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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the hanging-machines-out-to-dry dept.

Microsoft has quietly killed off Windows 7 support for older Intel PCs.

If your PC doesn't run Streaming Single Instructions Multiple Data (SIMD) Extensions 2, you apparently won't be getting any more Win7 patches. At least, that's what I infer from some clandestine Knowledge Base documentation changes made in the past few days.

Even though Microsoft says it's supporting Win7 until January 14, 2020, if you have an older machine — including any Pentium III — you've been blocked, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Here's how it happened. Back in March, the Win7 Monthly Rollup, KB 4088875, included a warning about SSE2 problems:

A Stop error occurs on computers that don't support Streaming Single Instructions Multiple Data (SIMD) Extensions 2 (SSE2).

I talked about the bugs in KB 4088875 — one of the buggiest Win7 patches in recent memory — shortly after it was released. At the time, the KB article said:

Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release.

[...] To recap: Up until June 15, Microsoft was promising that it would fix the bug that prevented Win7 Monthly Rollups and Security-only updates from installing on older pre-SSE2 machines. After June 15, Microsoft wrote off the pre-SSE2 population, without notice or fanfare, and retroactively changed the documentation to cover its tracks.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:24AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:24AM (#701828) Journal

    I am no fan of Microsoft, but I think many can agree that the boat anchor of legacy hardware and software support has held Microsoft back.

    Embrace, extend, extinguish... can you imagine how fast Microsoft could have moved on this innovation path if only it haven't had to support legacy hardware and software?

    (Bold as it may be, one possible outcome could be global extinction - imagine a Microsoft dropping support for XP and forcing the transition to Vista for submarines [mspoweruser.com]. Maybe even submarines in the cloud?)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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