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."
Well you could just buy a Mac (Score:1)
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).
See folks? It's all about sales... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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.
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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...
Re:See folks? It's all about sales... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, because regular computers tend to come with HARD DRIVE BAY COVERS for users to open themselves and NOT VOID WARRANTY.
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Most 'regular' laptops (not Apple ) have hard discs you can replace. Or add to by extension. It is not just 'desktops' of floor based PC towers.
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Yes, they do. Anything that isn't a shit slimline laptop almost always comes with A. a cover for RAM/Wireless and B. at least one hard drive bay cover.
One I just finished repairing even comes with another bay door for the DUAL GTX980M.
I've done and continue to do this for a living. You very obviously do not, which is why you posted as AC.
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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?
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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
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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...
Re: See folks? It's all about sales... (Score:2)
Well, YOU opened up the thread with "Mac", so that would be the actual topic.
And last time I checked, iPad is made by Apple. Some of those devices that I took for repair are iOS devices. Failure isn't limited to the Mac line.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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).
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
But we will still push the auto update hard (Score:3)
But we will still push the auto update hard so all it's takes is one click and then you have 10.
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Just use the GWX control panel, it can disable everything so its not possible to accidentally update to Windows 10.
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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.
Microsoft needs to stay with its word (Score:3)
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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)
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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).
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You're almost a year late on the 2003 transition..
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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.
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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
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Re:Hey, Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.)
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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.
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I'm thinking about your neighborhood dentist, orthodontist, GP.... They CAN'T buy Enterprise.
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they also paid/paying/willpay for f35...
bad decisions are built in the chain of command.
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Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me.
FTFY - No one wants to screw you. Not even your mother.
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Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me.
FTFY - No one wants to screw you. Not even your mother.
Nothing beats Friday night on Slashdot.
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To be fair, I think a lot of Windows 8.1 is better than Windows 7, fewer crashes and less memory footprint. The only real fault was the Metro shit, you can hide it now but you can never uninstall it. Windows 7 was also a distinct improvement over Windows XP as well.
Windows 10 could have been an improvement except for their update approach that is hostile to the customers.
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Metro can be ignored, Classic Shell allows a start menu that is sort of a mix of those from XP and Windows 7, and it's better than both.
I think the issue is there is no other freedom allowed. Sometimes we don't want an animated, 3D accelerated desktop. Give us a 2D, non composited desktop back with a traditional file manager and don't make us wait for it to launch.
Even something the spinning balls thing that runs at 60 fps is something that runs too fast and catches the eye, it's unneeded besides looking hi
I still don't get this... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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Most bugs are not intra-arch specific.. They do crop up but they are rare. The real reason for this is to force upgrades.
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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.
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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.
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I really doubt you can, at least not with networking support.
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From what I heard through the grape vine MS told Intel not to release Win7/8 drivers for the newer CPUs.
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Sometimes it's possible to use drivers from other versions of windows. It usually requires some inf hacking. Worth a shot.
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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
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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
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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 :-)
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There's something very fishy going on with this Skylake driver story.
Read this from top to bottom [wikipedia.org] about SkyLake. The only changes mentioned are to the "microarchitecture design", which means this is internal to how the CPU works, and should be transparent to the OS.
There are now many reasons to be wary of embedded backdoors, and some have opined the risk of spurious microcode vulnerabilities.
What's the bet that SkyLake formalises this in some way?
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"No, you can't. Try installing Windows XP on a Skylake CPU and see what happens."
It works just fucking fine over here! Posting from said machine in my kitchen RIGHT NOW. Sure, I can't see all 6GB RAM in the system, but the system works.
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Perhaps everyone's fault for agreeing so readily to Microsoft's one sided contracts?
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But enterprise is a core market of theirs. Most people at home can get away with nothing but a browser, so a Chromebook, iPad, or android tablet is cheaper and better for them. Maybe Microsoft is just surreptitiously trying to get out of the PC market altogether?
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Windows 10 is the new Vista [...]
Uh, seriously? Vista required new hardware to run and annoyed the hell out of users with its security features to protect users from the Internet. Win10 runs fine on the Vista-compatible hardware that I bought in 2007 and it's business as usual with desktop applications.
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I have an Asus eeePC netbook that came with Windows XP.
Vista? Too slow. Unusable.
7? Runs nice.
8/8.1? Resolution is too small.
10? Runs nice.
Windows Vista wasn't compatible with almost any hardware. Windows 10 is compatible with almost everything made in the last 7 years.
shit (Score:2, Interesting)
It makes sense why MS wants everyone on Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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
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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
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... 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?
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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.
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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
Microsoft = Donald Trump of the software world! (Score:2)
Dump Windows!
Hmmm Skylake (Score:2)
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
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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.
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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
Crafting a Virtual Service Pack? (Score:1)
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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.
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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
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Download VMware or whatever.
Make a VM.
Install Windows onto the VM.
At the first setup screen, before you create a username, hit CTRL+SHIFT+F3 to enter System Audit Mode.
Get it updated, install your borwsers, dickbutt.exe, and whatever else you use.
Shut it down using the Sysprep dialog box that is in your face. Choose "Enter System Audit Mode" with an action of "Shut Down". Do NOT check the "generalize" checkbox.
Boot it and patch it every Patch Tuesday.
If you ever need to install Windows, take a snapshot of
Re:Crafting a Virtual Service Pack? (Score:4, Funny)
Download VMware or whatever. Make a VM. Install Windows onto the VM.
At the first setup screen, before you create a username, hit CTRL+SHIFT+F3 to enter System Audit Mode. Get it updated, install your borwsers, dickbutt.exe, and whatever else you use. Shut it down using the Sysprep dialog box that is in your face. Choose "Enter System Audit Mode" with an action of "Shut Down". Do NOT check the "generalize" checkbox.
Boot it and patch it every Patch Tuesday.
If you ever need to install Windows, take a snapshot of the VM. Boot the VM. Using the Sysprep dialog box, tell it to enter OOBE and check the "generalize" checkbox. Tell it to shutdown.
You can now use a ton of different tools to take that Windows install and capture it as a deployable image on any hardware. System Center / Windows Deployment Services / etc. have Windows PE tools that will do this. Other tools exist, though I have not used them. I believe booting to an Acronis disc or similar will let you do the same deal.
After you capture the image using whatever method is easiest according to Google at the time you need to do it, revert the snapshot on the VM to undo the "generalize" step (which decrements your activation rearm count). There are other hacks to reset this count after you run out of rearms, but they're not clean and can break Windows Update.
For your 8007000E error, simply hit "check for updates" until you get the error, then reboot, then do it again. Last I checked, a machine will encounter this error 3 times before Windows Update works.
That's how I taught Grandma to do it.
Windows (Score:1)
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Well this ever be fixed? Probably not. T