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Microsoft have removed the option to disable this:
“IMPORTANT The mitigation described in this article is Enabled by default with no option to disable it. We recommend that you mitigate the vulnerability as soon as possible.”
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Before a clean install there’s no issue whatsoever. You can sometimes get an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE BSOD if you change the mode after installation, but you can usually get around this by booting Windows in safe mode.
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Every so often I try a Linux distro again in the hope that things have got to a stage where I can use it more often and break out of the Microsoft sphere. That just hasn’t happened. Every time I use one, I eventually come to the conclusion that Linux is at it’s core a system designed for servers or software developers when I see simple things not working as expected or requiring a huge amount of work to get right. But I also get the impression that the gatekeepers you see online wouldn’t want it to “just work”.
Yesterday’s example was Zorin OS. It looks great and the font rendering is top notch. But I just could not get Firefox to decode video via the GPU. It was using software rendering and therefore increasing CPU usage and heat. I spent about two hours doing the various about:config and environment variable hacks to make it work and at the end of it all, it still didn’t work. My laptop has a hybrid Intel/Nvidia setup but I set the Intel video as primary, knowing that Nvidia is iffy under Linux.
Why is it that stuff like this needs to be configured in the first place? On Windows, DXVA just works (if your hardware supports the codec of course). I can’t speak for MacOS due to not having any Mac hardware but I’d imagine that it would just work too. I don’t care about philosophies such as “free software” or “doing things the UNIX way”. At the end of the day I want something that I can install and use without too much messing. As much as I don’t want to admit it, maybe a Mac is in my future if I find Windows 11 that unpalatable. But that opens up another can of worms – unserviceable, disposable hardware.
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Does this mean Windows 12 will lock out anything older than a 12th gen Intel, considering they used Meltdown/Spectre as a reason to lock out older CPUs?
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Recall, Microsoft did something similar with Win8.1 by restricting the CPU’s that it could be installed on some years back. There was a workaround for a while, but I believe it no longer works (some of you Geeks, verify this please).
I have one Win8.1 VM running on a Kaby Lake i7-7700 machine (restricted CPU). Microsoft stopped signing the Intel driver and the only workaround now seems to be running it in Test Mode, though it continues to run all the programs and still updates using @abbodi86 ‘s method.
My Win8.1 VM running on an Ivy Bridge i7 doesn’t have that problem.
Windows 7 was included in that too. Skylake (6th gen) CPUs were only supposed to get support for a limited time but it was later rolled back. Kaby Lake (7th gen) and later were never officially supported. You could install it but got no updates. The Intel GPU also had no official drivers if I recall, but you could mod the video driver INF to force it to work; that’s probably what needs testing here.
I remember there was some controversy about this at the time with Windows 8.1 because it was still in mainstream support.
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