> Guess MS is tired of supporting 30 years of hardware with each OS release.

It seems they are supporting old hardware on each new OS. What they are not supporting is new hardware on an old OS.

Yeah, that's forwards compatibility not backwards compatibility.

In many cases, this situation is already here. My laptop came with Windows 8 and if I ran Windows 7 on it, it would work, but many of the newer power management and performance features wouldn't work.

You are not alone. You literally have to pay me to use a Microsoft Windows device and I'm not cheap.

I was such a Windows fanboy in the late 90's early 2000's when Win2k and Win XP were the platforms that were shipping.

Having lived through those days till now I'm convinced that Microsoft can never build a better user experience than Windows 2000 provided.

Better is of course subjective, and I might suggest a hint of rose-tinted glasses there.

I've been using Windows professionally since Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and whilst sure I miss some of the simplicity and cleanness of older versions, every time I actually have to use one of the old versions I'm constantly bumping into annoyances and missing features that I've gotten used to with Windows 10

One small but important, to me, example ie being able to resize command shell windows by dragging them! and easy copy/paste !

You don't have to use cmd.exe for your terminal. I used to use xterm via Cygwin back in the day.

I'm running Windows 10 now (upgraded just before the deadline) and I quite like it. It only takes a bit of time to disable enough to make it look/act like a better version of Windows 7.

I'm pretty sure new hardware can run old OS. It's just new features won't be utilized.

It is strange that most of the news sites currently covering the story have misleading or ambiguous headlines:

Microsoft made 'em do it: The latest Kaby Lake, Zen chips will support only Windows 10 (PCWorld)

Windows 10 Or Else? Intel's New 'Kaby Lake' Chip Won't Support Windows 7, 8 (Forbes)

Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's Zen processors will only support Windows 10 (PC Gamer)

From this point forward, all Intel and AMD CPUs are Windows 10-only (ExtremeTech)

Intel's latest CPUs will only support Windows 10 (TechRadar)

It's like any time there's a non-story that any one of them spin into some controversial click-bait they all have to follow suit to avoid being scooped. Journalistic integrity for internet news sites seems to be at an all time low.

They aren't journalists, they are marketing copywriters. News has turned into advertisements and no seems to want to accept it. Any article about a product or company was payed for by a PR company that was payed by the company in the article. Many times they will write large parts of the article themselves.

Journalism is dead.

Windows 10 isn't very popular, and that is good. No other operating system is as hostile to the users privacy, and certainly no desktop operating system where everyone stores many private files. And not just personal files, but think of all the doctors offices, lawyers - which makes Win10 illegal to use in many countries, as it transfers automatically your key strokes, microphone samples, screenshots, search history, application list, hardware configuration and what not else that god forbids to dozens of domains that have not even Microsoft in it's name. And the domains and IPs ate whitelisted in the signed 64-bit kernel mode part of Win10 network layer. Good night, no work around possible. Except you carry a hardware firewall around attached to your laptop. So it's good that the "free" (free to exchange for a Win7/8 license dongled to one mainboard) Win10 failed all expectations and got little uptake. Most companies are still on Win7 and all literated users too beside some foolished fanboys/early adopters/noobs. Many reverted back to Win7 after the got Win10 tricked "by accident". XBoxOne failed spectacular too being far far behind PS4 and even WiiU sales. And WinMobile/Phone 10 is dead too, with as little as 0.6% global market share. If I would be an investor, I would fire this failed CEO and some of his top managers incl PR department and restore and rebrand some of their former good products.

I hope you do realise that most of that anti-privacy bullshit was backported to win7 too?

Yes, but fortunately it's rather easy to avoid the backports, wheras I believe it's impossible to completely disable it in Windows 10

You can block what you want using the built in firewall http://winaero.com/blog/stop-windows-10-spying-on-you-using-...

And how many users will do that?

Those who want. I posted that link because of the bullshit in the comment i replied to.

Yep. I realized today that in my office of about 30 employees, there are about 2 windows machines, 2 devs running Linux, and the rest running MacBooks.

All of our servers are CentOS on AWS.

Email is Gmail enterprise.

We use a dozen different languages and frameworks, but no dot Net, no Visual Studio to be seen.

And most of us now collaborate with Google docs or just markdown / Confluence / Slack. The only ones using MS office are a few of the managers over the age of 50...

Sure, me too except zero windows. but Microsoft has realized going after 30person offices is not lucrative compared to 30,000person companies and government depts.

I don't think Gmail and Google Docs are a great alternative when the GP was discussing privacy.

Gotta love the fact that "most" (not all) news outlets want to blow up a topic.

I hate it when they do interesting stuff. That's how Windows 8 happened. What they need to do is useful stuff.

Vista and Windows 8 are what you get when the goals are set high, but not enough time is given to achieve them.

Vista was a deployment issue. At its release, the bulk of affordable consumer laptops had 1-2GB RAM, underpowered IGPs, and barely-beyond-32-bit dual core processors-- real "made for XP" systems.

Vista required hardware acceleration for its desktop compositing, a minimum of 2GB RAM, and amd64 to avoid PAE. It ran very well on on systems with quadcore CPUs, discrete GPUs, and 4+GB RAM.

The Linux DE Revolution hadn't started and I was still gnashing my teeth over the GNOME 3 transition when Vista came out, so I gave it a try. I still say it had better compatibility for foreign and older software than any of the later Windows.

Windows 8 was extremely useful. It just forced poor compromises on desktop users. Its UI/UX was fantastic for every other end-user device at the time that could run it.

The concepts were fine but HORRIBLY executed.

Okay, time to turn off my PC (with keyboard/mouse). Where is that? It's not in the start menu, and finding that alone took ten minutes...

(30 minutes later) Oh. It's under settings. Because turning my device on and off is a setting, I guess? And the settings menu is in the charm bar. And you get to the charm bar by... putting your mouse in the top-right corner. And then sliding it down.

It was just so many ridiculous new hoops to jump through, each one more frustrating than the last.

I won't defend the bad UI but you can get to the charm menu just by using Windows+C. Also, installing ClassicShell takes literally thirty seconds and then you have a standard Win7-style UI. The kernel and other OS internals in 8.1 are faster and more stable than 7.

>faster and more stable than 7.

You tricked by update cycle. Each new version is faster because has no updates that fix holes. Test it, install new virtualboxed w7sp1 into w7sp1 with updates and feel the difference.

That's the reason why I never install updates (this forces me to be ultracareful on the web, but I'm ok).

this is most certainly not the case, and I really doubt you "feel" any difference at all.

While you were 'in doubt' I recently reinstalled my old laptop (with the same restricted set of software except updates) so it can boot quickly and open explorer instantly, not in a couple of seconds. This behavior disappears at the time you install all updates. I experienced that many times on many pcs. Not that you should trust me, test it.

Try accessing that charm bar in an RDP session to a server... that was fun (NOT)... Though classic shell was my go-to with Windows 8/8.1, I mostly use 10 as-is. The more annoying thing is when web search results would come above local apps (Win, type app-name, ...), first thing I disabled after seeing that.

Overall, I still prefer Windows UI (since v7) over other options I've tried (macOS, Ubuntu Unity, gnome 3). I just wish they'd reign in some of the privacy and finish the polish on some areas of settings/usability already, there are still plenty of pre-vista style configuration panels that don't scale properly, and are too hard to get to.

I think the thinking is that you were supposed to just hit the power button on your PC tower; just like how you can hit the power button on a tablet/phone/xbox one/laptops.

Not ideal if you've put your tower in some far-off corner under your desk, of course.

Nobody does that because in Windows 7, the power button was by default wired to immediately suspend to ram. Why would a user expect it to act differently?

Daily, at least. Depends what you're doing, I suppose, but playing with large files in image editing software means a lot of memory gets doled out and virtually none of it ever makes it back into the pool when a program exits (Windows seems to be overly concerned that you might want to use that memory with that program again "right away", where "right away" means sometime in the next six weeks or so). There's little point in suspending; that just leaves the machine in a laggy state. And by "laggy", I mean Eclipse-on-a-Pentium-3 laggy. Shutting down when the machine's not actively in use means I get a better shot at not having to reboot in the middle of session.

Quite often, given how fast Hybrid Boot is. Nowadays I rarely sleep it, I either want it to leave it churning on an encode or something, or just powered off to come back to a fresh environment. I really only sleep it if I'm absolutely in the middle of something that just cannot be effectively saved.

I'm long-since done with Hibernate entirely and have switched it off to reclaim the space used by hiberfil.sys (powercfg /hibernate off).

I never understand why so many people find it so hard to change, and get used to a simpler way of doing things. Your computer has a power button, or (if it's a laptop) you can simply close it. Windows supports sleep and standby very well.

We have two oldfashioned desktop computers running Windows 10 in our home. They are shared by the family and kids for email, browsing and gaming, everyone (and even several of our kids friends') has a Microsoft account on each computer. The computers are turned "on" and "off" many times a day, using the POWER button. The computers take less than 3 seconds to start, as they are actually just sleeping.

Once a day. Keeps my room cool!

And how many Windows tablets are there now compared to PCs? like 1000x fewer? Do you still think it was worth it to compromise the PC UX for them?

The problem is that pretty much nobody used Windows 8 on anything other than desktop/laptop devices.

Microsoft had to start building their own tablets to push other manufacturers to build Windows tablets, too. They literally had to buy the only company making Windows phones exclusively to ensure that somebody makes Windows phones (even though nobody seems to want to buy them).

It was no better for laptops. Laptops + Desktops = 99% of windows users it was a total screw up.

It's just a marketing strategy, to get more people on board of the Windows-as-a-service train, a train without exit doors.

Good that I hear about that, I will buy a current gen CPU than and install a Win7 for legacy applications for the next ten years. And will await Android for Desktop or Google Fuchsia. The Windows days are over, that's happens when a CEO favors short turn strategies and burns his platform.

Got some proof of that?

I think it's less about wanting to drop support for old hardware than it is a panic-stricken move because Windows 10 is not compelling on its own.