The Zeffy approach apparently works well – but it’s ephemeral, as Zeffy points out.
[See the full post at: The whack-a-mole approach to running Windows 7 on newer machines]
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The whack-a-mole approach to running Windows 7 on newer machines
- This topic has 46 replies, 22 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 1 month ago.
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That was not always the case.
Once, there was the idea (almost a standard, really) that the SYSTEM software that was the cornerstone to computer operation had to be be better – i.e., more fully tested, more stable, bug-free – than APPLICATION software.
Only the highest-level engineers were considered worthy of OS work, while just anyone could be an application programmer. People with degrees in other disciplines – or without degrees at all – became application programmers.
Do you notice Microsoft doesn’t differentiate between the two realms at all any more?
The reality is that they really haven’t been working in the SYSTEM realm much since Dave Cutler applied his virtual memory system design expertise to making NT. Where did that expertise (and design philosophy) come from? Digital Equipment Corporation. And look how long it has been state-of-the-art.
Now, whack-a-mole indeed. Except that I don’t think the introduction of new problems is entirely by accident.
Today’s “OS design” philosophy resembles the old joke I first saw expressed on an Apple II: If you pair an infinite number of monkeys up with an infinite number of typewriters and give them an infinite time to play, sooner or later all the great works will be written.
Microsoft has become the most adept manager of mediocrity there ever was.
-Noel
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A quote from https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html
You may probably want to know why Windows 10 feels so buggy. Here’s a very nice <abbr title=”https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937526″>quote</abbr>:
Full Disclosure: I worked at M$ from 2014-2015.
MS has some very talented programmers. They’re not very common, but they exist. The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products, giving them completely unrealistic deadlines, and then shipping software on those deadlines no matter how half-assed or buggy it is.
The idea is that everything is serviceable over the internet now, so they can just “fix it later”, except they never do. This perpetuates a duct-tape culture that refuses to actually fix problems and instead rewards teams that find ways to work around them. The talented programmers are stuck working on code that, at best, has to deal with multiple badly designed frameworks from other teams, or at worst work on code that is simply scrapped. New features are prioritized over all but the most system-critical bugs, and teams are never given any time to actually focus on improving their code. The only improvements that can happen must be snuck in while implementing new features.
As far as M$ is concerned, all code is <bleep>, and the only thing that matters is if it works well enough to be shown at a demo and shipped. Needless to say, I don’t work there anymore.
The above link makes for an interesting read, and despite being a little disorganised, shouldn’t be dismissed as just another Windows rant.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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Just a note, as I mentioned yesterday (and kind of Herr Born confirmed it:
http://borncity.com/win/2017/04/20/windows-78-1-preview-rollups-kb4015552-and-kb4015553/
Carizzo DDR4 error is NOT fixed in the preview, so most likely the issue will not be resolved in May rollup.
Fractal Design Pop Air * Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 750W * ASUS TUF GAMING B560M-PLUS * Intel Core i9-11900K * 4 x 8 GB G.Skill Aegis DDR4 3600 MHz CL16 * ASRock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming 16GB OC * XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE 1TB * SanDisk Ultra 3D 1TB * Samsung EVO 840 250GB * DVD RW Lite-ON iHAS 124 * Windows 10 Pro 22H2 64-bit Insider * Windows 11 Pro Beta InsiderMany questions have to be asked of the user at this point, IMHO –
1) Do you believe MS will push out non-destructive updates to 7/8.1 systems?
2) If the answer to 1 is ‘yes’, how bad do you want those updates?
3) Is there any doubt whether your system is on the supported list?
4) If the answer to 3 is ‘no’, do you believe MS will honor that and not “mistakenly” [heavy sarcasm] flag it as incompatible?
5) How many hoops are you willing to jump through, and for how long?I know the knee-jerk is “use Linux” and I get that some people can’t go that way.
So you’re left with basically 2 options if you’re refusing 10 at all costs:
A) Join group W, shut off Windows Update 3 years early
B) Hop through the minefield, and the hoops as necessary.I still think MS is doing this completely and wholly on purpose, and expects that eventually, people will just give up and cave in. The problem I think they’re going to have, because their attitude and their history makes it hard for them to accept the facts (or make them willing), is that a lot of people have caved in – and switched to Mac or Linux. Or shut off WU for good. It’s almost like MS assumes that “caving in” means you accept 10 as your lord and savior, and that will continue being their downfall. All that glitters is not gold.
Why not inject a dll (take your pick of methods) that checks the version of the dll and dynamically patches it (in memory) if the version is supported to be “fixed”. It could be adjustable (saved settings) to try to patch unknown versions, or not.
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Nadella’s done very well with Microsoft’s stock price.
Windows is no longer relevant to Microsoft’s future. Hasn’t been for a long time.
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I have said it before and will say it again. Vote with your wallet. Try to use the least amount of Microsoft possible, never anything from the store, no Bing, no Edge, no Cortana, no cloud service, mail service, xbox, etc. If they start making less money, maybe they will get the message.
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When the CEO is making the shareholders rich, they will not demand he step down. What consumers think of the CEO is not a factor in the direction or vision the CEO has set out for the company. S. Nadella is considered by those who track CEO performance, a great asset to Microsoft. From a business perspective he is considered one of the most influential players in the future of IT.
Dominance in The Cloud is still an Enterprise objective for Microsoft. If you read anything that Nadella espouses, he never references the desktop. Windows 10 is a project that is a part of Windows as a Service. Read his lips; W10 is a means to an end.
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“Many advanced Windows users don’t trust Windows 10 and want to run Windows 7 (or rarely 8.1) on newer, faster hardware.”
I think it’s a lot simpler than that.
Windows 7 users were told their OS would be supported until January 2020. That’s what they want, neither more nor less. Similar considerations apply to 8.1 users.
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Windows 7 users were told their OS would be supported until January 2020. That’s what they want, neither more nor less. Similar considerations apply to 8.1 users.
When I think of “support” (i.e. what Microsoft promised to Windows 7 and 8.1 users), I think of the way it used to be, not the way it is now. The idea of “support” used to mean that the vendor would assist me in using the computer the way I want to, within the limitations of the OS. But I was in control of the process; I could say yes or no to the steps which were followed by the vendor in order to give me “support”.
But Microsoft has redefined “support” to mean that they are now in control of the process. It’s no longer what I want help with; it’s what they want to “help” me with.
It’s no longer support, it’s coercion.
Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
Windows is no longer relevant to Microsoft’s future. Hasn’t been for a long time.
Then they ought to sell it (Windows) to someone who cares. Maybe a new company or even a subsidiary to handle just Windows & Windows software. I’m pretty sure all those former employees that got laid off from MS would be glad to go back to work!
Even astrophysicist Carl Sagan when speaking astronomically used Billions, not Trillions.Microsoft has become the most adept manager of mediocrity there ever was. -Noel
Love that line 😉
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Woody, you asked “You gotta wonder why Microsoft’s continuing this self-destructive push. We need more carrots, fewer sticks.” But then you said :
Nadella’s done very well with Microsoft’s stock price.
Windows is no longer relevant to Microsoft’s future. Hasn’t been for a long time.
So I think you have more or less already answered your own question. From that CEO’s perspective, Microsoft’s stock price has risen, the shareholders are happy, so why does he even need to change the present course?
Treat consumers as unpaid alpha/beta testers? No problem.
Twice-a-year upgrades with tons of bugs? No problem.
Make customers unhappy with all these Windows “policies”? No problem.I don’t think we can depend on Microsoft to change for the “better”. That CEO, IMO, won’t even care if his policies cause Windows’ failure or death in the future.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
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Hype rules, reality drools.
Something is wrong with the business world.
-Noel
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But does Nadella create value or just hype? If it is the latter, stock prices might rise, but in the long run, we’ll see that he has no clothes. He is the Bing guy and Bing was supposed to crush Google like Netscape, remember?
They might be doing well in the cloud business, but that would not be Nadella, just the fact that if you take the dependency on Office and tools and put it online, you just moved the business to a more profitable one, no need to be a genius for that. I will follow Office where it goes because I can’t be without Office. If I can run it from a Mac as well as on a PC, maybe I will not be on a PC.
Guess what will happen to the price when lots of companies will have replaced their Exchange server with the cloud. Right now, they are still in honey pot mode.
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I read somewhere that Nadella’s pay (or was it a bonus?) is tied directly to Windows 10 adoption.
That would go at least some of the way to explaining Microsoft’s do-whatever-it-takes and d**n-the-
torpedoes-users Windows 10 forcing strategies.Edited for content
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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I don’t think we can depend on Microsoft to change for the “better”. That CEO, IMO, won’t even care if his policies cause Windows’ failure or death in the future.
I think he will care– and he’ll consider it a success.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the more I think about it, the more I conclude that it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I don’t think MS wants to be in the Windows business anymore. It only generates ~10% of their profit, if the unverified blurb I read is correct, and with everyone convinced the PC is going away, that’s no doubt forecast to continue to decline into the foreseeable future. The costs to develop and maintain Windows are high, and they don’t scale favorably with fewer and fewer Windows purchasers over the years. They may well have a forecast that Windows will become a net loss for them someday. I’d be surprised if they don’t.
As such, I think it is quite possible that MS is looking to execute an exit strategy as far as the general-purpose OS market goes. They can’t just drop it, though; they are obliged to support various versions for up to another 8 years. They could sell the Windows division (complete with support obligations) to someone else or spin it off into a new company… but that Windows monopoly they’ve built over the years is a heck of an asset, maybe too big of one to let it go out the door.
Perhaps what they’re doing now is liquidating that asset. By “monetizing” their Windows users in every way possible, they’d be converting that market share and the remaining goodwill their customers have into dollars. They’ll keep ratcheting up the monetizing for short term cash until all of their customers conclude that they’d be better off without Microsoft and move on to something else. At that point, the Windows franchise will be nothing but a dried-out husk of what it used to be. It won’t be worth much, but MS will have made a lot of extra money by then.
At that point, MS will sell what’s left of Windows to another company or spin it off into an independent company.
Everything MS is doing now makes sense if you consider that MS is trying to destroy Windows in the long term while realizing short-term profit gains. Even the things that don’t seem directly tied to monetizing customers are efforts to do just that. The forced updates and telemetry, for example, enable MS to turn the non-LTSB customers into free beta testers, saving them the money of paying people to do QA. A penny saved is a penny earned, right?
It doesn’t end there, though. MS is trying a lot of new ideas… they just keep throwing stuff out there and gauging the response. The forced updates allow them to rapidly implement any new idea they may have for monetizing the users in the future– and you can bet they will. What’s the angle they have on the rapid updates? Your guess is as good as mine, but you can bet it’s about extracting short-term profit without any concern about long-term viability.
That’s why it’s so important to MS that everyone be on 10. It’s not because they want to reduce support costs by having everyone in one version of Windows now, as so many MS syncophants claim– MS is obligated to provide a certain level of support for older versions of Windows regardless of how many (or few) people still use them. Unless one believes that they could conceivably get every person currently using 7 or 8 onto 10 well before the end of support date, they can’t stop supporting the older versions earlier than that.
MS knows that some people will stick with older versions of Windows, and those of us who do are of no use to them. If we won’t move to 10, we can’t be monetized, and that makes us dead weight. If we sit on 7 or 8 as Windows is destroyed, we will eventually have to move on just like everyone else once the franchise dies, but we’ll do it without ever having been monetized.
That, if true, would explain why MS seems so unconcerned about harming the Windows franchise or the future viability of Windows as a platform. If they already know there won’t be a future for Windows, it simply does not matter. They’d be betting on the tremendous lock-in they have to keep people in the line of fire long enough to extract some extra value from them before they leave. Satisfaction with Windows 10 is not required; you just have to be using it. That would explain… well, everything.
MS has been in the OS business a long time, and they’ve had a monopoly for a long time too. Still, they’ve never treated their customers like this before. I think the difference is that they once actually wanted to keep those Windows customers.
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Anon, I think it still fits into the “monetize them now, drive them away eventually” strategy.
LTSB is, from what I have gathered, not meant to be a general-purpose OS for business. It’s for mission-critical stuff where absolute API stability is mandatory (like manufacturing control and POS devices), but where new feature updates are not required. Of course, what MS tries to sell it as and what it works for may be quite different, but I have a feeling MS has ways of enforcing its marketing plans for LTSB just as much as they do with the “have to have Windows 10 for Kaby or Ryzen” diktat.
For enterprise customers who do not want to live on the bleeding edge of the CB, MS intends for them to use the CBB (current branch for business). It’s delayed four months from the CB, and allows eight more months of deferral, but that still only gets to 12 months past the initial release date, not 18… though an enterprise customer probably has an IT department that handles updates locally rather than simply allowing MS to do it the way non-enterprise customers do.
At any rate, the clock starts ticking once a build is released. Only two options exist if a business wishes to avoid the bleeding-edge CB and make use of all 18 months of support: Vet a new build for six months, then deploy and use it for twelve, or vet each build for twelve months, then deploy and use it for six.
MS is fully aware how long it takes a large corporation to test and roll out new Windows versions. It’s not something to be taken lightly– but it appears that MS is. Deploying a new Windows every 12 months is a nightmare scenario, and is sure to drive IT support costs into the stratosphere.
I’m sure there will be all sorts of ways MS can monetize all of this… if LTSB costs more than CBB and can really be used for general-purpose stuff without MS sabotaging them, that’s one way right there. I am sure that is, and will be, one of many ways for MS to try to bleed corporations dry. To keep it up forever, though, would require that their monopoly last forever, and history shows us that they don’t (how’s that Internet Explorer doing, MS?).
Whatever MS does to squeeze more cash out of their enterprise customers will (of course) add direct cost, but so does the rapid release schedule that will have their IT department planning OS deployments nearly full-time, in addition to all the other stuff they do. This rapid-release schedule benefits no one but MS, but it appears to be a central feature of what MS calls “Windows as a service.” Unless the goal of the rapid updates is to churn out new and “innovative” ways of monetizing Windows users, why is MS doing it? Home users don’t want it. Business users don’t want it. It costs MS money to be frenetically releasing these feature updates no one asked for. So why is MS doing it? That, as with Microsoft’s aggression toward their customers (non-enterprise especially), is the $64,000 question.
It has to reach a point where the pointy-haired boss has had enough and does what Ernie Ball or IBM have done (that is, move to Linux or Mac, respectively). I think this is by design from Microsoft’s point-of-view. In the cloudy world, the local OS won’t matter; Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and ChromeOS users will all be potential Microsoft cloud customers.
We may yet see the much-predicted but thus far elusive year of the Linux desktop.
The post-mortem of all of this, whether it fails or succeeds, will be taught in business schools for decades to come. It may take that long to truly understand whether Nadella is crazy like a fox or just crazy. One thing appears certain, though– it does not look good for the future of Windows as we know it (a real OS, not a thin-client style front-end for MS cloud services).
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Jim, just a small correction: Kaby Lake is the current generation, Skylake the previous, but still widely available. Kaby Lake has the update issue, Skylake not, but possibly in the future if it is not a computer from Microsoft’s “list”.
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Kaby Lake and Zen have new features and technologies that require significant updates to Windows 10 to optimally function.
Kaby Lake has updates to Intel’s Speed Shift technology that make it possible to change power states more quickly than Skylake. With Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 3.0, performance can be improved by identifying the fastest core on a particular processor die and prioritizing critical workloads for that core. It requires the installation of a driver and secondary utility that launches with the OS. It will be baked right into W10 for the desktop.
Zen has fine-grained clock gating with multi-level regions throughout the chip. And Zen will also mark the introduction of newer Simultaneous Multi-Threading technology for AMD chips. To properly leverage the tech in Zen, Microsoft will likely have to make updates to the Windows kernel and system scheduler to optimize it for W10.
Older versions of Windows and alternative operating systems will still install and run on Kaby Lake and Zen – they are X86 processors. Older versions of Windows won’t be optimized for the platforms and won’t receive future updates.
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Also read this issue from Github:
https://github.com/zeffy/kb4012218-19/issues/7Seems like the April 2017 security updates for Win7/8.1 have clobbered some old Intel Atom CPUs like the Intel Atom Z530 and some Win7/8.1 users are unable to check for new updates from WU and zeffy’s patch allows checking for updates again.
If that turns out to be true, then this is an embarrassing situation for Microsoft.
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What if I say that Ivy Bridge is also banned? ))
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We have seen no reports of Ivy Bridge processors being blocked from Windows Update, but I am unable to read the messages. If the left box says “Incompatible Hardware” you should report it on the Microsoft Answers Forum.
However, you may want to take a look at the latest INTEL vulnerability discussed here as it may apply to your computer.
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