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Apparition [soylentnews.org] writes:

Microsoft has quietly killed off Windows 7 support [computerworld.com] 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 [microsoft.com] Win7 until January 14, 2020, if you have an older machine — including any Pentium III [wikipedia.org] — 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 [computerworld.com] in KB 4088875 — one of the buggiest Win7 patches in recent memory — shortly after it was released. At the time, the KB article said [askwoody.com]:

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.

Original Submission