I don't get what the big deal is. Does Linux add support for newer Intel and AMD chips in old kernels? No. Does Apple add support for newer Intel and AMD chips in older versions of Mac OS? I'm sure no. So why does Microsoft have to do something the other companies aren't doing either? I mean it's not like they actively prevent older Windows versions on running on these chips, it's just that they don't add support for the newest chip features.
Sometimes when I see these newspapers bashing Microsoft I question whether they even think about what they are writing before pressing the publish button. Headline: Microsoft is doing what all other OS companies are doing too.
> Does Linux add support for newer Intel and AMD chips in old kernels? No.
Yes. All big distributions backport drivers to older kernels they still support. And Microsoft still supports Windows 7 and 8, and has to do so until 2020/2023 or heads will roll, no matter what their marketing wants people to think.
Windows 8 has almost no corporate adoption, so the interesting data point is 2020 and 7, which is just a bit more than three years away. Migration targets should be somewhere around 2019 (last minute really), but procurement for new machines with Windows 10 builds might start being rolled out in the first half of 2019 with most corps, which is practically just 2 years away. Factor in that the next generation chips still need some time to get to marked and you have a rather narrow gap, especially with corps that have a more conservative hardware policy. I don't see the issue here. I just hope that the Windows 10 rolling update will reduce the enterprise upgrade anxiety.
small nitpick: the 2020/2023 dates are for extended support, where they only provide security patches. But you're right in that windows 8.1 at least is still in mainstream support, so they will accept feature requests (until 2018).
Microsoft supporting Windows 7 and 8 does not mean implementing support for all future HW. They had HW requirements on launch and Microsoft supports that set of HW.
Supporting Windows 7 on hardware from that era and making it forward compatible are two different things.
If Windows 7 came with your machine you're covered. If you're looking to build or buy a new system you need to go Windows 10. If you don't like that, you have other non-Windows options.
Red Hat does "hardware enablement" for newer chipsets in older versions of RHEL, by backporting the necessary changes to the older kernel.
However your point is still correct: RHEL 6 which will support these new chips was released a year after Windows 7. RHEL 5, released two years before Win7 is no longer getting hardware enablement, only security fixes and other critical stuff.
> However your point is still correct: RHEL 6 which will support these new chips was released a year after Windows 7. RHEL 5, released two years before Win7 is no longer getting hardware enablement, only security fixes and other critical stuff.
How does that make his point correct? There's still Windows 8, which neither gets support, and which was released two years after RHEL 6.
Windows 8.1 was technically also its own version and released 3 years after RHEL 6, but I'd even be okay with ignoring that one.
Whether or not you want to ignore it, Windows 8.1 is still in the full mainstream support phase until January 2018. This is the equivalent of Red Hat's hardware enablement phase, and totally ridiculous that _at least_ that version is not getting support for the newer hardware platforms.
> Does Linux add support for newer Intel and AMD chips in old kernels?
The kernel devs may not, but distros backport new stuff to old kernels constantly. For example, RHEL/CentOS 6 is kernel 2.6.32, release 7 years ago. But it supports modern CPUs.
More succinctly: Linux doesn't have this problem at all because it's open source. You can stitch together the kernel in any way you want, and layer any user space on top of that to get an OS.
It's actually not a big deal but with the issues Microsoft has had with Windows 10 over the past year, it makes for good media fodder to stir up the masses. When this first hit the tech news sites earlier this year, my answer to anyone shouting "OMG I can't have my Win7 on my Skylake, die Micro$oft!" was to politely ask them to attempt to install Windows 98 on a Core i-series machine. You could see the gears turning in their skulls and revelation would dawn upon them that yes, this has happened before, many times, and is a perfectly normal progression.
It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.
There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.
my answer to anyone shouting "OMG I can't have my Win7 on my Skylake, die Micro$oft!" was to politely ask them to attempt to install Windows 98 on a Core i-series machine
Done that, and it works (as well as Win98 can, in any case.) Other apps from around that time will work too. Of course it can only use one core, but it's interesting to see just how ridiculously fast even a single core can be after 10 years of hardware improvement if the software hasn't "grown to fill the space".
It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.
That's the opposite situation; newer software on older hardware.
Sorry, I should have expanded on the Mac example. My point was that just as you wouldn't expect Windows 10 or the latest Mac OS to run on ancient hardware, you can't expect the latest hardware to continue support for old software past a certain point. x86 hardware and operating systems aren't created in different universes, they are designed alongside one another to work together.
They are two entirely different situations. Non-techie enteprise users have no afinity for their processors, only the applications they rely on and the interface they're familiar with.
No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP - which always ran fine on iX machines.
Now, many people still prefer Win 7 to the creeping user-hostile horror that is Win 10 - if only because it's possible to use Win 7 with relative confidence that an update won't suddenly kill your machine, or your webcam, or your Kindle, or whatever else MS manages to screw up in the next year or two.
That's not a trivial difference. MS+Intel are attempting to force users towards an OS that is inherently broken, and - given the level of competence on display in the Windows division at the moment - is unlikely to ever work reliably.
As I recall Win 98 and 98SE were hugely popular. People may not have loved them, but I don't think it was generally disputed that they were a huge improvement over Win 95. In fact, hardly anyone liked Win ME, and many clung to 98 until XP arrived, much like people clung to XP and avoided Vista until Win 7 arrived.
"No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP"
That's not true at all. Windows XP was based on NT, so had a very different technical base than 98. It had a completely different driver model, and could not run real-mode DOS apps. There was tons of hardware and software that it couldn't run. There were lots of people running 98 for a very long time to run legacy apps and hardware after XP came out. There probably still are.
The big difference is that those machines aren't on the internet, so no software maintenance is required.
This is just completely wrong on every level. Plenty of people liked Windows 98. There was the general "I don't want to upgrade" crowd, but more specifically, there were the gamers who wanted to keep playing the games they had already paid for. Windows XP wasn't great for that.
That gamer inertia was powerful enough that Windows 98 got DirectX 9 in December 2002, well after the release of Windows XP, and Microsoft released their last DirectX on 98 in December 2006.
If memory serves, Win 98SE fixed many vanilla 98 problems before the love. Same with XP pre service packs; #1 fixed many stability issues, #2 fixed many back-compatibility issues(or vice-versa). Same comparison can be made about the Vista & 7(aka Vista SP7) releases. What also came with each new release was bloat, poorly implemented features(some initially, others perpetually) and phone-home functionality: XP=4, Vista=32, 7SP1>40. Win NT was the last OS MS created, it's been feature rich-er iterations ever since.
Revisionist bullshit. Every new version of a Microsoft OS had been met with derision and complaints that "the previous version was the best" up until another version is released. People thought XP was going to be the ME release of Win 2000 with it first came out.
Your forgetting many versions sucked before the first or second service pack. MS tends to release things ~2 years before they are ready. Sometimes they still suck after those service packs.
Case in point at release win 98 was rather iffy, 98se was solid. XP was much better after SP1, win 7 was ok to start with but defiantly got better.
->There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.
This is not "new software on old hardware".
OK, It's happened before with other companies. For example Sony saying PS3 games will run on the PS4.
But that kind of nonesense is why you don't buy Sony hardware, and their stock price is trundling along at record lows..
My advice is more specific.
Anyone holding AMD or Intel stock. Sell now.
It's not what Microsoft is doing, it's what they have decided not to do, which is support their older operating systems. Apple doesn't have this problem because their supported hardware is very narrow in scope, usually only works for a small range of OS releases, and no one tries to install Leopard on their brand new Macbooks.
As I've said before, the issue is with the removal of legacy hardware. Intel removed EHCI support for USB in it's chips with Skylake in favor of xHCI. This has been a long time coming and not a malicious or insidious act. Windows 7 doesn't natively have xHCI support and Microsoft isn't adding features to Windows 7. So, on Skylake, you can't install Windows 7 via USB and you can't use a USB keyboard or mouse during installation because the USB drivers are incompatible.
They will actively refuse to issue new Windows 7 licenses to OEM on these new chips. They are kind of actively preventing older Windows versions running on these chips, yes.
Yeah but the problem with installing a retail windows 7 on an OEM hardware (as in mostly laptop) that wasn't meant for this OS is that this is mostly custom hardware with no driver available
I recently was forced to drop windows onto a partition on my main laptop. As 8, which came with it, is a PITA I decided to put on 7.
Install goes OK, system comes up and I have no Wireless Drivers. Fine. I plug in Ethernet. Doesn't work. Urgh. Ok, grab drivers on phone, use phone to transfer it. Nope, won't recognise anything in the USB3 ports.
I end up booting into linux and copying the driver install files directly onto the windows partition. If the drivers hadn't been available for windows 7 I would have been completely stuck.
I think you can just install a pirated version, run the Windows Genuine Advantage check (or whatever it's called). It will report that it's a bootleg version then give you an offer to pay for the license to make it legal.
There are many people who consider the older OS versions to be "better" than the latest Windows X.
What "better" means is quite subjective - familiarity, stability, privacy, compatibility, etc.
I really don't know, because I haven't used Windows in many years.
Finally, there's the "pirates" - hundreds of millions of people who run older versions of Windows, which are easier to crack because they're not as 'cloud-enabled' as Windows X.
But all in all, I agree that it's not such a big of a deal..
>Finally, there's the "pirates" - hundreds of millions of people who run older versions of Windows, which are easier to crack because they're not as 'cloud-enabled' as Windows X.
Windows 10 is just as easy to crack as windows 8.1. Just install a local KMS server and you're good to go.
Windows 10 is just as easy to crack as windows 8.1. Just install a local KMS server and you're good to go.
I wonder if the obligatory updates will eventually detect and defeat those cracks, or have the pirates thought of that too? (Or perhaps, given the aggressive push by MS to get everyone on Win10, even giving it away for free, they won't really care.)
Dunno. With Linux being a loosely coupled collection of parts, it is quite possible to upgrade the kernel without disrupting userspace.
And with Apple, you are dealing with one vendor support a small set of their own products. The only way to get into this issue would be with a hackintosh rig.
>So why does Microsoft have to do something other companies aren't doing either?
The bigger the market share, the bigger commitment to users. Microsoft doesn't "have" to ensure their older OSes work on newer chips. That sentiment is just another way of indicating that the userbase may take action (like choose to keep systems even longer, leading to MSFT having to support Win7 even further into legacy than they did for XP).
As well, consider the enterprise customers who are entrenched in Win7 but absolutely need new machines for expansion, but can't commit to replacing all machines. What was simply buying new machines now turns into supporting a new OS in addition.
This! Exactly this. When Apple is doing it that's fine but when Microsoft does it then they are awful. And yet you still get to use tons of old software on w10. I still remember when El capitan came out last year and xcode stopped suddenly working. We all had to update everything. No explanations and no choice in what you gonna run.
All they're saying is that if you go buy a new computer (which will probably have Win10 pre-installed anyways) you need to make sure you have software versions supported on those chipsets/CPUs.
Especially also when your market lead causes a lot of exclusivity like it does in the software world.
I.e. many people have to run Windows to do their job and often even have to run Windows 7 specifically, but might still need new hardware in the future.
> many people have to run Windows to do their job and often even have to run Windows 7 specifically, but might still need new hardware in the future.
Microsoft is under absolutely no obligation to support Windows 7. Those "many people" should and will be forced to upgrade, otherwise a substitute will appear and rake over their jobs/company/market.
People keep complaining, but the desktop market hardly changes.
Exactly. The desktop/laptop market has been stagnating for some time. That's partly because the average hardware in those categories reached the point of being good enough for the average user. Personally, I think it's also partly because much of the PC software industry has been stuck in a rut for the past few years. Overall, for most users, the platform simply hasn't offered anything new that they couldn't already do with their 5+ year old gear.
In areas that do benefit substantially from newer hardware, like gaming or CAD or multimedia creative tools, the traditional PC has still been doing pretty well. There have been a lot of significant advances in areas like SSDs, graphics cards and monitors. There have been lots of advances in smaller, low-energy versions of relatively powerful components that have enabled high-end laptops to do things only chunky desktop workstations could do a few years ago. But these areas are only relatively small parts of the overall PC/laptop sector.
Meanwhile, entire sectors like smartphones, tablets and web apps have taken off like a rocket, by providing hardware that supports new and very different use cases, software that takes advantage of those new opportunities and, almost as importantly I suspect, software that typically is cheap and "just works".
Microsoft had well over a decade of almost totally unchallenged market dominance to figure out user-friendly installation, maintenance, removal and security/sandboxing of applications on Windows, and it rearranged the deck chairs a bit here and there. Apple came along with iPhones, almost one-touch installation from an app store and a [dumbed down|simplified] interface that anyone could use effectively, and they became the biggest company in tech in a fraction of that time.
What concerns me most about Microsoft's current direction is that they seem so determined to chase the cheap/easy sector and alternative revenue sources, which have been so effective for the likes of Apple and Google, that they're losing the default powerful/flexible platform that they've provided for the past two decades in the process, effectively stepping a long way backwards in that sector. The trouble is, because Microsoft have been so dominant in that sector for so long, where do those who still value that power and flexibility go instead, even if they are willing to pay a premium to get it?
It will happen just with any other market before, after reaching a certain plateau, only a niche will care about.
How many people do actually tune their cars, specially modern ones that require all sorts of on-bord computers?
Or customize their VCRs, TVs and so on?
PC have become what every other home computer system already was, plain appliances.
Before the PC all other home computer systems had all their OS, or at least part of it in ROM and where mostly only expandable via external devices on their connection port, very few models had internal expansion bays.
The market has come to realize that the PC flexibilty doesn't pay any more in the age of "good enough hardware" and razor thing margins, so back to the old appliance model.
As for alternative OS, Apple isn't an alternative in the majority of the world. On my home country people earn on average 500 euros, only the upper layer can afford Apple computers.
ChromeOS is hardly practical, and never saw anyone using one in Europe. Just a few shops in Germany trying to get rid of them at any price.
Android might be a solution, but it remains to be seen how the desktop version of Android N really works out in the wild.
As for GNU/Linux systems, I stop considering them as I am yet to see the typical stores that average people go to buy computers invest in a proper packaged whole stack experience.
So this leaves us with Windows, bad or not, that the majority of people already know.
yea but you are on your own if you use newer stuff than what distro provides. distros and microsoft probably picked stable versions that they tested and know that they work.
The best Linux analogue I can think of is systemd. It's not about resisting minor changes or sticking to an obsolete OS and expecting the vendor to support you indefinitely. It's about the rug being pulled out from under your feet and completely fucking over everything you liked about the platform, while all the people you hoped would take a stand, bow their heads and step meekly into line.
With Linux, you can still install an alternative distro that doesn't use systemd. Or you could switch to a BSD. With Windows, you could keep using 7, up until now. Now you will eventually have no choice. It's as if systemd were completely embedded in the kernel and every alternative distro and *NIX nuked from orbit. Only, rather than mostly affecting sysadmins, this affects hundreds of millions of ordinary users.
> The best Linux analogue I can think of is systemd. It's not about resisting minor changes or sticking to an obsolete OS and expecting the vendor to support you indefinitely. It's about the rug being pulled out from under your feet and completely fucking over everything you liked about the platform, while all the people you hoped would take a stand, bow their heads and step meekly into line.
I'm not a fan of systemd, but I think you're way off base. First, this is more of a hardware support issue than a revamped init rapidly growing into a full OS like a cancer. Second, this is the way it's been done since the early days of Windows; it's only in the headlines because Windows 10 is a good punching bag.
> With Windows, you could keep using 7, up until now.
Bullshit. You can keep using Windows 7 until the day your computer dies. There's no magical switch being flipped that suddenly renders your existing Windows 7 installation inoperable the day a Kaby Lake CPU hits the local reseller's shelves. You're being deliberately disingenuous here.
> It's as if systemd were completely embedded in the kernel and every alternative distro and ∗NIX nuked from orbit.
No, no it isn't. Again, this is a hardware support/driver thing, and has nothing to do with what's going on in Linux land. For that matter, who exactly is going to "nuke every alternative distro and ∗NIX from orbit"? While systemd has taken over most of the major Linux distros, there will always be some like Slackware and Alpine that run perfectly fine without it, and no one from the systemd cabal will care. I'd certainly love to know how you think the BSDs will be wiped out by the spread of systemd too, considering that Poettering and Sievers intend for systemd to remain Linux-only.
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What I understand is that Intel and AMD decided not to work on drivers for their new chips to support older Windows, aligning themselves with the new Microsoft support policy... Intel said: "Intel will not be updating Win 7/8 drivers for 7th Gen Intel Core per Microsoft's support policy change". AMD said: "AMD's processor roadmap is fully aligned with Microsoft’s software strategy". Microsoft are also holding back, for example by not supporting 7th gen xHCI USB controller on older versions of Windows.
So it doesn't seem like it is Microsoft's choice alone. I think the current title (Latest Intel & AMD chips won't support Windows versions earlier than Windows 10) is not pointing blame at anyone, just saying that the chips are not going to be officially supported.
Rationally speaking, yeah, it doesn't mean much more than that they won't work with it, independent of who's to blame, but I did initially still read it as if it was Intel's and AMD's fault, and I'm obviously not alone with that either.
Better would have been like I've already used it: "Intel's and AMD's chips won't work with Windows 7/8"
Then it's completely open why that is and the reader can make up their own mind.
"Fault" is one way of looking at it. However, another way is to say that it's apparently not commercially worth while to the chip makers to support generation N-1 of Microsoft's OS. That says something interesting about the market.
One of the great things that would come out of a market where no single proprietary OS is dominant is that hardware makers would be free to pursue enhancement of their offerings while not being tied up to the marketing strategies of third party.
I remember reading e-mail and browsing the web (and developing software) on a 64-bit multi-processor machine years before AMD64 appeared. Actually, even before Itanium was announced.
Slightly mis-leading headline....bug it's direct from the register. tldr; the headline should read "Windows 10 is the only Windows OS that will support latest processors." Guess MS is tired of supporting 30 years of hardware with each OS release. Hopefully that'll free them up a bit to do more interesting stuff.
Yeah, that's forwards compatibility not backwards compatibility.
In many cases, this situation is already here. My laptop came with Windows 8 and if I ran Windows 7 on it, it would work, but many of the newer power management and performance features wouldn't work.
Interestingly, I've been a hardcore Dell fan for many years with many tens of thousands of dollars in purchases - home and work.
I bought an outlet Latitude two weeks ago. It came with Win 8 which is awful. It would not run Win 7, no matter how many tricks I tried (numerous driver issues).
I do not want Win 10. The Dell is being returned, and I am buying my first ever personal MacBook (I'm done with Linux on the laptop, too - too busy these days to deal with the typical issues that have plagued Linux for 15 years now).
I'm done with Microsoft and any company that wants to tie themselves to them: Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel, etc.
Better is of course subjective, and I might suggest a hint of rose-tinted glasses there.
I've been using Windows professionally since Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and whilst sure I miss some of the simplicity and cleanness of older versions, every time I actually have to use one of the old versions I'm constantly bumping into annoyances and missing features that I've gotten used to with Windows 10
One small but important, to me, example ie being able to resize command shell windows by dragging them! and easy copy/paste !
I'm running Windows 10 now (upgraded just before the deadline) and I quite like it. It only takes a bit of time to disable enough to make it look/act like a better version of Windows 7.
It's like any time there's a non-story that any one of them spin into some controversial click-bait they all have to follow suit to avoid being scooped. Journalistic integrity for internet news sites seems to be at an all time low.
They aren't journalists, they are marketing copywriters. News has turned into advertisements and no seems to want to accept it. Any article about a product or company was payed for by a PR company that was payed by the company in the article. Many times they will write large parts of the article themselves.
Windows 10 isn't very popular, and that is good. No other operating system is as hostile to the users privacy, and certainly no desktop operating system where everyone stores many private files. And not just personal files, but think of all the doctors offices, lawyers - which makes Win10 illegal to use in many countries, as it transfers automatically your key strokes, microphone samples, screenshots, search history, application list, hardware configuration and what not else that god forbids to dozens of domains that have not even Microsoft in it's name. And the domains and IPs ate whitelisted in the signed 64-bit kernel mode part of Win10 network layer. Good night, no work around possible. Except you carry a hardware firewall around attached to your laptop. So it's good that the "free" (free to exchange for a Win7/8 license dongled to one mainboard) Win10 failed all expectations and got little uptake. Most companies are still on Win7 and all literated users too beside some foolished fanboys/early adopters/noobs. Many reverted back to Win7 after the got Win10 tricked "by accident". XBoxOne failed spectacular too being far far behind PS4 and even WiiU sales. And WinMobile/Phone 10 is dead too, with as little as 0.6% global market share. If I would be an investor, I would fire this failed CEO and some of his top managers incl PR department and restore and rebrand some of their former good products.
Yep. I realized today that in my office of about 30 employees, there are about 2 windows machines, 2 devs running Linux, and the rest running MacBooks.
All of our servers are CentOS on AWS.
Email is Gmail enterprise.
We use a dozen different languages and frameworks, but no dot Net, no Visual Studio to be seen.
And most of us now collaborate with Google docs or just markdown / Confluence / Slack. The only ones using MS office are a few of the managers over the age of 50...
Sure, me too except zero windows. but Microsoft has realized going after 30person offices is not lucrative compared to 30,000person companies and government depts.
That is a lot of Ad Hominem attacks in one comment. For a personal computer one might care. For a work computer? Nobody gives a crap unless handling private information of other people. No personal stuff touches my work W10 installation. Worst case scenario: corporate espionage. I am not that paranoid.
Vista was a deployment issue. At its release, the bulk of affordable consumer laptops had 1-2GB RAM, underpowered IGPs, and barely-beyond-32-bit dual core processors-- real "made for XP" systems.
Vista required hardware acceleration for its desktop compositing, a minimum of 2GB RAM, and amd64 to avoid PAE. It ran very well on on systems with quadcore CPUs, discrete GPUs, and 4+GB RAM.
The Linux DE Revolution hadn't started and I was still gnashing my teeth over the GNOME 3 transition when Vista came out, so I gave it a try. I still say it had better compatibility for foreign and older software than any of the later Windows.
Windows 8 was extremely useful. It just forced poor compromises on desktop users. Its UI/UX was fantastic for every other end-user device at the time that could run it.
Okay, time to turn off my PC (with keyboard/mouse). Where is that? It's not in the start menu, and finding that alone took ten minutes...
(30 minutes later) Oh. It's under settings. Because turning my device on and off is a setting, I guess? And the settings menu is in the charm bar. And you get to the charm bar by... putting your mouse in the top-right corner. And then sliding it down.
It was just so many ridiculous new hoops to jump through, each one more frustrating than the last.
I won't defend the bad UI but you can get to the charm menu just by using Windows+C. Also, installing ClassicShell takes literally thirty seconds and then you have a standard Win7-style UI. The kernel and other OS internals in 8.1 are faster and more stable than 7.
You tricked by update cycle. Each new version is faster because has no updates that fix holes. Test it, install new virtualboxed w7sp1 into w7sp1 with updates and feel the difference.
That's the reason why I never install updates (this forces me to be ultracareful on the web, but I'm ok).
While you were 'in doubt' I recently reinstalled my old laptop (with the same restricted set of software except updates) so it can boot quickly and open explorer instantly, not in a couple of seconds. This behavior disappears at the time you install all updates. I experienced that many times on many pcs. Not that you should trust me, test it.
Try accessing that charm bar in an RDP session to a server... that was fun (NOT)... Though classic shell was my go-to with Windows 8/8.1, I mostly use 10 as-is. The more annoying thing is when web search results would come above local apps (Win, type app-name, ...), first thing I disabled after seeing that.
Overall, I still prefer Windows UI (since v7) over other options I've tried (macOS, Ubuntu Unity, gnome 3). I just wish they'd reign in some of the privacy and finish the polish on some areas of settings/usability already, there are still plenty of pre-vista style configuration panels that don't scale properly, and are too hard to get to.
I think the thinking is that you were supposed to just hit the power button on your PC tower; just like how you can hit the power button on a tablet/phone/xbox one/laptops.
Not ideal if you've put your tower in some far-off corner under your desk, of course.
Nobody does that because in Windows 7, the power button was by default wired to immediately suspend to ram. Why would a user expect it to act differently?
Daily, at least. Depends what you're doing, I suppose, but playing with large files in image editing software means a lot of memory gets doled out and virtually none of it ever makes it back into the pool when a program exits (Windows seems to be overly concerned that you might want to use that memory with that program again "right away", where "right away" means sometime in the next six weeks or so). There's little point in suspending; that just leaves the machine in a laggy state. And by "laggy", I mean Eclipse-on-a-Pentium-3 laggy. Shutting down when the machine's not actively in use means I get a better shot at not having to reboot in the middle of session.
Quite often, given how fast Hybrid Boot is. Nowadays I rarely sleep it, I either want it to leave it churning on an encode or something, or just powered off to come back to a fresh environment. I really only sleep it if I'm absolutely in the middle of something that just cannot be effectively saved.
I'm long-since done with Hibernate entirely and have switched it off to reclaim the space used by hiberfil.sys (powercfg /hibernate off).
I never understand why so many people find it so hard to change, and get used to a simpler way of doing things. Your computer has a power button, or (if it's a laptop) you can simply close it. Windows supports sleep and standby very well.
We have two oldfashioned desktop computers running Windows 10 in our home. They are shared by the family and kids for email, browsing and gaming, everyone (and even several of our kids friends') has a Microsoft account on each computer. The computers are turned "on" and "off" many times a day, using the POWER button. The computers take less than 3 seconds to start, as they are actually just sleeping.
The problem is that pretty much nobody used Windows 8 on anything other than desktop/laptop devices.
Microsoft had to start building their own tablets to push other manufacturers to build Windows tablets, too. They literally had to buy the only company making Windows phones exclusively to ensure that somebody makes Windows phones (even though nobody seems to want to buy them).
It's just a marketing strategy, to get more people on board of the Windows-as-a-service train, a train without exit doors.
Good that I hear about that, I will buy a current gen CPU than and install a Win7 for legacy applications for the next ten years. And will await Android for Desktop or Google Fuchsia. The Windows days are over, that's happens when a CEO favors short turn strategies and burns his platform.
To get an idea of what kind of grief arises from a legacy kernel on significantly newer hardware: XP doesn't know how to save and restore AVX register state across context switches. The cpuid instruction doesn't look at the OS, so AVX is detected as being available, but it doesn't work right. (This has been an actual problem for crypto code in Firefox.)
XP doesn't natively support hard disks with non-512-byte sectors, leading to performance degradation (and possibly more wear?) on modern, higher-capacity hard drives which use 4096-byte sectors and have to emulate 512-byte sectors for Windows XP's sake.
Vanilla Windows 7 doesn't support 4K sectors either.
I discovered this when I unthinkingly replaced my laptop's failing disk with a 4K disk. Windows 7 installed itself from the recovery DVD, but would blue screen on the first reboot.
If I remember correctly, Intel CPUs had support in hardware for automatically saving and restoring the CPU state (doing a task switch) since the 386, and there was a way to query the CPU for how big that state needs to be. That would've enabled automatic forward-compatibility, but I have a feeling that feature got broken sometime around the AMD64 timeframe (by AMD, not Intel.)
Yeah but nobody used it - the task state segment was slow to write and read - so it was faster to push/pop registers. Pity - because this forward-compatibility argument might have convinced folks back then.
Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 and Linux, BSD, OS X
But on thereg it reads:
Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10... and Linux, BSD, OS X
The ellipsis implies that Intel's and AMD's chips run other OSes too. In fact, according to thereg, they'll run "homebrew kernels", which I'm glad for. I don't want to be limited to Windows and Unix-derivatives. I agree with commenter jcbeard that the headline should be changed to "Windows 10 is the only Windows OS that will support latest processors", or something similar.
After having used windows 10 for about a year, I feel confident in saying that if you don't want to use Windows 10, it is better to switch to Linux or something else you like, than using clearly inferior versions of windows. Most people want to stick with 7 just because of nostalgia, and it's good that intel is cutting them off.
I have a unix based system for work and am using a Windows 10 PC solely for gaming purposes. Win10 makes it incredibly difficult to try and trim down your Windows installation to its bare minimum, so that the disk, cpu, and network activity won't affect your gaming experience.
Then there's the forced update system, which allows you to define a time interval where it won't automatically install updates, but it can't be set to more than a 12hs window. It just feels like an OS that thinks it knows what's best for you, but it actually results in an inferior experience compared to the previous versions due to its limited configurability.
I haven't played around with the registry and internals that much since Win'95, just because it adds all this unneeded overhead without any option to remove it from within its own settings.
Don't get me wrong, it certainly works and I'm getting used to all its new features and changes, but Win10 makes it really hard to optimize it to your specific needs for seemingly unnecessary reasons, so I can understand why people want to stick to their Win7 or even Win8 installs.
> Win10 makes it incredibly difficult to try and trim down your Windows installation to its bare minimum, so that the disk, cpu, and network activity won't affect your gaming experience.
You are laboring under some really weird assumptions from the jump. Namely that you have to "trim down" anything at all. My Windows desktop is almost exclusively for games (occasionally a little C#). The only changes from the default settings I made is to use a local account instead of a Microsoft account, fiddle with the times for Windows Update
When I am idle, the machine is idle. There is no unnecessary disk activity (there is indexing, but I want that and the switch is in the exact same place it's been since XP). There is negligible CPU usage. There is no network activity unless Steam decides to do something in the background.
This is the future. We're in it. And if you are buying reasonably new hardware, stuff really just works.
My Win10 install was showing a constant 100% disk usage right after upgrading from Win8.1. I read online that it can be caused by Windows search indexing all the files, so I simply left it running. After 2 days I had enough, stopped all the search related services, and disabled them where possible.
Then the Cortana update got released and the exact same thing happened again with search processes taking up all the available disk I/O.
Network speed was also an issue where Win10 kept on downloading updates while the PC was in heavy use instead of doing so when in idle status. That's when I found out about above mentioned 12hs update window, where it kept on downloading stuff in the background whenever I had a late/early gaming session.
CPU usage was not as bad as the disk usage issues, in my case, but there are the occasional spikes from Windows processes even when in idle status.
That's why I had to start looking into options in regards to trimming down Windows to its bare minimum features, as the system was barely usable with its constant disk usage spikes.
PC configurations differ, so of course your milage may vary. Just from my own personal experience I know people on both ends of the spectrum, where everything just worked for them, or it was so bad that it rendered their PC useless and they went back to their previous Windows version. In my case I just had to figure out how to prevent Windows from doing certain tasks that would end up having a noticeable effect on the system performance.
As a DJ, windows 8 touch was actually a godsend because I could give up the keyboard and just use the screen in the dark. Win 8 had a number of services to turn off in order to reclaim CPU, memory, and disk (necessary for real-time live shows with no glitches), but it was manageable.
Win10 refuses to stop updates, the antivirus (defender), turning off cortana is a mess, it even forces reboots as early as every 12 hours. Completely unusable for a professional. I'll have to upgrade to win 10 pro, and even then they don't make it easy, I have to edit the group policy.
This is nuts for anyone in pro audio. Even though I have thousands invested in Windows compatible software and hardware, I'm seriously considering switching to osx. Windows touch has no equivalent, this is an awesome underrated opportunity and they are blowing it.
Granted, I just dabble in audio, but I'm surprised you're using Windows in the first place. Fully anecdotal, of course, but everybody I know runs OS X with one or another setup (Live or Logic, depending). I do audio more for podcasts and the occasional composition and Logic Remote on my iPad (an old iPad 2) is a really solid touch surface with surprisingly low latency.
iPad only has toy DJ apps, it doesn't allow remote playlist control or really anything useful that compares to having the full OS as a touchscreen.
Also the iPad is more fragile, twice as expensive, and has a fraction of the storage for audio, compared to my Asus ultrabook. I only use the iPad in the studio.
It's much cheaper to get started on Windows, the plugins and programs are vast and often free compared to the Mac equivalent. The majority of my stuff also works on Mac but I'd have to relearn my workflow.
I do have a Mac but using it feels like I'm in the office compared to Windows touch experience. As an app dev I'm always trying to push the boundaries in music interfaces.
To clarify: the iPad acts as an interface to the DAW, not as a DAW itself. Either Logic Remote or the OSC-based equivalents are really nice ways to drive applications (touch-based mixers, etc.).
Right, I use several of the controller apps myself and send OSC or MIDI. It is a complex, less intuitive, more fragile, and less useful setup than having one machine that can do everything with touch. In the studio, where nothing changes, this is less of a problem.
Perhaps this is the case for the majority of Windows 10 installations. Or perhaps you're a lucky — and exceptional — case.
I can only add my anecdotes to your anecdotes, and I have no large scale statistically significant figures to claim my anecdotes are the general case.
But my anecdotes completely disagree with you. Two Windows 10 installations under my care in the past exhibited wild, mind-of-their-own-esque resource usage when they were supposed to be idling. One was a upgraded-from-Windows-7 physical installation (with no malware, I can attest to that) on which explorer.exe would start consuming ~ 60% CPU usage when left idle, another was a virtual installation of fresh Windows 10 without any apps installed on which the host hypervisor reported arbitrary, persistent (upto tens-of-minutes at a time) CPU usage rise.
And the sheer lack of things I could do about it frustrated me. Ultimately, I had to replace the Windows on the physical computer (a friend's laptop) with Kubuntu (thankfully, she liked the new experience), and replaced the virtual machine with Windows 7.
You're forgetting the tiny little switch that made me loose my nerves so much that I've even started to find a new virtualization platform for all my work servers and substitutes for most of the vms...
Windows defender cannot be disabled. Well, you can, but it will turn itself back on, no matter what you tell it to, and it even tells you that in settings. Like, as you don't know what you're doing, we're deciding for you. I mean, if you're going to decide what's best for me,in my machine, why bother making a setting?
Then there's all privacy checks auto enabling with each update, though at this point given what they've done with the 'upgrade experience', that was foreseeable...
> I wonder if MSFT will even release Win 10 embedded.
There is "Windows 10 IoT Core" that they threw together to jump on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon [1], which suggests that they'll do a Windows Embedded 10 at some point.
In short, Microsoft can trim down Windows 10 just fine, they've just made it hard for customers to do so.
I've been looking for a comprehensive guide before but haven't found anything yet. Most of the custom changes I've done were the result of software mentioned in online articles, or google searches in regards to my specific issues.
Rather than fight Microsoft, just ditch windows. That's what I meant. Using years old software which is unsupported is foolish. This sort of behavior leads to IE6. I'm glad Microsoft is ending the cycle here. The people who like 10 will stay, the people who don't (the reasons are definitely valid) should move to Linux or OSX. Why use something that the manufacturer is not ready to support? Vote with your wallet and demand an Ubuntu PC.
Yes, but that doesn't work if you require Windows, such as for gaming. There's SteamOS, but its support is still limited.
If gaming was as universally supported on linux as on Windows, then I'd switch right away, but unfortunately Windows is still its major platform so you need to try and make the best out of its shortcomings, if you're serious about gaming.
I know the reasons are valid. That's why I'm urging people to move to Linux or OSX, that's better than using win 7 which is soon going to go out of support.
>Most people want to stick with 7 just because of nostalgia
"There it is generation has grown up". Most people want to stick with 7 because it was last windows. Ugly, inconvenient in comparison with past versions, but still windows. Nostalgia is when you stick with 95-2000.
What was wrong with 8? I found the UI a significant improvement, even better than 10. The only qualm I had was the removal of the power button, but that was resolved in the 8.1 update.
Invisible hotspots to bring up necessary dialogs, settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place, flat UI elements, two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh). Windows 7 fits in with my experience on Windows going back over 20 years. Windows 8 throws that away for something I think is a contradictory mish-mash. Windows 10 doesn't completely clean up the mess, and it adds other things that I don't like.
If Microsoft removed the metro UI style, the tile interface, the Windows Store, Cortana, and forced updates (or allowed the user to disable those things), I'd be running Windows 10 now.
Oh, I disabled that early on so I forgot about it. The only one of significance was the start menu corner, but that was also remedied in 8.1.
>settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place
The settings panel is the same as Windows 10. I'd definitely argue against all settings being in one place on 7 though. There's dozens of different locations: control panel, the registry, local/group policy editor, folder options, the "advanced" system settings panel (contains completely unrelated settings such as environmental variables, performance toggles, DEP, and remote assistance). Then there's lots of weird quirky menus like the one you get by entering "control userpasswords2" into the run dialog.
I see the new settings panel as a cleaner frontend to the existing settings. Hopefully over time they'll be consolidated there.
>flat UI elements
I love it.
>two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh).
I don't see the conflict, but the start screen worked just fine on mouse for me. It took a week to relearn some muscle memory and then I was over it. In the end I found it much more efficient. The targets were larger and it didn't waste a ton of screen space like the current start menu does.
On my wife's, I remember something about the top-right corner, or along the edge there, and I think it had to do with wifi settings. Those are what I was thinking of. Oh, and swiping away from the lock screen.
> Settings
All the settings that I actually use are in the control panel. I end up in the registry less than annually, and I've never touched the policy editor, most of the things in the mmc, etc. Things like folder settings aren't what I'd consider OS-wide; it makes sense to have them in Explorer, because that's where they take effect.
>dual interfaces
Everyone's got their own opinion. It seems like change for the sake of change, to me, and better suited to a tablet UI than a PC one.
Meh I would have updated to 10 on my dual boot Window Linux Mint machine, but you need to have the latest updates on windows 7 to be able to even get 10, and even with the generous three days leeway I gave myself to back up, update, and roll back, I couldn't get updates working in time. I really don't see what reason there is to run windows for me, other then gaming, and even then, most of what I want to play I can get on os x or linux.
I haven't decided for anyone. I'm just saying that it's more effective if you vote with your wallet and move to a non Microsoft OS. Otherwise you're harming yourself by using an unsupported OS.
Hahah, and when your goverment makes some things hard for you, you vote with your property and move to another country. Why complaining? Just move, right.
When the AMD Opteron came out in 2003, did Windows 95 run on it? I don't think so.
Windows 7 is seven years old. It's just a reality that commercial software that old doesn't get support, unless you're an enterprise customer willing to pay for the privilege.
I have a feeling (but no facts at hand) that Win95 wouldn't boot on an Opteron. Even though x86 was more or less constant, BIOS and associated base drivers did change over time.
For comparison, PC-DOS 2.1 wouldn't be expected to boot on a Pentium either. It's not a reasonable expectation even in compatibility-obsessed traditional Wintel land.
I guess you're right. I could have sworn that at the x64 junction, they intentionally broke compatibility with booting a 16-bit real mode OS... But quick googling doesn't seem to support that.
What's the alternative? Old MacOS versions also don't support newer hardware, old Linux kernels neither. By your reasoning, no operating system should ever be considered for anything designed to outlast a 7 year period (which is windows' 7 age).
> Old MacOS versions also don't support newer hardware
Which is why nobody uses MacOS in production for anything but end user devices.
> old Linux kernels neither
They do. All major enterprise distributions backport drivers exactly for that reason – and unlike with Windows, you can update the kernel in place without having to touch any other part of your software stack. Your software won't care whether it's running on top of Linux 2.4 or 4.2, but it will care whether it's running on Windows 7 or Windows 10.
All I want is an operating system to game on that doesn't spy on me and advertise to me and force me to do things or disallow me to do what I want. I sure hope WINE has gotten better in the past couple years because I refuse to put up with this Windows 10 bullshit.
Wine and linux drivers will never be good enough to play games. You might as well install windows 7 in a vritual machine. And this whole thing about spying... you can install O&O ShutUp10 which helps a lot but on the other hand, if you're on the internet, chances are everything is spying on everything. Google is spying on you, facebook is spying on you. Unless you're only using TOR and chat clients with end to end encryption, if someone wants to spy on you, they will. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone Microsoft for this (hence the o&o comment) just that there are other players here as well.
On the other hand, being a user of all three OSes I could complain about all three of them.
I minimize the usage of my windows machine usage to steam and gmail and a handful of gaming websites. Nothing out of the ordinary is spying on me. But I'm far more concerned by my OS spying on me than whatever details some JS can pick up. Hell, I have my ext4 fs mounted on windows. In Windows 10, that means it can index and beam that info back to the mothership.
Coming from a semi-security IT background I always assume there are forces out there who see everything (in the great scheme of internet things). It doesn't make it better any way. Just helps me cope with how everything is screwed up these days.
When microsoft is done shooting off its own feet, I've got a bridge to sell them.
But I'm all for win10 atm. I just bought a new dirt-cheap netbook. The push for Win10 meant that even the cheapest of netbooks requires the muscle to run win10. The fact that mine never even booted into that OS is beside the point. Rather than a machine that runs win10 poorly, I've now got a very nice little linux mint box ... and a pile of Win10-related stickers.
But new x86 chips are backward compatible. What will happen if I install windows 7? Will Microsoft introduce a kill switch or am I just not going to take advantage of the new features?
Broadly-speaking, yes, but older OSes may not support newer CPU and other hardware features, and at some point those features become essential to working at all. Plus, CPUs actually do drop features sometimes.
In the case of Skylake, Windows 7 doesn't support xHCI, the new USB controller interface. Without USB, you won't have much luck doing anything.
maybe you are right about Windows 7, but Windows 8/8.1 has the same driver model with Windows 10 so at least that won't be an issue. now why would anyone want to run Windows 8.1 instead of Windows 10 is unclear to me.
No limits on the amount of devices, though IIRC after using 10 different keys (for each version) you have to ask for a refresh.
To be honest I'm also unsure on the details of how you can use the OSs you get from the MSDN license.
edit: I checked my subscription, for enterprise editions you get 2 multiple activation keys. I've no idea how many activations these keys allow. It's worth noting that you get two for regular enterprise, 2 for the N edition and 2 more for the LTSB version.
edit2: nevermind! Turns out that if you want to stay 100% legal the msdn subscription is pretty restrictive:
> Many Visual Studio subscribers use a computer for mixed use—both design, development, testing, and demonstration of your programs (the use allowed under the Visual Studio subscription license) and some other use. Using the software in any other way, such as for doing email, playing games, or editing a document is another use and is not covered by the Visual Studio subscription license. When this happens, the underlying operating system must also be licensed normally by purchasing a regular copy of Windows such as the one that came with a new OEM PC.
I think I'll probably get one. Everything I do is kind of experimental and hacky (home DIY rather than professional programmer). So none of what I do really leaves testing!
> Windows 10 must succeed at all costs. It's Windows 10 or bust. If you're buying a flash new machine, what a superb way for Microsoft to shoehorn its latest operating system onto it; that'll really help inflate its usage numbers.
Fuck Microsoft, I been using Windows all my life but if I could jump to any other operative system with games and software support I would do it in a heartbeat.
> Microsoft holding back support is the xHCI USB controller in sixth-generation Skylake and seventh-generation Kaby Lake: Windows 7 doesn't support that USB hardware, so installing the operating system from a USB stick using those chips is tricky. Intel provides xHCI drivers for Windows 7 once it's up and running.
AFAIK, consumer editions of Windows 7 never even officially came in a "USB stick" form factor. It has always been on a DVD.
So the more salient question would be: is it possible to plug in a USB external ODD to a Kaby Lake laptop, pop the Windows 7 DVD in it, and install from it? Or is it just as "tricky" as installing from a USB stick?
I don't know what the newer systems do, but on older ones that had USB boot support, the BIOS has a basic USB driver that lets even DOS apps access CD/DVD/USB media via the traditional INT 13H interface.
No, they are too beholden to large corporations who will not be railroaded into using an OS they don't need or cannot use for compatibility reasons. It may take some time, but eventually Microsoft will capitulate. They always capitulate. There's no sane business reason not to.
Will the next Intel & AMD chips support Windows 10, or will we see a similar planned-obsolescence dance again?
I'm asking to see whether this is part of a larger trend where compatibility is falling by the wayside or whether this is an isolated incident to kick the world up to modernity, and I am fully aware that it is difficult to predict the future.
IMO Windows 10 really is an atrocious piece of software and forcing it onto people could backfire.
One example of Microsoft holding back support is the xHCI USB controller in sixth-generation Skylake and seventh-generation Kaby Lake: Windows 7 doesn't support that USB hardware, so installing the operating system from a USB stick using those chips is tricky. Intel provides xHCI drivers for Windows 7 once it's up and running.
As far as I know, the xHCI spec is freely available, and so are the DDKs that let you write your own drivers (or perhaps port them from Linux), so I don't see anything stopping the enthusiast community from doing that, besides maybe (currently trivially circumventable, but who knows...) driver signing, and if my past predictions are any indication, that will likely happen.
In a VM the hardware is fake, and usually works on most OSes.
The real hardware is the problem here, because it only has official drivers for Windows 10. The CPU is fine.
Using a VM makes it more difficult to use some features of real hardware, even if it is still technically possible to pass real hardware into a VM. It's a usability issue.
What people want is to have their favorite OS or OSes on the newest hardware. But sometimes the hardware and OS makers collude to make older tech obsolete.
Most likely works. You can mask off the newer features on all previous cpus to make them look like an older model. Normally that kind of feature is preserved on newer products.
It means it's untested. In reality it should be option d) but they're saying that if a) to c) eventually happen then you were warned. Also don't ever expect chipset drivers for those OSs.
Cortana will force herself inside your hardware whether your willing or unwilling.
This is an interesting move and I wonder if these companies will back track under pressure from corporate. Is this just a matter of a few drivers built by AMD, Intel or Microsoft? I don't know.
Bit of a tangent, but that was a surprisingly readable article for TheRegister. They seemed very clickbaity with CAPITAL LETTER WORDS scattered around not so long ago. Are they now back to this more reasonable style in general or was this a fluke ?
Sometimes when I see these newspapers bashing Microsoft I question whether they even think about what they are writing before pressing the publish button. Headline: Microsoft is doing what all other OS companies are doing too.