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Microsoft Intel Software Hardware Technology

Microsoft Revises Windows 7, 8 On Skylake Cut-Off Date To 2018 (zdnet.com) 137

An anonymous reader writes from a ZDNet story: Microsoft is softening its stance on how long and how completely it will continue to support Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users running Skylake-based devices. Instead of cutting off full, extended support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on Skylake on July 17, 2017, Microsoft will now guarantee full extended support to July 17, 2018. Microsoft also tightened up the wording as to what kinds of security updates Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users will get once that date comes. "After July 2018, all critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for Skylake systems until extended support ends for Windows 7, January 14, 2020 and Windows 8.1 on January 10, 2023," it said. Many users weren't pleased with Microsoft's initial decision. And it appears OEMs weren't thrilled about it, either. Adrienne Mueller, Product Manager at Lenovo said earlier this month, "The thought here is that Microsoft is really just pushing customers to move to Windows 10. A lot of reactions from our customers...is can we influence Microsoft and tell them they're not ready to transition and try to get them to prolong support on that? We've tried, and Microsoft's not really willing to do that."
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Microsoft Revises Windows 7, 8 On Skylake Cut-Off Date To 2018

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  • Or put a Linux distro on your device (maybe even move that Windows stuff to a VM and disable network if the apps don't need it).

    • by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Friday March 18, 2016 @03:44PM (#51726931) Journal

      My wife went the Apple route when she went to look for a new laptop back in 2013 fora lot of the same reasons as listed in TFS. I was told to keep my mouth shut, and that she would do all the decision-making when it came to replacing her dead laptop. So, I follow her to Best Buy (I know, right?)... While I stand far enough back to not be part of the convo (but close enough to hear), the sales-schlub tells her that she was not allowed to buy a laptop with Windows 7 on it, but had to buy one with 8. Worst part was, he said it in such an arrogant well you're a girl, so trust the big bad techie guy here way that she just got pissed off. I followed her from a distance as she stormed out of the store, and let out a loudly-coughed "Bullshit!" just as I passed the confused salescritter.

      Long story short, two hours later we drove around to other stores, then we drove home with a shiny new iPad. The Apple Store employee was nothing but kindness and accommodation as he listened to her needs, and (again as I kept distance), they had a very pleasant conversation as she chose what she wanted. She's been using the thing ever since.

      I can only imagine what kind of special tech-support hell I'd be subjected to if she did bring home a Windows 8 laptop, got used to it, then had to go through the Win10 horseshit... instead, I got 3 years of pure bliss, and I think I had to help her once with something when the iCloud thing came out.

      • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

        Sounds great, until your wife gets freaked out because the Macbook that's 6 months old has a logic board failure right before we were doing a backup and all our newborn's baby photos are on the drive that the Genius says "well, this is definitely not a hard drive issue but there's no guarantee you'll get your HD back if we send it in for warranty repair". WTF? And I would have had to buy a $100 adapter and possibly voided the warranty if I wanted to back it up myself before taking it in.

        Good news is they

        • by Anonymous Coward

          That shit could have happened on a Windows laptop, too. Maybe you should just keep backups and then you won't embarrass yourself in front of your wife any more.

          Well, you'll still do that, because you're a loser. But at least you won't lose those pictures of some other dude's baby and your wife.

          • While most of AC post is a troll, he does make one salient point:

            That shit could have happened on a Windows laptop, too.

            Fact is, it does that shit far more often on a Windows laptop...

        • Actually...
          1) all her content is backed-up online (viz. iCloud), so unless you took >5GB of photos/videos, it would cost like $10/year or some paltry sum to get more storage on it.
          2) 6 months between backups? You know that the whole iCloud thing backs up *daily*, right?

          Now way back in the long-ago, you would have had to back things up to some local source or another computer viz. iTunes, but still - 6 months between backups? Really? How the fsck would that have been Apple's fault?

          • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

            I didn't say it was 6 months between backups. The laptop was older than our child. We were getting ready to make a backup of many new photos.

            We turned on iCloud backups after that. It took WEEKS to upload all the photos/videos she had on the computer (our internet connection isn't the best, around 1 Mb/s upload) and gives practically no visibility into the process. You can't tell what has been uploaded, you can't tell if it's actually connected or if there is a server issue or what (the same progress sh

        • by rsborg ( 111459 )

          Sounds great, until your wife gets freaked out because the Macbook that's 6 months old has a logic board failure right

          You might want to exercise your reading skills (or syntactic analysis if you're a bot) - because the person you're replying to said his wife got an iPad...

        • Make backups all the time. The biggest problem with Apple computers is that you're forced to use their geniuses for support, and they're morons. You can't even open up the laptops anymore to do your own repairs or even change the battery (those do fail quite a lot in my experience). So the full backup means you can get a a replacement up and running very quickly compared to Windows. OSX backup with built in Time Machine is really nice and really easy to use. Whereas on Windows they change their backup s

          • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

            I agree that Time Machine is a nice backup system and Windows would do well to copy it, at least conceptually. My only complaint is that only Time Capsule is considered reliable if you want to do it continuously over Wi-Fi, and I don't want to pay so much for a router that is inferior to the one I already spent big bucks on. Having to grab the portable drive out of the fire-proof safe and individually plug up results in far fewer backups than I'd like, just from inconvenience.

            • Time Capsule?

              I have one, for my wifes iMac, running on a Debian VM on my Xen host in the basement. You don't need to virtualize, you can do it on anything that runs Debian, like... let's say a Raspberry Pi [raymii.org]. In all honesty, it's ages ago I set it up. I just Googled for solutions and you'll find many articles. I just picked one, I can't guarantee it will work.

        • Sounds great, until your wife gets freaked out because the Macbook that's 6 months old has a logic board failure right before we were doing a backup and all our newborn's baby photos are on the drive that the Genius says "well, this is definitely not a hard drive issue but there's no guarantee you'll get your HD back if we send it in for warranty repair". .

          Huh? Damn - what are teh Windows computers you get that never ever fail? My favorite was a 2 week old Toshiba of my son's that I took to the repair counter. The "service" was to give me a xerox copy of the service center I had to send it to.

          Then he turned around and continued his discussion with the other techs. Presumably about how shitty Macs were.

          • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

            I never made a claim that all Windows-based computer OEMs are great. My claim was that Apple isn't always great, either.

            In my personal experience, I can't say I've regularly used many different brands and Toshiba has never really stood out to me as producing great designs. What I can say is how Apple compares with Dell, which I've used almost exclusively at work for about 15 years. Apple was certainly worse. In that time I've had a backlight go out on a Dell laptop, and a battery that no longer held a c

            • What I can say is how Apple compares with Dell, which I've used almost exclusively at work for about 15 years. Apple was certainly worse.

              I've used both for a lot of years as well. Oddly, my experience was not at all like yours, I've waved goodby to many many as in hundreds of failed Dells from the leaky filter cap debacle. Macs? a couple.

              So we have a couple data points.

        • See, here's something petty to complain about but still annoying, it's called a motherboard not a logic board. Someone tell them the 1980s have ended.
          Also, weird how they have a "highway interchange" key but home and end are considered confusing or superfluous.

      • Great I am sure that Apple guy would install 2009 MacOSX Snow Leopard on a brand new Mac for her.

        After all that is the gripe about switching to a mac right? They support 6 year old software on modern systems?

      • I can only imagine what kind of special tech-support hell I'd be subjected to if she did bring home a Windows 8 laptop, got used to it, then had to go through the Win10 horseshit.

        Probably none. The horseshit started at Windows 8. Windows 10 just changed the colour scheme and smell slightly. If anything Windows 10 is more like Windows 7 than Windows 8 is.

    • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      I actually wanted to do that... until I noticed that my board and CPU do not provide vt-d support... which makes gaming in the vm a tad useless.

      I must congratulate Microsoft here... I've been trying to switch to Linux and going back once ever two years or so for the last, oh, almost twenty years.

      Now the only thing stopping me is, in fact, my hardware. However, you can bet your hiney that when the next upgrade comes around, windows will be locked down tighter than Guantanamo.

    • by donaldm ( 919619 )

      Or put a Linux distro on your device (maybe even move that Windows stuff to a VM and disable network if the apps don't need it).

      I already have the latest Skylake chip-set for my desktop and Fedora 23 runs on it without any issue. I have even got Mint running in a virtual machine and again no issues. When you look at the BIOS boot it lists Windows 7 onwards however I just selected "Other OS" and I had no issues installing Fedora 23 which took less than 30 minutes.

      Since I am not into over-clocking I chose the basic 4 Core i7-6700 which has a maximum power rating of about 65W and a GA-Z170M-D3H motherboard with 16GB of DDR4 RAM. This i

  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday March 18, 2016 @02:48PM (#51726521)

    But we will still push the auto update hard so all it's takes is one click and then you have 10.

    • by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Just use the GWX control panel, it can disable everything so its not possible to accidentally update to Windows 10.

    • I think it would be funny if someone slipped it into the update center for some linux distro and claimed microsoft employees did it... Imagine the outrage... I would need popcorn.

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday March 18, 2016 @02:50PM (#51726533)
    And provide all updates (not selected updates) for Windows 7 on all CPUs until 2020, as previously made commitments have stated.
    • Or what about if Intel comes up with drivers for the Skylake CPU, GPU or chipset after 2018 and you go to Intel's website to download them.
      It's not a difficult concept. Had to do that on an oldish laptop to improve disk performance (driver auto-updater crapware doesn't work)

  • Hey, Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Friday March 18, 2016 @02:54PM (#51726565)
    Windows 7 is Windows XP of the enterprise environment. No one upgrading to another version of Windows any time soon.
    • by afidel ( 530433 )

      I wouldn't say nobody in the enterprise space is moving, we're just slower than consumers. My employer is a 5,000+ person international law firm and we're a few months into a two plus year project to move to Windows 10, although in our case it is the dual expiry of Windows 7 and Office 2007 that is motivating us to move so companies on a more modern version of Office might not yet be facing the need to move (still if it's going to take you 2-3 years to move you don't have that long to start).

      • My job has no intentions to moving to Win10 on the desktop. The priority in the data center is to migrate away from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008, 2012 or 2016, depending on the application-compatibility requirements.
        • by afidel ( 530433 )

          You're almost a year late on the 2003 transition..

          • You're almost a year late on the 2003 transition.

            Coddling server owners is a big part of the problem: six months to update, six-month extension to update, three-month extension to update, another three-month extension to update, 30-day notice to update, and, finally, server hardware placed on owner's desk to update.

      • Some big corporations migrate as soon as possible, honest. Those were the companies that stuck Vista on everyone's computers and making plans about Windows 8 rollouts even while everyone else was laughing at the release candidate. And some defense contractors paid for by your tax dollars have migrated to Windows 10 already. There are companies that are so in love with Microsoft that it's illegal in most southern states. They will do whatever Microsoft asks them to do because they know they have zero skill

    • by PRMan ( 959735 )
      Windows XP was Windows XP of the enterprise environment...
    • Re:Hey, Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blue Stone ( 582566 ) on Friday March 18, 2016 @04:15PM (#51727161) Homepage Journal

      I'd upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 when I had a compelling reason to do so.

      All I've had so far is compelling reasons NOT to.

      From forced, pc-breaking updates, to telemetry and 'spyware' and the options for these 'resetting' after updates, to the uncertainty of whether I get an actual legit upgrade to my win7 pro retail version or just some generic update version and un-solicited download of 3 and a half gigs of win10 when I never said I wanted to do that - none of it inspires confidence.

    • My enterprise is just starting to migrate from XP to Windows 7. At this pace, we will probably migrate to Windows 10 around 2030 to just discover laptop and desktop computers no longer exist anywhere.
    • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

      Actually workplace adoption appears to be going faster than from XP-to-7 for many. For example, the US Department of Defense is migrating nearly all its computers to Windows 10 by early 2017. (Compare that with the move off of XP, where US DoD paid for additional post-EOL XP support just last year.)

    • by sconeu ( 64226 )

      Don't forget that there are people who, for legal reasons, CAN NOT use Windows 10.

      I'm thinking medical offices. The phone home in Windows 10 is a huge potential HIPAA violation.

      • The Enterprise edition of Windows 10 allows you to turn off all telemetry and data collection. It might be cost-prohibitive for a smaller doctor's surgery to upgrade to it, but large medical complexes like Cedars Sinai and Mayo Clinic will just opt for Enterprise Win10 and be done with it.
        • by sconeu ( 64226 )

          I'm thinking about your neighborhood dentist, orthodontist, GP.... They CAN'T buy Enterprise.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    What does Microsoft have to do with support for a CPU...
    I'm pretty sure I can install Windows 98 even on the newest hardware sold today, so what would prevent me from using Windows 7/8 with a skylake CPU... This just doesn't make sense to me.

    • It's not so much that support needs to be implemented to work but rather when bugs and problems arise they'll actually fix them.
      • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        Most bugs are not intra-arch specific.. They do crop up but they are rare. The real reason for this is to force upgrades.

    • I'm pretty sure I can install Windows 98 even on the newest hardware sold today, so what would prevent me from using Windows 7/8 with a skylake CPU.

      It's not worth the trouble. Internet Explorer and Windows Update will be broken after installation. Unless you have a Win98-compatible web browser on a USB stick, you're not going to update to the last service pack and download other software.

      • You can get update rollup ISO's that should be up to the EOL of 98. Not idea and might have a virus....but hey.
      • The last time I installed Windows 98 (years ago) you had to manually install IE6, then Automatic updates worked.

        Also Windows 98 doesn't support USB mass storage out of the box. You need Third party Drivers [technical-...ance.co.uk] on Network,CD, or floppy.

    • I really doubt you can, at least not with networking support.

    • From what I heard through the grape vine MS told Intel not to release Win7/8 drivers for the newer CPUs.

      • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        Sometimes it's possible to use drivers from other versions of windows. It usually requires some inf hacking. Worth a shot.

    • ALOT

      Modern cpus are not your grandpas cpus which only did math. Modern CPUs have graphics, i/o, Intel Media Management Interface, Intel RST storage raid, USB 3, NVME, pci express bus routing, wifi, etc. Windows 98 wouldn't be able to see the hard disk as the SATA controller is on the CPU. The keyboard won't work as Win 98 doesn't know what USB 3 is.

      No the 3000 GPU driver is not backward compatible with an intel 4500 Iris on a skylake so a generic driver is out of the question for all but legacy vga during s

      • You might still be able to get BIOS emulation and booting on MBR (though that'd be motherboard/hardware dependent!), USB mouse/keyboard support through emulation, VGA (obviously), PC speaker as well as e.g. serial and parallel ports which don't even require any emulation. I hope IDE mode is still a thing for SATA drives. Perhaps USB drive support if it's connected at boot.
        But if I had to guess : forget about running Windows 98 anyway.

        What would be much more likely to run is DOS (including the one from Windo

        • Or fire up hyper-v if you have pro version of 8 or later or download virtualbox and run win98 that way without the hacks. It's 2016 now :-)

  • shit (Score:2, Interesting)

    by blackomegax ( 807080 )
    when MS releases an OS that isn't a pile of pure dren, I'll upgrade from 7 on my gaming rig. Otherwise, Ubuntu it is.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2016 @03:11PM (#51726693)

    It makes sense why Microsoft is pushing Windows 10. It's expensive to provide security and bug fix updates for an OS, let alone three of them. By the time of the EOL, Microsoft isn't bringing in much revenue on that OS. They're losing money, and it makes sense why they would want to EOL Windows 7 and 8.1 as soon as possible. Clearly they want to only have one version of Windows going forward, Windows 10. They will only have to support one version of Windows and the revenue won't drop off because it will continue to be shipped with new computers. Had Microsoft been honest and openly admitted this, I think many people would understand and at least appreciate the honesty. It's not to say they would have wanted to switch to Windows 10, but it would have bought Microsoft some goodwill with users.

    Being forthcoming with official information about the telemetry and implementing a way to altogether disable it on all editions of Windows 10 would have improved the reception by end users. The most damaging thing has been the deceptive attempts to forcibly switch Windows 7 and 8.1 systems to Windows 10. Even pushing it as a recommended update is deceptive to many users who have been taught they need to install all of those updates or their computers will be vulnerable to malware.

    All the deception has severely damaged the Windows 10 brand. They abandoned Internet Explorer because the name had acquired a toxic reputation for a lack of security, despite great improvements in recent versions. Internet Explorer had a toxic reputation and Windows 10 is well on its way to having every bit as toxic of a reputation. Microsoft may have undermined their own goals by pushing Windows 10 so aggressively.

    • Oh please. It's basically impossible for MS to "undermine their own goals"; it doesn't matter how badly they screw up, people are going to continue to use Windows no matter what.

      Why should they care about "improving the reception by end users"? Why would they want to allow people to disable telemetry? It only benefits MS to keep it on, and it doesn't hurt MS if they make it hard or impossible to disable it. What are the users going to do, complain? Whine? They're certainly not going to abandon Windows

      • You're forgetting one tiny little thing:

        Us geeks influence friends and family.

        I got my whole family switched over to Macs ~ 10 years back. It was an dead easy "sell" as my Dad was so fed up with Microsoft's constantly nickeling and diming. IF Microsoft would be reasonable and sell Windows (licenses) for $20 instead of $200 Windows 10 Pro USB flash drive [microsoftstore.com] then MAYBE people would stick with them but that ship has sailed LONG AGO in our family. Macs are just easier to use & support for non-technical peop

        • Sorry, I don't buy it. There's just way too many loyal customers for MS to go the way of IBM any time soon.

          As for Android, that's irrelevant; Android is a mobile OS only. Windows is for desktop computers. We're not going to be doing serious office work on Android tablets. Supercomputers are irrelevant too; no one edits Word documents on a supercomputer. That's like saying Chrysler is going to disappear because they don't make bulldozers and dump trucks or train locomotives.

          Maybe your company is stickin

    • ... It's expensive to provide security and bug fix updates for an OS, let alone three of them....

      Then why does Microsoft release so many of 'em if it is so expensive?

      .
      Why should I have to suffer for Microsoft's bad planning?

    • Three of them? Microsoft is still updating Windows XP. Just not consumer versions. Embedded and POSReady versions of xp have updates till 2019. When companies pay exorbitant amounts for extended xp support, Microsoft is just giving them updates they already wrote for embedded versions.

    • Sure, they want to do this but it also generates major customer anger. What if your automobile maker decided to stop support on your car after only a few months, no new service bulletins, no recalls for major defects, and everytime you took it in for service you'd have to listen to a lecture about why you're a Luddite? Big lashback from the customers I would think. Yet Microsoft gets away with this sort of bad behavior and some customers even praise them for it. They lie about what they're doing and som

  • Skylake software support seems to be a bit funky at times.
    I suspect it will improve.
    I just picked up a small skylake box and had to tell
    GRUB to boot the kernel with "nosmp" to install Ubuntu.
    There is some support forum mumble foo about RAM and if you device is unstable
    try to update the BIOS and to try a different stick of RAM or RAM vendor.

    This darn thing is FAST even with one lung as it were.
    Old school interpreted stuff like FORTH can run out of cache,
    if you are not greedy and suffer personal affection for

    • by ytene ( 4376651 )
      I bought a fantastic Skylake system in December from AtLastSolutions.com - it's a completely silent fanless machine... Dual-booted with Mint 17 was effortless and worked without any need to re-work anything. All hardware recognised and - best of all - this machine came with an optical audio out for surround sound... Not sure how you might feel about swapping ubuntu for Mint. I made the switch when Canonical started to snoop end user use of the Dash and I haven't looked back. I find Mint to be cleaner, fast
      • by ytene ( 4376651 )
        Should have said... it came with Windows 7 pre-loaded on to a 1Tb SSD in a 500Gb partition [at my request]. I've since dist-upgraded twice [now on 17.3/Rosa] and it works brilliantly...
        • Should have said... it came with Windows 7 pre-loaded on to a 1Tb SSD in a 500Gb partition [at my request]. I've since dist-upgraded twice [now on 17.3/Rosa] and it works brilliantly...

          I am open to trying things. Will try Mint/17.3/Rosa on my Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-6100U CPU @ 2.30GHz
          Tomorrow.. There are multiple Skylake flavors out there. There are multiple BIOSes out there as
          well. News at eleven as they used to say.

        • Ah Windows 7 NVME is not stable.

          Hence why MS wants to drop support for Skylake. Windows 10 will run much better and so will 8.1 with a start menu replacement. NVME is different and a later linux kernel can help too. Sometimes new hardware on old software is a bad combo unless you get a Dell which does the QA that Intel won't

  • I have no desire to switch from 7 to 10 and I have at least 6 or 7 licences for Windows 7. Running this OS will be fine whilst I am able to get updates from MS if I'm ever forced to do a clean installation, but ever since MS stopped issuing "Service Packs" life got harder. With their underhand determination to force us away from 7 and on to 10, I can't see a sudden moment of charity resulting in an "End of the Road" Service Pack update any time soon... So - does anyone know if it might be possible to engi
    • They never released a rollup / service pack at XP EOL. Windows update servers still remain active for EOL versions. Just no new updates. Regardless WSUS Offline [wsusoffline.net] will let you build a backup of available updates.

    • I know Windows 10 gets lots of hate on slashdot, but one of the benefits is if one PC on your subnet updates it can stream the updates to your other pcs saving bandwidth :-)

      Nice for home environments.

      You may want to just hold your nose and upgrade using Microsoft's free Media Creation tool which will put all the latest 10 bug fixes and updates on a flashdrive for a clean install? Spyware? It just does what Chrome does with telemetry to see what works and what doesn't. It does not spying and the keystroke st

  • I really don't have any troubles with Windows 10. I don't agree that MS should force people to upgrade. If someone wants to be on an outdated system that they are happy with for whatever reason then let them be. I think all they need to do is just turn off automatic updates and then they can patch their systems manually from the MS web site. What I would like to see is MS come out with Windows 10 for the RT Platform. They put out RT and they are letting it die on the vine in favor of the Surface Pro pl

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