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posted by n1 on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the four-more-years dept.

Microsoft has extended the duration and scope of support for Windows 7 and 8.1 operating systems running on Skylake chips:

Microsoft today repudiated an early retirement date for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 support, saying that it will patch those operating systems on PCs running Intel's Skylake silicon until 2020 and 2023, respectively.

The move was a complete rollback of a January [decree] that Microsoft called a "clarification" of its support policy. Under the January plan, Microsoft would have ended most support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on July 17, 2017, if the operating systems were powering machines equipped with Intel's now-current Skylake processor family. At the time, Microsoft attributed the decision to Windows 7's age and the hassle that Microsoft and OEMs would have to go through to ensure the 2009 operating system ran on Intel's latest architecture. In March, Microsoft retreated from the original mandate, saying then that it was extending the support drop-dead date by a year, to July 18, 2018. After that date, Microsoft said, it and its computer-making partners would not guarantee that they would revise device drivers to support Windows 7 and 8.1 on newer hardware.

[...] The one support rule that Microsoft did not reverse was its decision to support only Windows 10 on Intel's Skylake successor, an architecture dubbed "Kaby Lake;" and on AMD's next-generation "Bristol Ridge." That remained in place today.

Also at The Register and Windows.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:24PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:24PM (#387487)

    Some tech in the right department in MS finally figured out how to port xHCI installer support from Windows 10 back into 7 (7 was EHCI only, and Intel dropped EHCI from Skylake.)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:34PM (#387493)

    You could just add a usb 3.0 driver to the ISO with tools from the mobo manufacturer and install from that.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:07PM

    by FunkyLich (4689) on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:07PM (#387553)

    But really, is it such a hard thing to do to backport into Win7 kernel drivers already existing for the Win10 kernel? I am not a system programmer, my programming skills I consider them even less then mediocre, but is it such a horrendous and apocalyptic undertake to do? Worthy of boasting news and billboards with "We will *not* do this, listen very carefully everyone" ?

    Or is just the same old way to socialengineer as many people as possible into never giving up the habit of buying more hardware and software and other things you could perfectly live without?

    I remember something I read: "Never credit ignorance for what can adequately explained by malice."

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by fnj on Saturday August 13 2016, @10:53PM

      by fnj (1654) on Saturday August 13 2016, @10:53PM (#387643)

      I remember something I read: "Never credit ignorance for what can adequately explained by malice."

      That is backwards.

      The very frequently quoted Hanlon's razor [wikipedia.org] states "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.". Robert A. Heinlein expressed the idea, and may have originated it, in a 1941 short story, Logic of Empire: "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."

      Or, as Goethe wrote in 1774, "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice".

      You are either mis-remembering what you read, or else what you read was somebody standing common wisdom on its head.

      • (Score: 2) by http on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:27PM

        by http (1920) on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:27PM (#387651)

        We're talking about microsoft here, either direction is valid.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:44PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:44PM (#387653)

      I would credit bureaucratic nonsense before malice or ignorance. Literally thousands of MS employees probably know how to do the tech part of this, and hundreds of them probably have personally performed older Windows installs on Skylake for themselves. Trim that number to tens who know how to navigate the procedural maze to get the update through the product release channels, and probably single digits who had it allocated as an actual project for them to work on, low priority, after all the "important stuff." Sprinkle in a little malice from marketing or other areas that don't really want the fix out there too quickly, and you have a good explanation for the current schedule.

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