New CPUs will only be compatible with Windows 10, says Microsoft | TechRadar
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... ft-1313255

AKA 'Will you please stop using Windows 7?!'

AKA we did this with Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, nothing to see here.

Intel brought out new MMX multimedia opcodes in the Pentiums after Windows 98 was released and Windows 95 was left hanging; it still worked, but it didn't gain the advantages that the MMX instructions brought.

Likewise Windows 2000 and XP were left hanging with new mainboard and IDE features. If you wanted to get the full use out of your mainboard, processor or hard drive, then you needed a newer version of the OS that supported it.

This seems to be exactly the same thing. The older OSes will still work on newer hardware, they will get security patches; but any new features in the processor will not be taken advantage of - and things like power saving modes might cause problems and you'll need to disable sleep and hybernate if you stick with Windows 7. If the new processor design causes conflicts with W7 or W8.1, then you will have to find your own fixes or move to a supported OS.

It is the same with OS X and Linux BTW. If you have more modern hardware, then you can have problems with older versions - we have one customer that is struggling with a 1999 release of SUSE, because it doesn't work on modern hardware, but some of their software only runs on that version of SUSE and they won't pay for updates to a newer version of the software.

I honestly don't see why this is news other than for the joy of bashing MS's cack handed efforts to push people to Windows 10.

Seriously, if you want to use all the features of next generation CPU's you need to use the current, up to date, version of the OS. Like this is any different from OS X and probably any commercial UNIX variant either (OK, you might get a group doing the work for Linux but meh).
Seems to boil down to people getting into a tizzy because MS have stated clearly that they will no longer be devoting major resources to updating the core code in Windows 7/8/8.1 (what they regard as or 6, 3 and 1 year old legacy OS's respectively) to support CPU's that haven't even been released yet. How very dare they!

The difference between 7 and 10 is marginal (Windows 8 is no longer being supported, and 8.1 is now officially a service pack apparently*), with the main differences being GUI changes and, latterly, dodgy privacy settings. Quite a few Win7 drivers work on Win10.

*annoying when you consider the fact most people got 8 as a cheap upgrade from 7, and reinstalls require you to install 8 and update to 8.1, because your upgraded licence key isn't directly accepted by a 8.1 install.

What's the problem? Windows 7 is *really* old and runs out of support next year.

To put it in perspective, it's roughly the same age as OS X Snow Leopard - the one that dropped native support for PowerPC. When 7 was released, Google Chrome wasn't a year old yet and the iPad was 10 months away.

Oh and Android looked like:

What are you gibbering about? Windows 7 runs out of support in 2020.

Mainstream support for Win7 has already ended. Extended support is 2020.

Which is still support!

Which means it only gets security fixes. New features, such as support for features in new processors are not security updates and therefore it won't take advantage of those new features, although it should run on the new processors, just MS won't guarantee that it will be stable.

OS support for new Skylake processors runs out on 17th July 2017.


From here

The problem is, people are reading "supported" and saying Windows 7 and 8.1 won't run on Kaby Lake. Those are two very different things.

In the past it has meant that new features aren't supported in older versions of Windows and the older version won't be guaranteed to work on the new silicon. That is very different to saying that you must have Windows 10 to boot on a Kaby Lake processor.

Windows Weekly spent about an hour discussing this today.

It seems I was mostly correct. When new silicon comes out, many things need to be updated in the OS to take advantage of the new features. MS won't be doing this for Windows 7 after Skylake. This is mainly for businesses and not for private users, so that they can continue to use Windows 7, whilst sorting out their upgrade plans. Only certain PCs will be guaranteed to work with Windows 7 and Skylake. And after mid 2017, they will only get security updates for Windows 7, any incompatibility issues that crop up are then your problem.

Microsoft gives some ground on pushing Windows 10 to Skylake PCs | TechRadar
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/ ... cs-1317387

just as a side note.
windows 10 32 bit doesn't have PAE so doesn't support more then 4GB of memory.
on my shuttle systems windows 10 32 bit home edition only uses 2.99GB of the available 4GB of installed RAM.
that's not major for our systems as we dont use them with anything heavy duty but its worth noting ...

Is that not pretty much the same as any 32 bit version of Windows? A 32 bit OS can't deal with more than 4GB of RAM less whatever it reserves for other essential functions (like mapping graphics memory).