose, such as getting someone to change, or getting people to choose another vendor, then great, complain away! For instance: "I bought a Chevy car, and the ignition key turned off while I was driving down the freeway, causing me to wreck. I almost died! Here's some links showing how Chevy knew about this design flaw and covered it up to save a li
Re: DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run... (Score:2, Insightful)
They're in the business of making OS, it's kind of expected for them to make it work on any hardware. Linux and BSD maintainers have to do the same work as do some other proprietary OS and manage to support various architectures that are several decades old.
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"They're in the business of making OS, it's kind of expected for them to make it work on any hardware."
you say this as though it's a fundamental property of an operating system. really, it's pretty damned unusual for a commercial OS to run on "any hardware" (even when you interpret that in the limited sense you're using it), and it's an expectation that Microsoft mostly established in the first place. this was not altruism, of course; it was a business decision to take over the PC market. since that's now b
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"Any hardware" - it's an x86 processor. From Windows 7's point of view it has the same feature set as any prior processor. They don't have to do ANYTHING to make it work. They actually have to do work to make Windows 7 NOT work with recent hardware.
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obviously, the money to make Windows 7 not work is less than the money they think they'll save by supporting fewer Windows 7 users.
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They're in the business of making OS, it's kind of expected for them to make it work on any hardware
cf. MacOS
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At least that has been free. Microsoft wants you to pay $150 to upgrade to their latest point-release of NT5.
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Re:Microsoft...why couldn't they do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile a few of us will continue babying along Windows XP until we can get Linux running. Microsoft can go pound sand, I'm not playing anymore.
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..no, they just want to put a gun to everyone's heads and force them to use Windows 10. Really, they do.
Oh don't be so melodramatic.. We've had viable alternatives in macOS and Linux (which of course you also need to run newer versions of if you want to run these newer processor architectures) for many many years now and if you're only just realizing "oh maybe Microsoft doesn't have my best interests in mind" then that's your own fault. Even if you really really need to run that program and it's Windows only? Run it in a sanitized VM, again a solved problem for many many years.
Re:Microsoft...why couldn't they do this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux and Mac are only viable if:
- You can stand their interfaces. Linux is configurable enough that its probably OK but macOS is a bloody nightmare to use when you're used to Windows.
- You can configure it. Applies mostly to Linux in order to deal with #1 since Apple's UI design motto is basically "do it our way or fuck you." This is not really an easy chore and requires some fairly strong computer skills if you want anything beyond the defaults.
- You don't require any software that runs only on Windows. Yeah VMs work but they start getting into the previous point of requiring computer skills. Plus they're typically a pain in the ass and always at least a little bit slower compared to running applications natively. Never mind if you're into games that don't have Mac ports (and Linux gaming is still barely worth talking about..)
- And even if you set up the VM, all you've done is push the problem from the hardware to the virtual hardware -- you're still running Windows on that VM and unless you're running a clean image every time you start the VM, you've got all of the same problems (and of course doing the clean image plan has its own massive problems in terms of convenience.)
- And then forgetting all of that, you have to rely on your replacement OS to not be just as bad. Looking at macOS in particular for this point. Apple may be crusading to avoid having to give your data to the government, but they sure as hell aren't taking the "just don't collect it in the first place" route.
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Linux and Mac are only viable if:
- You can stand their interfaces. Linux is configurable enough that its probably OK but macOS is a bloody nightmare to use when you're used to Windows.
- You can configure it. Applies mostly to Linux in order to deal with #1 since Apple's UI design motto is basically "do it our way or fuck you." This is not really an easy chore and requires some fairly strong computer skills if you want anything beyond the defaults.
If you'd rather suffer lack of security updates because you can't cope with any non-Windows GUI then - aside from being a pretty lame attempt at an excuse - you're only stuck because you choose to be.
- You don't require any software that runs only on Windows. Yeah VMs work but they start getting into the previous point of requiring computer skills. Plus they're typically a pain in the ass and always at least a little bit slower compared to running applications natively.
They're typically not a pain in the ass, in fact they're typically VERY VERY easy and with modern virtualization they tend to offer near-native performance, but most people that have some program that only runs on Windows can cope with a minor performance hit as a tradeoff to running Windows 10 natively wrt pri
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If you'd rather suffer lack of security updates because you can't cope with any non-Windows GUI then - aside from being a pretty lame attempt at an excuse - you're only stuck because you choose to be.
Yes. New interfaces can be learned. Its just a pain in the ass and requires a hell of a lot of time, patience and retraining. I've run on Linux before. It was alright, but I do too much non-Linux stuff to make it worth the effort. MacOS kills me though.
They're typically not a pain in the ass ... So what specifically do you find so difficult about VMs?
Having to start them up every time you want to do something is a pain in the ass. Think "annoying" more than "difficult." Well, unless you need to do something non-standard and then they can be difficult depending on what you need to do.
If you really need those games then dual boot into Windows 10 just for games and nothing else.
Again, a right
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What specific problem are you talking about that has been "pushed"?
The fact that you're running Windows. Windows is still Windows, even in a VM, and has all of the same issues that Windows on hardware has.
Why do you consider running Windows to be a problem? ... mitigates (in a very big way) the privacy concerns around it.
Isolating it in a VM away from things like your personal data, browsing information, etc
Except all of the other issues I've mentioned about this being annoying as fuck to deal with and not exactly easy for a layperson to setup in the first place.
If it's too hard for you then don't do it, again if you're not willing to resolve the problem then you can opt to just live with the problem. Or maybe you don't consider it a problem to begin with in which case this is all irrelevant to you anyway. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?
No.. I'm just saying that there are costs to the alternatives as well.
Oh really?
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I read this last night, was hoping to come back to some more nonsense, but i think he realized that he was just talking in circles about his laziness and lack of aspiration. You made a bunch of very good points about alternatives i hope some people take it to heed.
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At this point it's still less work to run one of those "Windows 10 fixer" apps to disable/block the advertising and malware then it is to switch over to Linux.
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I prefer OSX look and feel to Windows 7 and 8. Simple, minimalistic, no ribbons, no gloss, no extra junk to get in your way.
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Windows is only viable if:
In other words, if you can't deal with Mac OS or Linux, there is no "viable" OS anymore.
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Yep. Apple is much worse in this respect. My 2006 Mac Pro had processing power and memory that is still on par, or better than, the current Mac mini once you upgrade the video card. But Apple stopped supporting new OS versions on it, which quickly renders the whole Apple ecosystem defunct. You can't update iTunes, so then you can't sync a new iPhone, for example. And finding compatible browsers starts to be an issue too, as new software for OSX tends to just not run on older OSes. I had to res
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The only thing MacOS is missing out of the box is window snapping, but there are ways to fix that....
(I'm wondering off topic a bit, but...)
1. focus follows mouse and window menu bars within the window (need the latter for the former to work).
2. legal/supported hackintosh.
If Apple had made their OS generally available in the same way Windows is, and I could do focus follows mouse, I would have had it running on at least one of my machines, and I suspect that would have grown into most of them.
For those coming from Windows, and buying new hardware, it really shouldn't be a big deal. Sure, everything underne
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Mint XFCE (or probably Xubuntu) by default ends up giving you pretty much the equivalent of the de-crapified 7-and-earlier Windows interface. It even does snap-to-edge now out of the box :)
The theming engine is split into two different pieces, somewhat oddly, but that's when you're getting into customizing it.
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Re:Microsoft...why couldn't they do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If this was anyone but Microsoft, that may well be right.
But this IS Microsoft, and they have been doing their absolute damnedest to shove Win10 down everyone's throat in every conceivable way possible.
Further, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from releasing any necessary updates to support the newest processors, assuming updates are even necessary. They've done this plenty of times in the past. Windows XP was supported for, what? 15 years? No CPU problems there. Windows 7 has been around for 8 years, and up till now there hasn't been any issues with processor updates. There have been a whole lot of new CPUs released over the past 20 years, and yet suddenly NOW it's a problem? I don't think so.
I don't understand how this is isn't class-action suit worthy. Microsoft has explicitly declared that they refuse to honour the contract that they would support Windows 7 until 2020.
Re:Microsoft...why couldn't they do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one expects MS to provide support for new processor or platform features.
We do expect the exact same files for OS security patches to be made available to all since the files don't care what the underlying processor is.
In the very rare case that some bug pops up on new processors but not old processors, then it's errata time, along with a BIOS/UEFI/microcode patch to fix it without Windows even knowing about it.
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No one expects MS to provide support for new processor or platform features.
I expect support for new processors. I don't expect support or even use of platform features, but I damn well expect support for processors.
Windows 7 and 8.1 are designed for x86. I expect Microsoft to provide support for their versions regardless on which x86 processor I attempt to run it on for the duration of their support agreements. I'm not even talking extended support. Windows 8.1 is in the ____(1) mainstream support period and they are refusing to support it even though you are running it on a curre
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It's not just processors but chipsets. You can't expect support for new SATA, USB, thunderbolt and other types of controllers. You can't expect new wifi drivers or support for the latest GPU. That's just not reasonable.
I think it's a dick move for microsoft to put in this patch, but from there perspective a user running an old windows version where it runs poorly, overheats or just has a bad experience will blame them for that too. It kind of makes sense from that perspective.
You guys are looking at this
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It's not just processors but chipsets. You can't expect support for new SATA, USB, thunderbolt and other types of controllers. You can't expect new wifi drivers or support for the latest GPU. That's just not reasonable.
Why isn't it reasonable? Linux can do it. There are definitely programmers out there who can right the code to support the hardware. You know who hires such people? Motherboard manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, AsRock, and MSI. They do it because they believe in helping people. They do it purely out of kindness...oh wait. Actually they do it because a lot of potential customers are running older and much better operating systems and don't want to have to upgrade just to buy a new motherboard. They do it be
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Linux doesn't do it. Third parties back port some things from newer kernels, but at the end of the day, old kernels like say 2.6.18 aren't getting updated with new hardware support now.
Motherboard manufacturers do not put out updated drivers. They don't make chipsets. In fact, often times they won't even tell you which realtek, broadcom or intel chip they used. Asus won't even fix secure boot on their motherboards so that you can boot an OS that isn't windows or linux with it disabled on gpt volumes for so
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At no point has Microsoft *ever* been responsible for supporting all those drivers. Ever. They may throw some base-level drivers for common well known hardware, but when something new comes out, it is the manufacturer's responsibility to put out new drivers.
This has been true for every single piece of hardware in existence, whether it's a PCI winmodem, a printer, a graphics card, or a motherboard chipset. If you've ever done a clean install of Windows, you would know that there are a cavalcade of drivers
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Microsoft has QA'd drivers as part of the US and also as part of windows update. WHQL drivers I believe. They have to test those in several hardware configurations or have the vendors follow a process. Either way, it's a pain in the butt. Being one of the big 3 operating systems, they at least get some drivers of course.
Microsoft isn't taking windows away from anyone who is still running a beater PC from 7 years ago. You can still use your crappy windows 7 OS, just not on a modern system. I fail to see
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You like Windows 10? Fine. You don't mind not having control of your machine? That's your choice. I despise it. But our personal OS preferences are irrelevant to the discussion.
You're assuming that the number of non-OEM installs are an insignificant number. They are not. Between retail copies, Volume License copies, and people who have simply exercised their right upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows 10, this is still a very sizeable number. This is also irrelevant to the discussion.
What IS relevant is
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You can't expect support for new SATA, USB, thunderbolt and other types of controllers.
From Microsoft? I don't. I also never have. On top of that they never did. Hell before Windows 8 I hadn't even seen a version of Windows that detected my HDDs during install or booted with my display at anything other than garbage resolution followed by a warning saying it's not "optimal".
Microsoft should support their OS with security patches.
Vendors should support their hardware with drivers.
The only thing that has changed here is that Microsoft has arbitrarily decided not to provide *security patches* fo
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OEMs love to refuse choice to their customers. Just look at how many sell systems with Linux preloaded. Look at how many will support a system running another OS.
Microsoft still supports their OS on beater hardware from 10 years ago. They won't support modern hardware that didn't even exist when they made the agreement. I fail to see the problem.
As for the hardware statement above that I made, let me give a more concrete example. Most SSDs now are at least 4k sectors. If you format your drive poorly (not 4
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OEMs love to refuse choice to their customers.
Yes I'm sure refusing to sell the latest and greatest and most expensive hardware is right up there on their list.
Sorry I didn't read the rest of your post. Not after you open with such a stupid line.
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Apologies for my previous post. I was actually curious at how many other brain dead stupid things you would write so I did read them. Let's go through the list:
OEMs love to refuse choice to their customers.
OEMs sell hardware that makes money. Right now they can't sell the most expensive hardware on the market to any customer with a locked in eco-system (i.e. most of the customers of Dell and HP). Your comment is stupid.
They won't support modern hardware that didn't even exist when they made the agreement.
No one is asking them to support hardware. It is their job to support software. The hardware vendors will support their hardware. Why w
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Well any decent company would support past customers just for the sake of keeping customers. Whether it's a new feature or not it make sense to support it.
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I think that it has more with Microsoft wanting to avoid a repeat of the Windows XP support debacle, where people were installing fresh copies of it just a few months before it was about to go End Of Life.
These people then started screaming that couldn't get security patches for their 13 year old operating system, even though they probably shouldn't have installed it that new PC to begin with.
Even now, there are still a ton of unpatched Windows XP systems out in the field running as information kiosk system
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And what's wrong the customers with that viewpoint? Why should a company treat past loyal customers like scum just because they like an older version? Even if it's a pain in the ass to maintain, it's a huge PR hit to dismiss most of your installed base that way. There's a big shift away from their core loyal base of office workers towards home users who were already migrating away from PCs. If they want customers to upgrade then they should make upgrading attractive to the customers, rather than a ho-hum
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My Win 7 box will run until no more security updates come in 2020.
By then you should be pretty good at reinstalling your system from a clean image and having your data backed up, for that odd time when your box DOES get pwned. Which you really have to try hard to do nowadays - gone are the days of some random worm taking over your box just because you hooked it up to the internet.
And besides, hopefully Flash will be totally dead by 2020 and a major security threat will be gone.
Re:Microsoft...why couldn't they do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Why are they scumbags?
Like, philosophically? I guess because if there aren't vile antagonists, humans would have little to strive against.
Do you mean, practically? Presumably because they think it lines up with their business model, and they have no intention of serving their paying customers if they can get away with not doing that thing.
Or do you mean, why does THIS particular thing exemplify their scumbaggery? Well, that should be obvious: if you have a Windows 7 license, nothing on that box states or implies that the software will be broken by design on Intel chips past a certain date, for no reason except to invalidate the value of your purchase.
> Are you going to pay them extra to keep supporting Win7 on new hardware like that?
If you bought a Windows license, you already did. Nothing about it says "works with these exact chips: beyond that, we can guarantee nothing".
Much more relevantly, testing security and even functional patches on chips which jump through every hoop in the universe to be backwards binary compatible with THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES is no great effort. Not supporting OLD hardware is reasonable for OSes, assuming they don't screw over too many people. Not supporting NEW chips which are backwards compatible is UNPRECEDENTED in the industry. It's just a stupid cash grab to try to force everyone onto that supernaturally awful Windows 10.
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They also never advertised that it would work on all future computer hardware.
But it does work on future hardware. This is the bit where your analogy fails miserably. The newer processors are 100% platform compatible with their predecessors. There is no reason why the new processors should not be supported especially given that one of the OSes in question is still in the middle of it's mainstream support period.
So to summarise:
1. You have a current OS designed for x86 hardware in its mainstream support period.
2. You have a current CPU with an x86 instruction set with feature complete
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Microsoft's job is to make money for their shareholders, and that's it, not to make people happy
No it is not. Their job has nothing to do with their shareholders. Their shareholders can go fuck themselves. They don't matter. Their actual job is to deliver a quality product that gets better with each release instead of worse and which is beneficial to their customers instead of actively being harmful to them. If Microsoft did not essentially have monopoly power in their market segment they would have been out of business a long time ago. They are probably the most inept software company in the world. A
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This is a stupid and idiotic post. No, their job is not to deliver a quality product; where do you get that crazy idea?
Moreover, if you really think that's their job, then obviously they're failing at it. So, what are you going to do about it? You're going to keep using their products, and sending them money, right? That means they're succeeding at their job, because they're still "working" and still getting paid. People who fail at their job get fired. If you don't get fired, you must be doing a good
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> They also never advertised that it would work on all future computer hardware
Conveniently, I actually have the Windows 7 box and disc that I purchased right in front of me!
The top requirement is: "1 GHz or faster 32 bit (x86) or 64 bit (x64) processor".
But even if I didn't have a stupid box, and even if I had one of the licenses that is sold with physical hardware like some kind of savage, failing to issue SECURITY UPDATES to processors that are FULLY BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE is totally ludicrous, and comp
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>That's every company's job, but notice how plenty of them manage to do that without taking actions that are "just barely legal" or non-monopolist in nature.
Sure, but that's because their customers will actually leave them if they become too dickish.
But there's LOTS of companies that are just as bad as MS, and people still flock to buy their products. John Deere is one that's come up a lot lately in the tech news. Oracle is another. And there's various other "enterprise" software makers that are gener
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Meh. Works just fine for most of us.
Until it doesn't, and you find out you can't read the logs to figure out why.
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Sorry duder. You got my name wrong and you're accusing the wrong person. I'm not the apps!/ LUDDITE guy (though I do respect his work).
In fact, I don't post as AC to troll/spam at all. I've also been falsely accused of being the moo! guy because I posted it on some stories that hadn't been hit by it yet, and people assumed I was the original troll and had forgotten to post as AC. Nope.
In closing: Happy Tuesday from the Golden Girls!
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If you don't want to use Windows 10, there are always alternatives.
Yes. The best being Windows 7. The second best being Windows XP if your motherboard and other hardware has drivers for it. If you meant Linux well surely you were already dual booting that. The only point of running Windows is for software that does not have a viable Linux equivalent and there are lots unfortunately.
Microsoft has been evil and inept for a long time, but they are reaching new levels of both pure evil and ineptitude with Windows 10. I won't downgrade to that piece of shit while I am still bre
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Microsoft has deprecated old versions of Windows on this hardware for a reason
Yes and we all know what that reason is. No one wants to run Windows 10. Almost everyone hates it. Probably has something to do with the fact that it is very badly designed malware disguised as an OS, but who knows. For whatever reason it is the new Windows ME. The difference is this time Microsoft wants to try to force people to use it and apparently are willing to spend millions of dollars to try to make that happen. I mean fuck they can't even give it away for free. How are they ever going to get end use
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