Windows 7: Stop support for some old CPU
Microsoft has announced the end of support for some older CPUs on Windows 7: processors like the Pentium III or the Athlon XP will no longer be supported from now on, despite the support theoretically terms in 2020.
The installation of the cumulative update of March 2018 for Windows 7 has caused quite a few problems for users of the operating system that used it on machines with CPUs without SSE2 instructions: blue screen of death are a frequent problem. Microsoft had promised a solution and announced it now, although it is not a real solution.
The Redmond company has collided with the lack of SSE2 instructions of some particularly dated processors, such as the Pentium III and the Athlon XP. Given the high incidence of the problem on machines without these instructions, Microsoft said it was ” working on a solution and will provide an update in the next release “.
Three months have passed, and the company said it had found a solution to the problem: ” upgrade your machines with a processor that supports SSE2 or virtualize them “. This is not clearly a solution, but a workaround that will not be too welcome to the owners of the machines; despite this, the age of the processors involved is such that they are too obsolete (and too little widespread) to continue the support.
This change of course takes place before the official end of the operating system support: Windows 7 will be officially supported until January 2020.
