Windows 10 users report app problems after Microsoft update
theregister.com
theregister.com
Still, it sounds like someone simply screwed up a compiler setting.
A screw up would imply they hadn't intended to make the change. It could just have easily been someone trying to improve performance or security by optimizing for supported platforms while not knowing that a lot of unsupported platforms would run the code or be impacted.
If the change doesn't negatively impact stated supported platforms then it wasn't a mistake imo and I don't think they should revert it.
A lot of security issues exist because we continue to support legacy systems that cannot be secured or not without negatively impacting performance. If MS pushed a security patch that gobbled 5-10% performance from decade old systems some people would lose their minds.
Remember how painful the switch from XP was? And from Win7? And now Win10? Some people just refuse to upgrade hardware or software until forced and will bitch piss and moan the entire time.
There is a more general Windows Processor Requirements doc that does drop a number of old CPUs off of the list for newer builds: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
However, this is not surfaced to the user nor are there compatibility blocks to prevent auto-upgrades to newer builds, and the page specifically says this:
> Changes to the processors listed do not indicate or impact a customer’s existing Windows support and are intended for OEMs to determine processors which may be used in new Windows devices.
If Microsoft wants to raise the minspec to maintain a reasonable support window, more power to them. I can't see how apps suddenly crashing is a good way to do this. It has to be an unintentional bug.
but it's true that maybe the store should start blocking old systems from updating such apps instead
I recall that Microsoft periodically drops support for versions of Windows 10 AND drops support for hardware with newer versions. It looks like Windows 10, version 1909, which fell out of support in 2021, only supports Nehalem (2008) or newer CPUs. I didn't dig further back to see when support for Core 2 Duos was dropped but this makes me wonder what version of Windows 10 these folks are running.
Are they running 22H2 on unsupported hardware, or 1909 which just isn't supported. If it's the later case and old versions like 1909 aren't supported, shouldn't they just be excluded from these Windows Store releases entirely?
Is this just a matter of someone not specifying the correct OS version to target in the Store deployment?
tl;dr is that an SSE4.2 instruction was introduced into an optional but commonly used runtime library that ships with the Visual C++ compiler. There's no runtime checking for whether the CPU supports this instruction, so it crashes on older CPUs.
That's it. Was hoping I could ride out staying on Windows 10 until it support was cut off. Enough is enough, I'm wiping Windows tonight and only single booting Ubuntu. Steam library be damned, whatever works on Proton works on Proton. I'm buying a Steam Deck.
No runtime detection, no software trapping/emulation. Hard crash for very old hardware.
Like with anything, lack of care leads to degradation. The core functions remain for a while, but without support it's clear where this leads. Microsoft has no reason to be embarrassed or surprised, they chose the circumstances that made this happen!