Microsoft says new processors will only work with Windows 10 (starting with Skylake)

Soon, when you buy a new PC, it won't support Windows 7 or 8. Microsoft has announced a change to its support policy that lays out its plans for future updates to its older operating systems, and the new rules mean that future PC owners with next-generation Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm processors will need to use Windows 10.

It's not usual for old PCs to fall short of the minimum requirements of a brand new operating system, but in this case, the opposite is happening. Microsoft and its partners will not be putting in the significant work necessary to make new hardware work with older versions of Windows. The old operating systems, at best, will merely lack the latest updates. At worst, they might not function properly.

"Going forward, as new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support," Microsoft notes in a blog post published on Friday. "Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Intel's upcoming 'Kaby Lake' silicon, Qualcomm's upcoming '8996' silicon, and AMD's upcoming 'Bristol Ridge' silicon."

This new policy doesn't mean that Windows 7 and 8.1 are no longer supported in general. The two operating systems will continue to get updates through January 14, 2020 and January 10, 2023, respectively. But that's only if you're using hardware that was contemporaneous with those operating systems.

For current PC owners, the detail to note is that Intel's current, sixth generation processors, known as Skylake, are the first that won't support either of the older versions of Windows. (Intel and Microsoft say that the [Skylake] platform and Windows 10 were designed for each other.) Microsoft is phasing in the policy now.

For the company's all-important enterprise customers, who often lag behind on hardware and software updates in order to guarantee stability, Microsoft says it will be maintaining a list of approved Skylake systems that are guaranteed to have Windows 7 and 8.1 support through July 17, 2017. That gives companies an 18 month grace period to buy modern hardware for employees before committing and implementing upgrades to Windows 10.

After the grace period, only "the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices." Companies and consumers, of course, can still buy older PC hardware that doesn't utilize Intel's Skylake platform or other modern CPUs â€” the last generation of supported Intel processors are known as Broadwell, and those chips are still widely available.

The policy change not only makes Microsoft's hardware partners happy â€” they no longer are on the hook to develop as many costly software updates for past versions of Windows â€” but it also helps Microsoft push adoption of Windows 10. The company sees the operating system as the "final" version of Windows; it's now a service, not a product, and this change better reflects that. There's only one current version of Windows, and while Microsoft will fullfill its legacy hardware obligations, it won't be expending resources to help users steer clear of its latest and greatest.

A good friend confided personal healthcare information to his closest friend at work in private. Nobody else knew but the doctor.

2 days later he began to receive adware regarding his prognosis, which he hadn’t told anybody else.

After conferring with his friend, they checked his cell phone, which had Cortana installed, but deactivated.

Checking the transaction logs, it appears Cortana periodically turns on the microphone and uploads its recordings to the Cloud for analysis. 2 days later and adware began hitting his internet browsers (not his cellphone, mind you, but now linked to his email account, then his PC.

BTW, if you have any doubt about the big M, just read their license agreements on their SW and operating systems.

Then read all the blogs of nerds who have paid for it, want it, and Windows 10 still doesn’t load properly.

If you have a new PC, preloaded with Windows and it runs Bing, it appears you have no ability to change it. Even the technophiles throw their hands in the air and turn to other PCs when this happens.

How does it happen? Research the OEM preinstallation kits required by Microsoft for their deployment. They have toolsets premade to preinstall Bing with other apps like Cortana. Even if you do not want adware, the preinstalls create it in the OS, the Backup, and other nooks and crannys.

Microsoft is to Operating Systems what Obama has been to the Executive Branch.

One trick has been to dual boot your PC, with a partition, so that one boot drive is Win10, the other is another Operating System.

FWIW, I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to load up Win 8.1, then 10, after it has been paid for, and supposedly MS wants you to upgrade.

Don’t buy the OEM SW. Only buy the retail and install it yourself, if you want it. BTW, you are forced into creating a Microsoft account when you activate the Operating System, and then you can never change out the CPU, Motherboard, Power Supply, HDD or SSD unless they are identical parts and CPU remains the same Serial Number,...without buying a new OS software package for over $100-$200. Every time you log in, the OS might update, and if it finds any apps in your PC which doesn’t have contracts with Microsoft, it might simply delete them.

After you sign in for an account you don’t want, you are then forced to become a Microsoft Partner in order to find downloading and installation directions. The Partner license also has a blank check assigned such that you agree to pay an annual fee, with the fee never disclosed. In some cases the annual fee is over $1700 to $5k. In the past, the OEM version of the OS simply implied you didn;t receive support without additional payment for services. Now they hide the installation procedures in a bait and switch licensing scheme.

I have a friend who has had his programs deleted twice on some very stable older freeware, as a consequence of automatic OS updating and changes to your system without the owner’s approval. (approval implied by opening the SW in the licensing agreement with MS)

BTW, the title is a bit misleading.
The newer OS are the only ones which support many functions in the Z170 chipset (Skylake) though they are likely to be more associated with adware and market analysis and the Cloud.

FWIW, the documentation to properly install the systems is so poor, that all we will likely see are either installed off the shelf versions with embedded links to Bing and other search engines hooked to analytics or you might get completely pirated stuff. MS has no intention of delivering a professional grade product to system builders. If they did, they would have had at least 30% of the documentation available to older PC system builders.
Instead, their documentation is a bait and switch game to sucker clients into buying more trash with benefits, but never stating the costs until you are into their hole.

Plan on a $2k investment in the Operating System with several months of dedicated training, with repetitive upgrades and “clean installs” just to get an operable system with some degree of integrity.

Otherwise, buy it off the shelf and suffer the adware harassment.

Be sure to back up all your data in multiple media. It will likely become contaminated and nobody knows how grossly unreliable these systems are.

Sincerely, Microsoft is to Operating Systems, what Obama has been to the Executive Branch.

For the amount of time I’ve invested in just trying to install SW I already purchased, I would have been better off buying LINUX/UBUNTU and compiling my own. At least I would know what the machine is doing and can control it.

I’m not to sure you can keep Win10 from destroying the rest of the machine if somebody wanted it to do so.

IMHO, Objective isn't money or even market share. MS is a good enough company not to get themselves into this mess, which they have, making New Coke look like a success story.

IMHO, its convoluted, but driven by the agendas in hitech toward neurological programming.

Some of the problems with the MS SW is simply very poor documentation. Microsoft always had a problem with keeping their operating system Basis of Design so tightly chested that one corner of the company didn't know what the other was doing. People migrated to what they could engineer and manage, hence their new SW rollout and imaging programs. If you don't know what it does, just copy and paste it into a backwards compatible machine and hopefully it works.

Some people want to meet milestones, others believe its bit too arrogant.

We seem to be living in a Plug and Play, replace the part world, where nobody knows how anything works from the bottom up, anymore. Installing the OS is fraught with steps to perform, but few are really following what is being performed systemically.

If it were money driven, MS wouldn't care who was getting it, they still would have their hands in the transaction at activation. IMHO, it's so complicated, they're just trying to shut off their older systems and keep their hands in the cookie jar on the new ones.

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