[RajT88]

Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.

So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.

I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.

[necovek]

If anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even.

This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on par with Linux (i.e. almost nothing from the cheap vendors).

[mjevans]

NT4 started with a kernel mode, user mode, security model and drivers had to be written and validated accordingly.

9x, me, and even compatibility parts of XP (up to some service patch IIRC? Might have been SP2) would still allow dos mode realtime BS for any driver that wanted.

I loath all the dang software modems too cheep to ship a decent device in a single unit and instead slice off the user's already constrained resources.

[necovek]

Heh, who else remembers the golden benchmark, a US Robotics 56k hw modem (the only one I could find locally was an external one too) to get online in either NT4 or Linux. But when I finally did save for one, I could fully leave Windows behind in 1998.

[joe_mamba]

>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.

Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD.

>but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11

They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important.

So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.

[ssl-3]

Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.

What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?

[joe_mamba]

>Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.

Yes, you can bypass HW checks to install it on a pentium 4 if you want, nothing new here.

>What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?

All the security features I listed in the comment above.

[ssl-3]

So, if I'm hearing this right:

This computer had the security features that you listed while it was running Windows 10, and now that it is running Windows 11 it is lacking them?

(I'm not trying to be snarky. That's simply an astonishing concept to me.)

[9dev]

It hadn’t. Windows 11 has them, due to support for new hardware mitigation features. What is it you don’t understand in particular?

[ssl-3]

There's a lot here that is hard to understand:

> > What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?

> All the security features I listed in the comment above.

[magicalhippo]

> You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have.

A key difference between regular software and Windows is that almost nobody buys Windows, they get it pre-installed on a new PC. So a new PC purchase means a new Windows license.

[RajT88]

You are just arguing the requirements are the requirements.

Are they as important as stated? Microsoft says so. Everyone here loves and trusts them, right?