
Microsoft cuts off Windows 10 support early for some PCs - AdmiralAsshat
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-blocks-windows-10-creators-update-on-some-pcs/
======
ntauthority
This hardware uses PowerVR GPUs (e.g. rebranded GMA500), which are no longer
supported (driver updates) for Windows by both Intel and Imagination, and even
on older versions of Windows (and Linux) had barely-to-non-functional drivers.
These drivers already had various bugs, and on newer Windows 10 versions an
additional bug is apparently 'text not rendering'.

The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely
was usable, that it apparently wasn't deemed worth the engineering effort to
work around this type of flawed driver.

Of course, this article completely ignores that information, presumably to
cause typical baseless Microsoft hate.

~~~
nickcoury
I had an Acer Aspire 751 with Atom Z520 and the GMA500 GPU you mentioned. It
always had terrible driver support in Windows 7. When I updated to the Windows
10 insider preview before it was released, it was unusable. Huge graphics
glitches all over the place, text would disappear entirely in some programs,
random scrambled blocks of the screen that changed as you navigated. By the
time Windows 10 was officially released it had been improved, but still wasn't
great. Not surprising that this piece of hardware isn't a good candidate for
support in the future.

~~~
pantalaimon
Have you ever tried running Linux on it?

I wonder how the gma500 driver fares these days.

~~~
morganvachon
My experience with it under Linux was limited to the vesa driver only, as the
GMA500 driver was incomplete and buggy. As such, it wasn't a great platform
for media consumption, but if all you needed was a terminal it was fine.

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jarym
So in 12 years time when Windows 10 is as old as Windows XP we'll be back to
the same security nightmare that Windows 10 was supposed to put an end to?

That's a bit disingenuous of Microsoft - they've been parading the 'as-a-
service' model as a security feature so that users get constant patches.

~~~
twblalock
Do you think Microsoft is obligated to support all hardware for all time?

A line needs to be drawn somewhere.

~~~
jarym
It does indeed. But remember one of the big sells Microsoft made was that with
Windows 10 you would get continual security patches. Microsoft dug that hole
for themselves.

And to add, a machine released in 2015 (less than 3 years ago!) that no longer
gets security updates is hardly the right place to be drawing the line you
speak of.

~~~
orbitingpluto
Many of the 32GB Bay Trail Windows 8 tablets that were upgraded to Windows 10
for free were unable to install Windows 10 Anniversary edition. For these
devices you had to do a completely fresh install to get from Windows 10 to
Windows 10 Anniversary Edition.

Conceivably you've cut your support from 10 years to 2 by upgrading to Windows
10.

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AnssiH
I wouldn't be so sure until the support _actually_ drops.

1607 is going to receive updates to 2018, and the Acer quote says "Microsoft
is working with us to help provide compatible drivers to address this
incompatibility", and I can see no official statement from MS saying
otherwise.

The "Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC" message, then, could be
explained by simple "if (!systemsupported()) { show message }" that does not
properly take into account that support could still be added in the future.

------
lightbyte
>If... the manufacturer [of your PC] doesn't officially support it for Windows
10, you're at risk.

In other news, water is wet.

~~~
asveikau
Windows upgrades have worked for decades without manufacturer support. I can't
remember the last time in the "32 bit and above" era that a whole class of CPU
stopped working release to release. You might be bound by RAM or a particular
driver but you were generally ok to upgrade. Is Apple's grip on this community
so strong that we now accept hardware deprecation for PCs? (Though even apple
didn't cut off my 2009 machine until sierra.)

~~~
amyjess
> I can't remember the last time in the "32 bit and above" era that a whole
> class of CPU stopped working release to release. You might be bound by RAM
> or a particular driver but you were generally ok to upgrade.

The problem isn't with the actual CPU cores but with the graphics drivers.
Unlike all other Intel chips, these Atoms have PowerVR GPUs that have been
EOL'd by the manufacturer. The existing GPU drivers won't work with the new
Windows 10, and reverse-engineering them without manufacturer support would be
too much of a pain (there aren't even good Linux drivers for these GPUs, TBH).

~~~
asveikau
If it worked in the last release it's a regression and they can fix it. It
sounds to me like a compat bug where the true severity wasn't understood or
acted upon until too late.

(Disclosure: I worked for MS from 2008-2011.)

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ConfucianNardin
Yesterday on Ars:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794546)

~~~
castell
got only 19 votes (probably bad timing), let's keep it and not flag it as dupe
- info seems relevant to me

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Palomides
>Intel's Atom Clover Trail series CPUs

~~~
MikusR
Using PowerVR Graphics.

~~~
mtgx
Okay, but we already saw Microsoft drop support for Skylake features in
Windows 7 and 8.

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-
window...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-windows-
support-policy-new-processors-skylake)

We may need at least another data point, but it does look to me that Microsoft
has gotten much more aggressive about dropping support for older hardware. It
probably a result of Nadella's cut of the Q&A team. If the Q&A team is cut, it
makes sense that less hardware would be support, and that you'll also see more
bugs in the operating system.

> _Despite being Microsoft’s newest and ‘most secure’ operating system,
> Windows 10 was found to have the highest proportion of vulnerabilities of
> any OS (395), 46% more than Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 (265 each)._

[https://www.avecto.com/news-and-events/news/94-of-
critical-m...](https://www.avecto.com/news-and-events/news/94-of-critical-
microsoft-vulnerabilities-mitigated-by-removing-admin-rights)

It sounds to me like all of those anti-exploit mitigations that are supposed
to come to Windows 10 will be needed just to make it as "secure" as previous
versions.

~~~
ntauthority
Dropping support? No, said support was announced to not exist before the
release of said CPUs, and given that CPUs are a fair bit more complex than
appears (for instance Windows XP wouldn't run on Ryzen CPUs until a microcode
update in practice due to some old feature being unsupported, or new features
would be introduced that old OS task switching code is unaware of) at first
glance, it was considered unviable to formally support these CPUs - even if
they might work at first appearances, Microsoft gathers sufficient usage/error
data that they presumably know of some hard-to-fix issue that makes it
impossible to guarantee the OS to work together with this new hardware.

Also, an update to the OS to make it compatible could potentially be
sufficiently high-impact that it could break user applications, existing
hardware functionality, or other potential concerns.

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rbanffy
I think it's worth noting most Linux distros will continue to support these
machines with new features and security patches for the time being.

~~~
pantalaimon
It depends.

The problem here lies within the graphics driver for the PowerVR GPU - which
was never really supported under Linux either.

There is an experimental 2D driver [0] which is unlikely to receive any mayor
updates, I don't know how stable it is at this day and age.

You won't get any 3D or video decoding acceleration though unless you use a
now as well unsupported release like Ubuntu 11.10 [1]

[0]
[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/Kconfig)

[1]
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PoulsboObsoleteDrivers](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PoulsboObsoleteDrivers)

~~~
qplex
The old Intel driver works under Ubuntu 14.05 LTS. And you can get them
working on newer releases also. [1]

The Ubuntu Wiki on this is horribly misinformed and out of date.

The gma500 driver included in Linux also works very well, but lacks the
accelerated features.

[1] [https://github.com/EMGD-Community/intel-binaries-
linux](https://github.com/EMGD-Community/intel-binaries-linux)

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gruez
And that's why you use LTSB. 10 years of guaranteed security updates, with no
feature updates that break your shit.

~~~
E6300
Only you need a volume license for that, and if you have the dough to spend on
that, presumably you'd get a higher-specced CPU.

~~~
DanBC
Schools buy hundreds of low end machines for students.

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MikusR
Strange way to write Intel.

