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It's happened at least three times:

Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.

Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no warning.

Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.

Has happened:

Core2Duo, Opteron64 and Athlon64 can run W11 RTM

They will bluescreen booting after an update to 24H2 because they are missing the POPCNT instruction.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/windows-11-24h2-goes...

Athlon 64 is a 20 yo CPU. At some point...

Hey, my X200 has a Core2Duo and still does everything I need.

(No, I don't need gaming or LLMs.)

From my experience it seems to happen all the time. Settings reset, uninstalled apps reinstalled, firewall settings erased. I went looking for the Windows 10 patch that deleted the Documents folder if you had remapped it to another drive, and it was hard to find an article due to all the other times their updates have also deleted people's Documents folder. This was the first time I recall it happening: https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-09-windows-10-october-updat...