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Comment by ntauthority | Hacker News Reader

This hardware uses PowerVR GPUs (e.g. rebranded GMA500), which are no longer supported (driver updates) for Windows by both Intel and Imagination, and even on older versions of Windows (and Linux) had barely-to-non-functional drivers. These drivers already had various bugs, and on newer Windows 10 versions an additional bug is apparently 'text not rendering'.

The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely was usable, that it apparently wasn't deemed worth the engineering effort to work around this type of flawed driver.

Of course, this article completely ignores that information, presumably to cause typical baseless Microsoft hate.

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It's not baseless to care about getting security fixes despite your graphics driver being a finalized buggy version.

Windows 8.1 on these devices is still supported until 2023 as far as I can tell.

> The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely was usable

AKA the OEMs could get it super cheaply and throw it on entry level netbooks for max profit.

This isn't Microsoft's fault. All the blame is on the OEMs here for using hardware that was known to be at EOL stage.

I had an Acer Aspire 751 with Atom Z520 and the GMA500 GPU you mentioned. It always had terrible driver support in Windows 7. When I updated to the Windows 10 insider preview before it was released, it was unusable. Huge graphics glitches all over the place, text would disappear entirely in some programs, random scrambled blocks of the screen that changed as you navigated. By the time Windows 10 was officially released it had been improved, but still wasn't great. Not surprising that this piece of hardware isn't a good candidate for support in the future.

Have you ever tried running Linux on it?

I wonder how the gma500 driver fares these days.

My experience with it under Linux was limited to the vesa driver only, as the GMA500 driver was incomplete and buggy. As such, it wasn't a great platform for media consumption, but if all you needed was a terminal it was fine.

The reverse-engineered open source gma500 driver included in Linux works very well for basic stuff but lacks features such as H.264 decoding and 3D acceleration.

The old Intel drivers can be patched to run on newer kernels, you also need to run an old version of X.org.

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