Finding issues like this is literally why the preview program exists. Should they have caught this with internal testing? Maybe, we don't have enough information to know.
Is it therefore possible that this bug check is being implemented as part of the journey towards actually dropping "support" for these CPUs?
Indeed, it's a preview release, and the Insider program is amazing for getting insight into Windows development and it shouldn't be held up to the same level of journalistic scrutiny as a sanctioned general release, but I can absolutely see why this particular change may have raised some eyebrows.
That seems entirely possible. That being said, I'm not sure I'm going to be upset about them dropping support for a 20-year old CPU built on an architecture that I think is pretty widely accepted as a failure.
Windows 11 doesn’t support CPUs that are 6 years old (Intel 7th gen) that are still ok by today standards
A 7th or 6th gen Intel would run Windows 11 quite well, unlike a Pentium 4 which struggles a great deal with it. Despite that, without workarounds, you cannot install Win 11 on one of these CPUs. You must have an 8th gen or later.
You have to actually opt in and download the preview. Then you'll be part of the preview :-)
These always struck me as an odd middle ground between regular updates and Insider
fwiw my very 'unsupported' 11 Dell box seems okay with this update installed. All the Reddit folks getting the error are on Intel MSI boards
I'm really happy with where MS is going, I think they have been killing it with vs code, chatgpt integration, and I was quite bullish on the surface pros.
But after having owned one for 1 month, they were still a real disaster in the OS area. I "subscribed" to the preview track, and had to reformat my pc twice. It was a fricking disaster. I'm back on osx now, having sold the surface pro.
Hardware and OS is still very much their weakpoint imo. It's like the whole OS is designed by product owners working on macbook pros (which apparantly isn't far from the truth)
I understand there are workarounds - such as buying a non-personal Windows license, and fiddling with the registry - but that's like selling me a car that'll shut its engine off on the highway and force me to listen to its own advertisements while I'm using a bluetooth device, and assuring me that I can adjust the behavior. If I know how. If I even know that's possible. If I'm willing to pay more.
"I subscribed to test betas and they were unstable. Thanks Bill Gates!"
Like, my brother in Christ, that's why there's the stable version of that OS.
What stability issues are you referring exactly?
There is a difference between having a few apps crash more often, and literally having the offical MS help tell you, the only solution is to reinstall everything.
And unsurprising.
They finally found out what everybody knew since Win 95 days: There is no problem in Windows(TM) that a complete reinstall cannot fix. /s
Are you tracking the pre-release versions of MacOS?
Still, Microsoft gutted their internal testing, so they hold some blame for disastrous failure, even during preview.
The only people who "buy" Windows are those who build their own gaming machine. Even then, they usually buy a sketchy "volume license" key off ebay.
I bought windows retail, because I actually like the Windows kernel, and despise running pretty much any install of Linux that isn't just a command line to boot daemons and web servers from. I use my computer every single goddamn day, and don't ever want it to randomly break, which Linux has always done to me. The steam deck is the first Linux install that hasn't been utterly useless or shit the bed on me.
Every single problem I have had in Windows has been caused by shitty hardware, or AMDs abysmal drivers.
Enterprises pay a surprising amount of money to Microsoft usually in the form of monthly/annual pr user licenses(to the time of double digit percentages of the end user device budget) and yet no amount of badness seem to make anyone in those Enterprise departments think that they have any alternative and it's the same in the laptop space, where despite having to fork out whats often a double digit percentage of the retail price to Microsoft there is no serious appetite from hardware vendors or consumers to consider that maybe we could have a market where multiple Operating systems coexisted.
And your driver argument is exactly the weirdness here as people will absolutely hold anyone but Microsoft(especially smaller opensource competitors) responsible for bad drivers but with windows it's suddenly an valid excuse for bad experiences with windows.
Yeah, but making this info clear in the title doesn't drive the pitchfork driven clickbait FUD that seems to be invading HN lately.
Nearly half of Windows 11 related topics I read here lately were mistakenly titled or factually wrong, and yet full of rage comments of people who haven't even read the article, or don't even use Windows, but came by to tell everyone they use Arch or MacOS.
This isn't "lately", HN has been this way since at least 2017 when I started reading. If you didn't notice it, that's on you. Almost nobody has ever read the articles on HN.