Latest Intel, AMD chips won't support Windows versions earlier than Windows 10
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft is under no obligation to cater to the needs of any customers whatsoever.
Which is fine. MS can shoot itself in the head if it wants to.
But there will be consequences for the company.
Every year is the desktop year of something. Meanwhile I got fed up to keep trying to run GNU/Linux on my laptops.
Even the Asus Netbook I bought with Ubuntu support out of the box had wlan issues that took around 6 months to get sorted out.
People keep complaining, but the desktop market hardly changes.
Now the lower margins hybrid tablets/laptops is flooded with 2GB/32GB eMMC Windows 10 netbooks.
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?
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.
Are there any Windows APIs that have been actually dropped and not just deprecated?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
->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.
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.
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.
People freaking loved win98 once a few service packs got released, especially if they had the plus pack.
They didn't like Windows ME. Or Vista.
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.
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.
Are you saying that Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 exceed the capabilities of latest Intel and AMD chips?
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".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOWzorOD-II (not me)
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.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
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..
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.)
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.
Though the 32bit to 64bit was probably a big part of the big step between XP and 7.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And they did offer free upgrades.
Microsoft chooses not to support new Intel & AMD chips in Windows versions earlier than 10.
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.
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3112663/software/microsoft-ma...
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.
A much more appropriate description would be that Microsoft won't support Intel's and AMD's newer chips in the company's earlier OSs.
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.
It seems they are supporting old hardware on each new OS. What they are not supporting is new hardware on an old OS.
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.
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.
I was such a Windows fanboy in the late 90's early 2000's when Win2k and Win XP were the platforms that were shipping.
Having lived through those days till now I'm convinced that Microsoft can never build a better user experience than Windows 2000 provided.
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 !
Microsoft made 'em do it: The latest Kaby Lake, Zen chips will support only Windows 10 (PCWorld)
Windows 10 Or Else? Intel's New 'Kaby Lake' Chip Won't Support Windows 7, 8 (Forbes)
Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's Zen processors will only support Windows 10 (PC Gamer)
From this point forward, all Intel and AMD CPUs are Windows 10-only (ExtremeTech)
Intel's latest CPUs will only support Windows 10 (TechRadar)
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...
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'm long-since done with Hibernate entirely and have switched it off to reclaim the space used by hiberfil.sys (powercfg /hibernate off).
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.
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).
Not ideal if you've put your tower in some far-off corner under your desk, of course.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 and Linux, BSD, OS X
Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10... and Linux, BSD, OS X
But not adding Zen and Kaby Lake support to windows 8.1 is a little weird, it still has 16 months of mainstream support.
We want to stick with 7 because 8 was atrocious, and 10 doesnt offer enough improvements for the standard user to change the UI in useless ways.
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.
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.
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...
The inability to minimize and customize Windows 10 is really starting to grate on me.
Win 10 keeps making decisions for me and does not let me choose.
I have had to configure Windows 7 and Windows 8 Embedded for work so I am used to being able to configure Windows to minute detail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those are forced only on Windows Home.
I think upgrading to Windows 10 and blocking the telemetry with something like Spybot’s Anti-Beacon is a better option than getting stuck in the past.
"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.
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.
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.
It did. That was the whole point of AMD64, as opposed to Itanium: It runs all the legacy crap you could possibly wish to.
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.
And DOS is even simpler to "support" because it doesn't need much.
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.
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.
I know Windows 10 enterprise is adware/spyware free, but as an individual I have no idea of how to get one.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
ASRock's tool for my Skylake mainboard worked fine, could install off its USB3.1 port.
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.
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.
Ironically, there are already xHCI drivers for DOS: http://www.georgpotthast.de/usb/
And most of the compatibility issues here are in system chipsets, not so much the CPUs (unless you count the integrated graphics some have).
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.
a) older Windows versions will not run at all on those chips?
b) older Windows versions will still run but cause some problems?
c) older Windows versions will run without problems or performance impediment compared to old chips but some new features are not supported?
d) everything will work just as well but when problems occur Microsoft won't provide official support?
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.
> Right.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
Newest Intel & AMD chips will not work with any Windows version below 10.