Windows is killing 32bit support starting in W10 2004

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3.1 Processor

* Beginning with Windows 10, version 2004, all new Windows 10 systems will be required to use 64-bit builds and Microsoft will no longer release 32-bit builds for OEM distribution. This does not impact 32-bit customer systems that are manufactured with earlier versions of Windows 10; Microsoft remains committed to providing feature and security updates on these devices, including continued 32-bit media availability in non-OEM channels to support various upgrade installation scenarios…

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/minimum-hardware-requirements-overview

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I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Hardware has been 64bit for ages.

cheers, Paul

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Ascaris

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Yeah… 32 bit’s time has come and gone.  When I saw the headline, I thought it meant that 64-bit Windows would not be able to run 32-bit programs, which would be a big problem.  This, though, is not a big deal at all. Is any OEM offering Windows 10 32-bit on modern systems now anyway?

My 12 year old Core 2 Duo laptop is set up to dual-boot Windows 8.1 x64 and Linux Mint x64.  It ran Windows 10 64-bit without difficulty when I tested it also.  Even my 15-year old AMD Turion laptop is 64-bit, though I doubt it would be very happy with Windows 10 x64.  It has 1 GB of RAM, and I believe it is expandable to 2, and it’s a single core design.  But it is 64-bit!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Lenovo Ideapad Miix 300 for example, Sir! Many 2GB RAM tablets still have 32-bit Windows and 32-bit drivers only.

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 Insider

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Ascaris wrote:

When I saw the headline, I thought it meant that 64-bit Windows would not be able to run 32-bit programs

32 bit apps are next, just like Apple did with iOS and MacOS.

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Alex5723 wrote:

Ascaris wrote:

When I saw the headline, I thought it meant that 64-bit Windows would not be able to run 32-bit programs

32 bit apps are next, just like Apple did with iOS and MacOS.

I’m not so sure about that, Apple care much less about backwards compatibility than Microsoft do. I can’t see them removing WOW64 anytime soon.

radosuaf wrote:

Lenovo Ideapad Miix 300 for example, Sir! Many 2GB RAM tablets still have 32-bit Windows and 32-bit drivers only.

I have one, an Acer Iconia W3. But it’s one of the infamous Clover Trail machines, so would be officially stuck on 1607. I left it on Windows 8.1 because even though it can (on paper) take 1607, the video driver is terrible so it’s not worth it. The video driver is the main reason why Microsoft locked them to 1607, they should never have been upgraded to Windows 10 in the first place.

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I have Lenovo Yoga Tab on Windows 10 1909 32-bit. Not the fastest out there, but still enough for web browsing etc.

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 Insider

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the Acer Iconia W3-810 was not even tested for Win10 compatibility and Acer themselves did not provide any Win10 drivers for it.

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Clover Trail and Bay Trail is/was always “fun”. As in not at all if you need to get any work done on it… some of these didn’t do well at all even with Windows 8.1 updates. That and the need for model-specific images for installation / recovery…

On some models, the only way to get any stability was to install a specialized Linux distro. (Counting also Android and ChromeOS as Linux distros like they technically are.) On some others, even that wouldn’t help.

There were even some models that actually were reliable with some version of Windows, but updates were always riskier than on more standard-compliant hardware.

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I’m running Win7 and Win8.1 32-bit in 64GB Parallels VMs (4GB Ram allotted) on my 2012 MacBook Pro (Ivy Bridge i7). With 16GB RAM and an 512GB SSD in the host, they run quite fast.

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Does this mean the end of the road for the 32-bit programs that I am running – Office 2010, old versions of Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and most critically, Quicken 2002?

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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32-bit programs should still run (until MS decides to change it) on 64-bit Windows.
I think this is the death knell for 32-bit Windows OS.

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EP wrote:

the Acer Iconia W3-810 was not even tested for Win10 compatibility and Acer themselves did not provide any Win10 drivers for it.

Because there weren’t any for the Clover Trail platform at all.

Intel farmed out the GPU development to another company who later went bust and never released Windows 10 drivers for it. The W3 only has 2GB of RAM so probably shouldn’t run anything more than 8.1 anyway. I just use mine with a Kodi frontend for internet radio streaming, it’s good enough for that at least.

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