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Got a few here.
From Shad Larsen, director of Windows business planning at MS:
“Future silicon platforms including Intel’s upcoming 7th Gen Intel Core (Kaby Lake) processor family and AMD’s 7th generation processors (e.g. Bristol Ridge) will only be supported on Windows 10, and all future silicon releases will require the latest release of Windows 10.”
From Terry Myerson, EVP of Windows and Devices at MS:
“For example, Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Intel’s upcoming “Kaby Lake” silicon, Qualcomm’s upcoming “8996” silicon, and AMD’s upcoming “Bristol Ridge” silicon.”
It’s creepy having MS tell us which vendors will be issuing drivers for which versions of Windows. MS can certainly choose not to provide chipset drivers for the newest CPUs on 7 or 8, but to tell us that no one else is going to either is… well, as I said, creepy.
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I’ve already described the difference in detail in two posts above.
“Not supported” means just that: they will not offer you support for doing whatever it is you’re talking about. USB 3.0 is “not supported” on Windows 7. If you want to use it anyway, you will have to locate and download a driver for your USB 3.0 chipset on your own, and you will have to get support (if you need it) from someone other than Microsoft. That’s “not supported.”
That’s not the extent of it, though. MS has also told us that not only will MS not support this, but neither will AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm, which is in contrast to the interests of any of those chipmakers. One would have to wonder why they would agree to this. AMD, for one, looks like it has not, as Radosuaf has pointed out.
The new news here is MS taking the extraordinary step of sabotaging running installations of Windows 7 on “unsupported” CPUs to further their agenda. This is well beyond “not supported.” Way, way beyond it.
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I haven’t noticed that Cancel/OK position reversal– but, I haven’t had access to hardware capable of running the heavier KDE interface.
KDE has them what I consider to be the “normal” way, which is to say that OK is on the left and Cancel is on the right, like Windows. You listed them in the opposite order above, so perhaps the GNOME way is normal to you.
There’s been a big debate about this in Ux circles, I guess. My thought on it is this: When you ask someone for a “yes or no,” that’s the order they come in. “No or yes” just sounds odd, like you’re trying to lead them to say no, whereas “yes or no” has no such loaded meaning. If you ask if someone is Ok or not, again, OK is first, not is second.
Since we read left to right, to me that means that OK or YES should be on the left (so we read it first) and NO or CANCEL should be on the right, so we read it last.
GNOME has them in the opposite order, so anything that uses GNOME as a base or GTK+ likely does too. Cinnamon is like this throughout… even though it’s all backwards to me, at least it’s consistently so. When I ran Firefox from KDE, I had to catch myself before I hit the wrong button in Firefox (the most-used GTK+ program for me), since I was used to the KDE/Windows way.
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Jim,
I’m using the free version of Macrium Reflect also, and I just booted from the USB to try it. It’s backing up my EXT4 volumes right now, no problem at all!
My EXT4 volumes are partitions, not physical drives. I would not think that would matter, but maybe it does.
As for True Image… bah, the bootable made by the test version won’t do backups, so that’s a no go.
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May I ask what the problem is here? Windows 7 support will end in about 3 years.
Anonymous, I take it you didn’t see my post above where I addressed this.
It’s not just that MS has decided not to support new CPU architectures on Win 7. As a product in extended support, I would not expect new features like this to be added to it. If MS had simply stopped there, I’d have no problem with their decision (for 7 only; as far as I am concerned, MS is contractually obliged to support new CPU architectures on 8.1 since it’s in mainstream support).
Unfortunately, MS didn’t stop there.
They’ve told us that not only will Microsoft not support new CPU generations on Windows 7, but neither will AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm provide the drivers necessary for any version of Windows other than 10.
That’s a little odd to hear that coming from Microsoft instead of any of the CPU manufacturers, isn’t it? Why is MS speaking for AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm? Why would hardware manufacturers, who have no interest in the success or failure of Windows 10, but who have a big interest in selling as many chips as possible, decide not to support the most popular Windows version in existence? It’s “only” got three years of life in it, but three years is a long time for computer hardware. They could score a lot of sales during those three years. This is probably not an issue for Qualcomm, as AFAIK they only have ARM-based CPU/SoCs, but it is for Intel and especially AMD, which badly needs a success in Ryzen now.
We know why MS would refuse to support anything new on versions other than 10: they have no concern for CPU sales, but they have a huge interest in the adoption rate of Windows 10. It’s all upside and no downside for MS to only support new hardware on 10. Why the CPU makers would get on board with such a thing, though, is another question, since for them, cutting off the percentage of the customer base that refuses Windows 10 as potential customers is all downside.
Remember when news leaked out a few weeks ago about AMD deciding to support Win 7 on Ryzen after all? It was quickly tamped down by AMD; they reaffirmed their commitment to only supporting 10. The first thing that I thought of was that someone at MS had a little talk with AMD. Microsoft runs the WHQL and decides which CAs get to issue certificates for the signed drivers that Win 10 x64 requires (like the ones for AMD GPUs), and I’m thinking that no one really wants to anger them.
MS has a long history of doing things exactly like making that threat, like when they told PC manufacturers that they’d better not preinstall Netscape on their machines (I believe HP wanted do to s0), or else they might not get any more licenses for preinstalled Windows. How many PCs do you think they would have sold without Windows installed?
But MS hasn’t stopped there, apparently. Now we’ve seen reports that MS may be planning to actively deny Windows updates to Win 7 installations on systems using any of the newest CPUs– in effect, sabotaging installations of Windows that don’t further the MS marketing plan. We’re talking about installations that are already up and running on these new CPUs; you can’t see the “sorry, no updates for you” message until Windows is installed and ready to update. Microsoft can’t seriously claim the update blockage is about compatibility when the “incompatible” OS is already running on the “incompatible” platform. If it truly was incompatible, or partly so (in other words, it would work, but with glitches), that in itself should be a big enough reason to get people who “foolishly” install Windows 7 on a system with the latest-gen CPU to reconsider and go to 10.
Radosuaf has indicated above that AMD has, in fact, released Win 7 drivers, in defiance of Microsoft’s ban. Good for you, AMD, but one question: Why not 8.1? Its life cycle isn’t even half over yet. Sure, there are not that many using 8.1, but it’s also nearly the same as 10 “under the hood,” so it would take a really minimal amount of work to port whatever drivers they wrote for 10 to 8.1.
Six years is a long time in the computer world. Maybe by then Windows 10 will have evolved to something decent… or maybe Linux will have caught up enough for me to dump Windows completely without any discomfort at all.
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There are levels of “not supported.”
1. “Windows 7 does not support x.”
This one is not a huge deal. For example, Windows 7 does not support USB3. In order to get USB3 functionality, you have to install USB3 drivers on your own, and that any support for issues with those drivers will not be provided by Microsoft… that will be up to the OEM of the motherboard, laptop, or the maker of the USB3 chipset. It doesn’t even remotely mean that if you have Windows 7, you can forget about using USB3.
2. “Windows 7 does not support x, and all the manufacturers of x have agreed not to provide the drivers for x on Windows 7.”
Now there’s a problem. If MS decides not to support x on Windows 7 (which is in extended support), that’s their prerogative, but it isn’t their prerogative to conspire/collude with hardware manufacturers to not provide drivers for older, more popular operating systems.
We can reasonably assume this has happened, given the statements by AMD and Intel, since neither of them ordinarily would give two shakes about what OS the person installs. They’re out to sell CPUs, not promote a given software platform, and it’s obvious that they’d rather reach a bigger market than a smaller one. AMD and Intel are both cutting off a significant percentage of their customer base by refusing to enable users to install Windows versions that currently make up 72% of the Windows market (netmarketshare.com numbers). While not all of those 72% are “never 10” people like me, a lot of them are, and ordinarily, there would be no reason for a hardware vendor to leave them out in the cold.
3. “”Windows 7 does not support x, and all the manufacturers of x have agreed not to provide the drivers for x on Windows 7. In addition, we will be blocking all Windows 7 updates on systems containing x hardware.”
This one’s beyond the pale. It’s no different than the cynical move that some printer manufacturers have made when they included a DRM chip in each of their ink cartridges, without which the printer refuses to work. It’s not that the cartridge is actually incompatible… it’s that the printer and driver look for that chip, and if it’s not there, they pretend the cartridge is incompatible to force the user into behavior that is better for the printer manufacturer and worse for himself.
I’d put a printer manufacturer on my lifetime boycott list for doing that (or the equally cynical “brick the printer after a page count threshold has been reached” thing). It’s unconscionable, wildly anti-consumer behavior. It’s not a way that a company that respects (or deserves) its customers behaves.
If only we could boycott MS forever. It simply is not possible for a great many of us, and it’s really quite sad that it’s gotten to this point. There’s always been a lot of MS hate, and much of it has been deserved, but I always liked and defended Windows. I know a lot of my Linux-using compatriots habitually call Windows a terrible OS, but it really isn’t… or at least it wasn’t until quite recently. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t the mess that some people make it out to be either.
In practical terms, this particular issue is of little concern to me personally, as the pace of CPU speed increases has slowed to a crawl. Older CPUs remain relevant far longer than they ever have, and there are still plenty of older-generation CPUs and board available in the secondary market. Given how many of these CPUs were manufactured, it’s not likely at all that we’d get to a point where we can’t get a decent older CPU at a good price.
Whenever I do eventually decide to upgrade my CPU/motherboard once again, I would like to support AMD by going with Ryzen (or whatever it may be called at such a future date), but if they’re going to let MS bully them into not allowing any older versions of Windows (and if no workaround is found), I guess I will be stuck with older Intel platforms.
This issue, though, does matter to me as a sign of things to come, and the depths to which MS will sink to force people to use their garbage.
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Another vote for Linux Mint Cinnamon here.
I tried a number of distros on for size… Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE), Lubuntu, Mint Mate, Mint KDE, Mint Cinnamon, OpenSUSE (I wanted to see what a non-Ubuntu distro would look like). Of all of the desktop environments, I liked Cinnamon the best (by a pretty wide margin), and given that Cinnamon is a part of the Mint project, that seemed like a good place to get it.
Mint’s goals also align with my own, so it was a great fit. Mint is about preserving the traditional desktop UI rather than following GNOME 3 down the same garden path as Unity and Windows 10 (that is, trying to make one UI for desktops and touch devices). It’s based on GNOME 3, but with the wacky touch stuff backed out and replaced with a desktop UI that does one thing and does it well rather than two things poorly. The X project (a recent addition to Mint) aims to fork many GNOME programs and develop them in parallel with their hamburger menu’d counterparts, but with the desktop UI put back in.
The other big point with Mint is stability. Ubuntu has earned a reputation as not having the best stability; this was certainly consistent with my experiences with Kubuntu. The installer (which boots into a live session of Kubuntu from the removable media first) kept crashing, and it took quite a few tries to get it to install before it went kernel panicky again.
I finally got it installed, but it was no better than on the live session. I posted on one of the Ubuntu sites about it, and got a suggestion to try a new video driver… but for the absolute beginner that I was, I would have had to bypass the dire warnings on several sites about the dangers of downloading the drivers from Nvidia and trying to install them. I tried anyway, but it didn’t work, and I ended up trying Mint KDE instead.
It worked perfectly. It wasn’t until later on that I learned Ubuntu had gotten sort of a reputation for being less stable than other distros. Mint (being a derivative of Ubuntu) addresses this by waiting and watching after an update (to one of the OS components or otherwise) to see if it is stable or not, much like Woody’s MS-DEFCON system. It’s even on a 5-point scale, though in reverse.
Updates that are judged by Mint to be most likely to destabilize the system are given a 5; those that are the safest are given a 1. By default, Mint will select for installation updates that are rated 3 or less, but you can always change that threshold, or else you could manually select the 4 or 5 rated updates as desired. Setting the threshold to 5 (always select every update for installation as soon as it comes out) matches what an equivalent Ubuntu installation would have done (it does not use the numbering system).
Mint, thus, became a frontrunner in my distro selection, but I began to question whether KDE was the best desktop environment. While I much enjoyed the wealth of customization options KDE offered, something about KDE didn’t sit right with me. The main (start) menu seemed fiddly with its three tabs or pages, and some of the function of the panel (taskbar) bugged me too, but neither of those was as bad as what to me is a cardinal sin of UIs… inconsistency.
Many Linux programs use GTK+ (Gnome Toolkit) to draw the UI (like Firefox), and that meant to make the GTK+ programs and the native KDE (Qt) programs look the same, I had to have the identical theme for both toolkits installed in the OS (so any work theming and coloring the UI to my liking had to be done twice with unrelated theme formats)… and even if that is done, there’s the annoying reversal of the cancel and OK buttons in GNOME. If it’s consistent within the OS, I can adapt (though I still don’t like it), but having different programs within the same OS behaving differently and flipping the buttons around… was really irritating. I hit “cancel” when I meant “ok” or the reverse more times than I could count.
UI consistency is a must for me. I absolutely loathe the discontinuity of Windows 10 when you’re tooling around the OS on your desktop PC, using the traditional Win32 UI, when suddenly some horrible, ugly, flat UWP abomination appears, with all of its childish-looking, oversized sliders and controls. It’s jarringly dissimilar to the rest of the OS, and I really dislike it. It offends me on at least three levels in Windows 10!
I can’t avoid UWP “design language” bits completely in 10, since MS seems to have randomly replaced Win32 dialogs with UWP ones (like the Personalize menu you get when you select personalize on the desktop, which then calls another Win32 dialog when you hit the themes button… why is that UWP thing sandwiched in there between the Win32 bits? It’s not like that in 8), but I can fix the discontinuity in Linux by adopting a GNOME derivative like Cinnamon.
I tried MATE and Cinnamon, and while the two are similar, Cinnamon really felt like “it” to me. I’d have to dig a little deeper to customize it than I would have with KDE, but that was ok.
I never got around to trying XFCE, but by then I liked Cinnamon so much that I didn’t feel like trying anything else.
Mint, being an Ubuntu derivative, benefits from the enormous knowledge base out there in net land, with the vast majority of hints and tips written about Ubuntu being relevant to Mint as well. The same applies to software repositories and PPAs, which makes it very easy to get most Linux software and keep it up-to-date. It’s Ubuntu when that is what I want, and not Ubuntu when it’s not (like with Unity).
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If you decide to stay with Windows you might consider getting a W 8.1 Pro Valid Legal Licence from Amazon or Ebay.
Actually, it’s even better if you’re able to find Windows 8. They’re transferrable between computers and can be freely updated to 8.1. Licensing has been changed again in 8.1 and those are tied to your computer.
That sounds like the difference between the full retail version and the OEM version of Windows. OEM Win 8 would not be transferrable; retail Win 8.1 would be.
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Noel, I’d change the wording on that question a bit when asking if any given person is an astroturfer. Something like, “Are you paid or otherwise compensated or incentivized by Microsoft or any other entity for promoting Microsoft and its products?”
Microsoft has already been noted as paying third parties to hire people to astroturf for them; these people can still semi-honestly say they’re not paid by Microsoft to promote Microsoft products. Of course, they could also claim they’re not compensated at all even if they are; it’s not like they’re talking to a federal agent on an official matter.
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it’s an advertising platform
A bit like Betanews and this site then?
No, not like those. Those are web sites. Windows 10 is an operating system. An operating system that, unlike those web sites, costs the end user a significant bit of money.
If MS would like to stop charging OEMs for Windows 10 and make it permanently available as a free download (for everyone, not just licensed users of their other commercial products), maybe then ads would be tolerable, but that’s not what they’re doing. They’re charging for Windows, as they always have, AND they’re using it to deliver ads, as they never have before.
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