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Microsoft Massive Backtrack: Extends Windows 7 And 8.1 Intel Skylake Support

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Earlier in 2016, Microsoft dropped a bombshell; it would be pulling official support for systems using Intel's new Skylake processors in Windows 7 and 8.1 as early as 2017. This came as quite a blow to the millions of users planning on using either of these operating systems and not upgrading to Windows 10.

In less than 12 months time, if your PC or laptop used a Skylake processor, such as the 6000-series Core i5-6600K or Core i7-6700u, you'd no longer receive updates to your  operating systems if you used Windows 7 or 8.1, while users with older processors would.

As far as I know this was a first for Microsoft and was seen by many as yet another way to force people to upgrade to Windows 10. The company realized this and in March, the unpopular policy was changed to add an extra 12 months to the support period for Skylake systems - support would end in 2018.

However, in a surprise move, Microsoft has extended the deadline for Skylake-based Windows 7 and 8.1 systems for the second time - this time reaching all the way to January 2020 for Windows 7 and January 2023 for Windows 8.1 for security, reliability, and compatibility support. After July 2017, though, only the most critical updates will be rolled out for these older operating systems and only if Microsoft deems them compatible.

Microsoft's reasoning here is that it's working with Intel to better optimize Windows 10 for the latest processors, so there will come a point when creating the same improvements for older operating systems becomes impractical. This does make some sense, although this has rarely, if ever, been a problem since Windows existed with exceptions such as the move to 64-bit CPUs and operating systems so some still remain skeptical.

This might bail asome people out, but the future isn't quite as rosy if you plan on upgrading in the next 12 months. Microsoft is sticking to its stance that future processors will only be supported officially on Windows 10. This means that if you upgrade to Intel's next generation processors due in the next six months, code named 'Kaby Lake', or indeed AMD's Bristol Ridge or Qualcomm's 8996-based silicon, only Windows 10 will be supported in terms of receiving updates.

In the official post in the Windows Blog, Microsoft goes on to say that in future, the baseline for support will be the operating system that was current when the hardware was released. For Skylake that is indeed Windows 10, with Skylake having landed in August last year - a matter of days after Windows 10's launch on July 29th.

Seeing as security updates are paramount and reliability updates very important too, if you upgrade to a Kaby Lake processor  when they're launched soon, the likelihood is you'll need to be running Windows 10 or at the very least, install updates manually; that would clearly be a pain and there's no guarantee that Microsoft won't write code into them that prevents installation on older operating systems too.

It's another mess in a long saga of issues for Windows 10, which passed its one year anniversary recently and also received a major update in the form of the aptly-titled Anniversary Update. However, at least if you plan on running your older operating system, for the time being, you'll continue to enjoy support for a few years yet.

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