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.
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.
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.
The reverse-engineered open source gma500 driver included in Linux works very well for basic stuff but lacks features such as H.264 decoding and 3D acceleration.
The old Intel drivers can be patched to run on newer kernels, you also need to run an old version of X.org.
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.
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.
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.
No. But manufacturers ought to warn their customers that they don't intend to support their hardware for longer that some period of time so that people can at least buy their crap based on an informed decision. It used to be that you could run Windows until it EOL'd giving you a good couple of years, now with point releases you are only guaranteed to run it until it reaches EOL of that point release.
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.
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.)
> 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).
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.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right on all points. This is one of the few situations where moving to Linux doesn't improve support for a non-Windows-supported device. The PowerVR GMA500 never worked well under Linux from day one. I've had two netbooks with this CPU/GPU combo, even under Windows 7 performance was terrible and the driver was buggy.
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).
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.
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.
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.