Microsoft cuts off Windows 10 support early for some PCs

[ntauthority]

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.

[Dylan16807]

It's not baseless to care about getting security fixes despite your graphics driver being a finalized buggy version.

Windows 8.1 on these devices is still supported until 2023 as far as I can tell.

[dabockster]

> The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely was usable

AKA the OEMs could get it super cheaply and throw it on entry level netbooks for max profit.

This isn't Microsoft's fault. All the blame is on the OEMs here for using hardware that was known to be at EOL stage.

[nickcoury]

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.

[jarym]

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.

[twblalock]

Do you think Microsoft is obligated to support all hardware for all time?

A line needs to be drawn somewhere.

[aaomidi]

How is this Microsoft's fault? If drivers are getting no updates, how should the OS help?

[AnssiH]

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.

[lightbyte]

>If... the manufacturer [of your PC] doesn't officially support it for Windows 10, you're at risk.

In other news, water is wet.

[asveikau]

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.)

[ConfucianNardin]

Yesterday on Ars: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794546

[castell]

got only 19 votes (probably bad timing), let's keep it and not flag it as dupe - info seems relevant to me

[Palomides]

>Intel's Atom Clover Trail series CPUs

[MikusR]

Using PowerVR Graphics.

[rbanffy]

I think it's worth noting most Linux distros will continue to support these machines with new features and security patches for the time being.

[pantalaimon]

It depends.

The problem here lies within the graphics driver for the PowerVR GPU - which was never really supported under Linux either.

There is an experimental 2D driver [0] which is unlikely to receive any mayor updates, I don't know how stable it is at this day and age.

You won't get any 3D or video decoding acceleration though unless you use a now as well unsupported release like Ubuntu 11.10 [1]

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PoulsboObsoleteDrivers

[gruez]

And that's why you use LTSB. 10 years of guaranteed security updates, with no feature updates that break your shit.

[E6300]

Only you need a volume license for that, and if you have the dough to spend on that, presumably you'd get a higher-specced CPU.

[MikusR]

Strange way to write Intel.