[morganvachon]

It's actually not a big deal but with the issues Microsoft has had with Windows 10 over the past year, it makes for good media fodder to stir up the masses. When this first hit the tech news sites earlier this year, my answer to anyone shouting "OMG I can't have my Win7 on my Skylake, die Micro$oft!" was to politely ask them to attempt to install Windows 98 on a Core i-series machine. You could see the gears turning in their skulls and revelation would dawn upon them that yes, this has happened before, many times, and is a perfectly normal progression.

It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.

There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.

[userbinator]

my answer to anyone shouting "OMG I can't have my Win7 on my Skylake, die Micro$oft!" was to politely ask them to attempt to install Windows 98 on a Core i-series machine

Done that, and it works (as well as Win98 can, in any case.) Other apps from around that time will work too. Of course it can only use one core, but it's interesting to see just how ridiculously fast even a single core can be after 10 years of hardware improvement if the software hasn't "grown to fill the space".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOWzorOD-II (not me)

It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.

That's the opposite situation; newer software on older hardware.

[morganvachon]

Sorry, I should have expanded on the Mac example. My point was that just as you wouldn't expect Windows 10 or the latest Mac OS to run on ancient hardware, you can't expect the latest hardware to continue support for old software past a certain point. x86 hardware and operating systems aren't created in different universes, they are designed alongside one another to work together.

[intopieces]

They are two entirely different situations. Non-techie enteprise users have no afinity for their processors, only the applications they rely on and the interface they're familiar with.

[dao-]

> There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.

Are you saying that Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 exceed the capabilities of latest Intel and AMD chips?

[TheOtherHobbes]

No, that's nonsense.

No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP - which always ran fine on iX machines.

Now, many people still prefer Win 7 to the creeping user-hostile horror that is Win 10 - if only because it's possible to use Win 7 with relative confidence that an update won't suddenly kill your machine, or your webcam, or your Kindle, or whatever else MS manages to screw up in the next year or two.

That's not a trivial difference. MS+Intel are attempting to force users towards an OS that is inherently broken, and - given the level of competence on display in the Windows division at the moment - is unlikely to ever work reliably.

[dao-]

> No one liked Win 98,

As I recall Win 98 and 98SE were hugely popular. People may not have loved them, but I don't think it was generally disputed that they were a huge improvement over Win 95. In fact, hardly anyone liked Win ME, and many clung to 98 until XP arrived, much like people clung to XP and avoided Vista until Win 7 arrived.

[bobajeff]

My dad would still use 98 today if he had the choice. He's increasingly hated every version of Windows since 98.

[bryanlarsen]

"No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP"

That's not true at all. Windows XP was based on NT, so had a very different technical base than 98. It had a completely different driver model, and could not run real-mode DOS apps. There was tons of hardware and software that it couldn't run. There were lots of people running 98 for a very long time to run legacy apps and hardware after XP came out. There probably still are.

The big difference is that those machines aren't on the internet, so no software maintenance is required.

[justin66]

This is just completely wrong on every level. Plenty of people liked Windows 98. There was the general "I don't want to upgrade" crowd, but more specifically, there were the gamers who wanted to keep playing the games they had already paid for. Windows XP wasn't great for that.

That gamer inertia was powerful enough that Windows 98 got DirectX 9 in December 2002, well after the release of Windows XP, and Microsoft released their last DirectX on 98 in December 2006.

[DanBC]

> No one liked Win 98

People freaking loved win98 once a few service packs got released, especially if they had the plus pack.

They didn't like Windows ME. Or Vista.

[tunap]

If memory serves, Win 98SE fixed many vanilla 98 problems before the love. Same with XP pre service packs; #1 fixed many stability issues, #2 fixed many back-compatibility issues(or vice-versa). Same comparison can be made about the Vista & 7(aka Vista SP7) releases. What also came with each new release was bloat, poorly implemented features(some initially, others perpetually) and phone-home functionality: XP=4, Vista=32, 7SP1>40. Win NT was the last OS MS created, it's been feature rich-er iterations ever since.

[moron4hire]

Revisionist bullshit. Every new version of a Microsoft OS had been met with derision and complaints that "the previous version was the best" up until another version is released. People thought XP was going to be the ME release of Win 2000 with it first came out.

[Retric]

Your forgetting many versions sucked before the first or second service pack. MS tends to release things ~2 years before they are ready. Sometimes they still suck after those service packs.

Case in point at release win 98 was rather iffy, 98se was solid. XP was much better after SP1, win 7 was ok to start with but defiantly got better.

[yuhong]

AFAIK the requirement for 10.7 is just 64-bit support, the requirements for 10.8 are higher.

[mSparks]

You seem to have this the wrong way round.

->There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.

This is not "new software on old hardware". OK, It's happened before with other companies. For example Sony saying PS3 games will run on the PS4. But that kind of nonesense is why you don't buy Sony hardware, and their stock price is trundling along at record lows..

My advice is more specific. Anyone holding AMD or Intel stock. Sell now.