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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that according to this:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Windows 7 still has twice as large install base as Windows 10. It's literally nothing other than MS stopping support for 7 because 10 is out - imagine the outrage if Tesla stopped supporting an older model S because a new one was out.

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The main difference is that here Microsoft arbitrarily put a check for the cpuid in while Kaby Lake is probably as compatible with Windows 7 as any previous 64bit Intel CPU. Windows 3.11 doesn't have this, if you have any i386 compatible CPU it will run just fine and will happily apply all available patches.

It checked the DOS version and errored out on non-MS implementations of DOS.

> The main difference is that here Microsoft arbitrarily put a check for the cpuid in while Kaby Lake is probably as compatible with Windows 7 as any previous 64bit Intel CPU. Windows 3.11 doesn't have this, if you have any i386 compatible CPU it will run just fine and will happily apply all available patches.

IIRC, the compatibility problems with the new processors are processor drivers and power management.

However, the dumb thing is that Microsoft already made the engineering effort to support those things, since they used to support Windows 7 on the now-unsupported architectures. Now they're taking it away to push Windows 10 some more.

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