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Microsoft Quietly Cuts Off Windows 7 Support For Older Intel Computers (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If your PC doesn't run Streaming Single Instructions Multiple Data (SIMD) Extensions 2, you apparently won't be getting any more Win7 patches. At least, that's what I infer from some clandestine Knowledge Base documentation changes made in the past few days. Even though Microsoft says it's supporting Win7 until January 14, 2020, if you have an older machine -- including any Pentium III -- you've been blocked, and there's nothing you can do about it.
The last Pentium III chip ever created was released in 2001.
2001. That is 17 years ago. Last computer built with this ancient technology is probably from 2005, over ten years ago. Much of the hardware machinery, such as mechanical drives and fans, should've stopped working by now. If they miraculously still work, Linux is a prime candidate to run on this super-old system for that last mileage.
Face it, Windows 7 is on it's death bed, and if you do not like it, go Linux or go home. :)
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Last P-III was 2001 or 2002. People/companies generally nurse such old hardware along because they have to (it controls factory hardware, etc), not because they want to.
Doesn't change the fact that Windows 7 officially supports Pentium IIIs (32-bit x86 1GHz or higher) and has stated support to 2020. And that this inherently means if they're running in specific applications and are exploited because of malware because of a lack of updates, Microsoft can be sued through the ass not to mention be potentially brought up on fraud charges*. But, yea, let's try to spin this into being a minor issue and wholly the users fault.
PS - Even using your out of the ass numbers of 0.5% of computers (really using just Windows 7 sales (300 million), which is a smaller number), and you're talking 1.5 million computers. You don't think 1.5 million computers as part of a botnet would be a big thing? Or replacing 1.5 million computers early would be a big thing? Seriously, the sheer scale of expected support should have shut down Microsoft considering such changes.
Of course, the real lesson here is to cut Windows products out of your environment as much as possible. Any company that believes it can just mandate substantial changes to your business so you can keep accepting patches to fix ITS bugs is a trainwreck.
* Large corporations quite specifically are maximizing the life of bought hardware and scheduling software purchased based upon a support cycle. Anything that upsets that can be a massive loss.
Embedded systems like medical equipment, displays, measurement equipment, etc.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Do a Google search for: Windows 7 EOL and you will get the following:
Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 7 on January 13, 2015, but extended support won't end until January 14, 2020. This applies as long as you have Service Pack 1 installed.
So, Windows 7 is already well beyond the end of the normal support cycle for consumers, and the extended support is going away in another 1.5 years. If people insist on holding on to what is soon to become a dead end, then you run into the problems you see with Windows XP, where getting it to run on a new computer is problematic and requires a virtual machine, because there are no drivers for the newer components. Want to put antivirus or other programs on there, nope, they won't run on anything older than Windows 7 currently.
The longer you hold on to an OLD product, the more difficult it will be to migrate your programs/data, and at some point, you just won't be able to get your old programs running on newer computers. Then, you end up needing to really hunt for parts to fix your old computer. If you are on a laptop, it becomes even more difficult to deal with a hardware failure due to a lack of standardization in the components in a laptop.
I understand that many people don't like some of the things in Windows 10, but the bulk of those things can be removed or turned off, and it is worth the effort to modernize NOW, before you end up stranded and without a way to move to a new computer when your old machine needs to be upgraded.
Actually the indicator in the Steam hardware survey of a PIII would be lacking SSE2, currently Steam is showing 100% of computers surveyed as having both SSE2 and SSE3. Even then the vast majority are post Core2 even with support for SSE4.1 and SSE4.2. I honestly suspect this is a non-issue that affects primarily industrial applications, and honestly most of them are probably running XP without a care in the world. I was actually quite surprised by this story in the first place because I had been under the impression windows has required SSE2 since Vista.
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Yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
RHEL5 released in 2007 and is in extended support until 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
SLES11 came out in 2009, LTSS ends in 2022.
For fun, Solaris from 2005 is supported until 2021:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So while OSX and community distributions and Ubuntu LTS don't go that far, there are OSes that do. This is one reason why people snicker at Ubuntu's proclamation of 'Long Term Support', when the competitors have so much longer support cycles.
Of course, I wouldn't wish a RHEL5/SLES11 desktop on anyone, they are missing so many features in the current distros. Then again, XP also was pretty pathetic desktop experience wise when it was still popular relative to contemporary Microsoft desktops.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In its original incarnation, its memory footprint was about 35 megabytes and it was insanely fast compared to anything that came after.