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Windows XP Starter Edition Snubs P4, Athlon

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the for-starters-only dept.

Apu writes "CNET is reporting that Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition operating system specifically checks the result of the CPUID instruction on bootup and fails to continue if a Pentium 4 or Athlon processor is detected."

2 of 705 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perhaps a strange suggestion, but... by stevey · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course when the machine is in such a mess that it decides to blue-screen you're probably not going to trust it to write a file.

    After all it might have crashed because it encountered a strange filesystem error - and writing to it could trash your whole disk.

    There have been similar suggestions for the Linux Kernel; write information somewhere when the kernel panics, but they are usually shot down for the same reason.

    When a machine is in the 'panic' state writing to the local disks, or sending stuff across the network isn't usually feasible. (True some people have done it but its a hard problem - because you can't actually rely upon the kernel to do anything correctly when it's mid-panic).

  2. Re:Perhaps a strange suggestion, but... by g0at · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Mac OS X writes data to the machine's NVRAM on kernel panic, which is then retrievable and interpretable once the system reboots.

    -ben

    --
    myselfmusic