Everybody knows you can’t install Windows XP on a 386, or Windows 95 on an original IBM PC. But for Windows 11, the goalposts seem to be changing with newer releases of the existing OS. As covered by The Register, it appears the latest Windows 11 24H2 update might be incompatible with older machines.
It’s all down to the POPCNT CPU instruction. As shared on Twitter by [TheBobPony], the instruction appears in a number of Windows 11 system files, including kernel and USB XHCI drivers. Thus, it appears that any CPU not able to run this instruction will not be able to boot Windows 11. POPCNT was first included in AMD’s Barcelona architecture in 2007, and Intel’s Core processors in 2008. It’s an instruction for counting set bits in a word.
Ultimately, the effect is that computers with older CPUs will no longer be able to run the latest version of Windows 11. It could be as simple as Microsoft engineers enabling more modern CPU instructions at compilation time. However, given affected hardware is more than 15 years old, it’s perhaps likely that Microsoft is perfectly willing to cut these machines off from using the latest versions of its main operating system. We’ve talked about this phenomenon before, too.
In any case, keep a close eye on Windows update if you’re running super-old hardware. Let us know if you’ll be affected in the comments.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip!
One of the reasons for removing support for vaguely recent CPUs was the hardware vulnerabilities found in predictive branching. Patching against these in software added massive complexity and performance overheads. It was pretty reasonable to draw a line in the sand, to move forward.
It is easy to say that everything should always remain backwards compatible, that ewaste is bad, etc. but you take for granted that you can have your cake and eat it. The reality is often when you compare the saving of energy costs in new hardware by increased performance, it actually works out that scrapping the old hardware is greener.
Agreed in principle on the ‘scrapping is greener’ claim: It makes sense for datacenter-scale installations, and that’s how I scored a Dell R710 server very cheaply. But for an individual user, it will take essentially forever for a new $1000 machine to offset its manufacturing footprint, vs. just continuing to use an older machine.
Just drive the older machine into the ground, use it until it can’t do what you need any more, then buy new.
It’s like the ship of theseus anyways. The only part that I have on my computer that’s 15+ years old is the case. Even the case fans gave up at 17 years, and the actual hardware has been replaced three times bit by bit.
“One of the reasons for removing support for vaguely recent CPUs was the hardware vulnerabilities found in predictive branching. Patching against these in software added massive complexity and performance overheads. ”
Linux can support older chips without compromise on security and performance, so why can’t Windows? Just load a different module when running older chips.
The real reason is that MS stock price is dependant on new PC sales, as CPU power in recent years has got so good less are upgrading their hardware. Just take the windows free upgrade path when offered. This was an attempt to make people buy new kit. My dell XPS laptop was one gen older than supported. There is no difference to the arch between the two generations and no hardware security fixes. And my laptop has TPM 2.0. But MS says no because 6th gen not 7th gen.
It’s now happy running Linux. Was my last windows PC, kept for when I needed it. Now I don’t, so well done MS, you played yourself.
Because with Linux you have a bunch of DIY tinkerers to keep making those different modules, or you do it yourself, whereas on Windows the point of the system is that Microsoft does it for you for money so you wouldn’t have to bother or even think about it, and you’re not paying them any extra to keep supporting obsolete hardware.
It’s more that on Linux you’re already supporting a ton of architectures, so effectively adding more isn’t much larger of an overhead. Windows is extremely narrowly focused in comparison. It’s not a “DIY vs paid” thing – there are advantages to having a smaller hardware ecosystem. Effectively Microsoft sits somewhere between Apple and Linux in this case.
Each of those different architectures have dedicated teams working on them, on their own dime or for some customer, but you as the user don’t see the cost as a user since they’re not selling it to you.
If all of those people were working for the same company that supplies a single operating system package with support for all those architectures, then damn sure you’d be paying multiple times the amount that you do for Windows.
There’s probably tons more overhead, since they all have to re-invent the wheel and duplicate effort to get all the usual stuff working for the different architecture. Therein lies the problem. Say I want music player X to work on my system, but oh, I’m running on ARM instead of x86. Someone has to go and port the software for me – for my particular combination of Linux plus the other stuff – which means I either have to hope that some helpful volunteer does it, or pay more money.
It’s the same on Windows – software that was written for newer hardware doesn’t necessarily work on older hardware with the missing features, so compatibility layers have to be added, so sticking around with the old stuff is a moot point anyhow. You’re not paying them to add that stuff in, so they’re not adding it. If you were paying, chances are buying a new computer comes cheaper.
Just because you put on a suit and go to work in an office, does not make you a better coder than a “DIY tinkerer”.
“The real reason is that MS stock price is dependent on new PC sales”
Not directly. Most is office 365 and that’s cloud-based. The other is their cloud based business for everything else. Then there’s gaming.
ms makes most of their money from the enterprise sector, and so they make their software for that use case. even though they sell a home version, its still a bloated cow that does far more than what the home user needs.
what really bugs the hell out of me is that while high performance hardware is available to most pc enthusiasts, none of the software you buy actually runs on your computer, except games really. i didn’t build a computer to use as a glorified terminal.
While the kernel itself still supports older architecture, but some distros are also switching to a more modern base architecture x86_64_V2, which uses more modern instructions like POPCNT, SSE4.2, etc.
But, with Linux in general, yes, the choices are there, you can simply switch to other distros if your architecture is no longer supported.
No?
Almost ALL of Microsoft’s revenue comes from cloud services, support contracts, and selling access to their desktop users/data for advertising.
Windows hasn’t been a real product in a long time.
Itis a loss leader.
“The reality is often when you compare the saving of energy costs in new hardware by increased performance, it actually works out that scrapping the old hardware is greener.”
I’m not sure where you’re getting that idea. For a computer with a 6 year lifespan, 85% of the carbon emissions will be from manufacture.
https://www.it.ox.ac.uk/article/environment-and-it
This means that it take 34 years of use for the carbon footprint of the energy consumption to match that of manufacture. In other words, if your new machine could magically use zero energy but had the same carbon footprint as the manufacture of the old one, it would be a bad idea to replace it unless you’re talking about a computer from the start of the 90s.
Financially, it might make sense under certain circumstances, especially in a country where the consumer has their energy bill inflated by heavy handed green tariffs. I made a saving switching a low powered server over to a used NUC with a RoI of just a few months. It’s a shame that this was probably worse for the environment but politics is full of myopic perverse incentives.
You should not confuse people here with facts :). Shame on you.
BTW, Linux rules!!!
I do get that the hardware is old and devs want to use recent chip features. But I wonder if any gain from such command is worth messing up with userbase
what userbase uses 15 year old hardware and needs win11?
Anyone with a Mac Pro?
It’s a Mac, yes, but it’s also a compact server (Xeon CPUs, ICH10 chipset) in a pretty and easy to use metal chassis.
Just think about it. The HDD bays are easy to access, the PCIe slots have thumb screws.
Personally, I’m using SATA SSDs in those HDD bays. It’s still a nice PC.
I am a hardcore Apple fan, and the old Mac Pro’s look nice, but they terribly inefficient. Good on the shelf as a display item but I certainly wouldn’t use them for anything.
Understood. Its poor efficiency doesn’t matter to me, though. Not anymore.
Here in Germany, the energy costs are kinda unpayable, anyway.
So it makes no difference, it costs two arms and two legs either way.
So I’m not able to pay it twice times instead of just not being able to pay it once.
When the next energy bill is about to arrive in the mail, my fellow citizens and me will go all mental and do start laughing hysterically. Or something along these lines, not sure.
😂🥲
There are 5/6 years old PCs that are not supported by windows 11. My laptop (i5 6300U) was manufactured in 2017 and is not supported. The following generation is also not supported and in this CPU range support starts at i5 8xxx onwards.
That CPU was release in 2015, 9 years ago. Its a dual core low power CPU, any windows will be a chore to run on it. Use linux and enjoy.
in the xp64-7 era you usually had a wide array of options as to what os you would use on a new build, id always use something older but still supported. new os new bugs. but around my 8th gen intel build, i noticed that they took away this ability and it only supported the most recent windows at the time, which meant my mobo didn’t come with 7 drivers and i was forced to use 8.1. ever since then its all been forced 10 and i really dont like 10, and im not even going to do 11.
currently in search of a linux distro i can live with (preferably something running kde plasma as its de, never did like gnome). been testing out debian but it likes to run out of date packages for some reason.
Linux Mint. Or Lubuntu. Or MX.
Pfft… the Lenovo laptop I picked up in 2018 for BlackHat has warned me it can’t upgrade to 11 since it dropped in late 2021. Talk about a short lifespan…
Just add this to the registry and it will work:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup]
“AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU”=dword:00000001
Well there’s also another problem with old machines. In 2018 I bought a top line Lenovo Tablet for over 2000$. It is practically unusable today, because most websites use VP9, H265 or AV1 codec for videos. Intel Skylake got no real HW-decoder in Skylake CPUs, so I can’t watch any videos anymore.
Well, that’s odd. The Lenovo machine I’m typing on has one of the very first Skylakes made (2015), and it has not failed to play any video I have encountered. It’s still the most capable machine I have (32 GB of RAM and a big SSD help), and still my daily video editor.
Now, this is still Win10: Win11 says it won’t run on it, and I’m perfectly happy with that.
Well, if you use it for video editing you most likely got a dedicated video card. Many Laptops and Tablets do not have a dedicated GPU und use the built-in Intel HD Graphics.
See for yourself: https://github.com/intel/media-driver#decodingencoding-features
Skylake and Broadwell are all missing modern video codec decoding support.
What are you talking about?
I have never had a problem with websites or video on my desktop!
Of course I wouldn’t even know how to tell if it is running via hardware or software decoding but honestly it just works, even while multitasking so why would I care?
I just don’t get the complaints I read about video performance and why this piece of old hardware or that piece of old software needs deprecated… Is it just a case of trying to get a higher framerate for bragging rights? Or is there a whole world of super high quality immersive video that I just don’t even know exists?
Is someone running a holodeck or something?
cpu-info
Packages:
0: Intel Core i5-6500
Microarchitectures:
4x Sky Lake
Cores:
0: 1 processor (0), Intel Sky Lake
1: 1 processor (1), Intel Sky Lake
2: 1 processor (2), Intel Sky Lake
3: 1 processor (3), Intel Sky Lake
Logical processors (System ID):
0 (0): APIC ID 0x00000000
1 (1): APIC ID 0x00000002
2 (2): APIC ID 0x00000004
3 (3): APIC ID 0x00000006
Skylake supports 8 bit H.265 and it should have plenty of power to software decode VP9.
AV1 could be a problem, but it’s very unusual to find a video on any website that is only available in AV1.
My old Sony Vaio VGN-C2Z laptop runs a C2D T5500 from 2006. So it won’t be able to run the latest Windows 11 version. :'(
However, that chipset reliably supports only 3GB of memory anyway, so Windows 11 was out of the question anyway. :)
Wish Microsoft would still support Windows 7 so that it would be safe to browse the internet with that laptop. It still working great, even with some modern software. Web browsers, however, have apparently significantly bloated since 2006. Websites run like treacle. But I can’t use any modern browser anyway, so it’s too dangerous to use it to browse the web anyway.
You could always try installing a lightweight Linux distro.
Nah, I don’t think so. I use this computer on my workbench, mainly for working on vintage computers (I also have Pentium 233MMX computer for the even more vintage software ;)). I have more modern laptops, of course. ;)
I just felt to write what I did because I’m so amazed at how much value this Sony Vaio laptop has given me, and how usable it still is for me now. Despite Microsoft trying its stinking best to make it obsolete.
Huh, that’s very like my second ever laptop, the first one I had that was relatively current. Mine didn’t have a Core(tm) processor though, it was definitely single core. I’d stopped using it in favour of a Macbook with a C2D in 2007. I did use that Macbook until 2015 though.
You could probably make some modern use of your Vaio with a minimal linux distro, but I don’t really see the point, you should get that thing back on WinXP and enjoy playing some original Far Cry.
I can honestly say that it was probably my best computer purchase ever. I have been using it for 18 years, and it’s running latest Arduino, Atmel AVR Studio 7, VSCode 1.67, Eagle 6.7. I have to wait a bit until the applications open, but once they are open they run great. Of course it has an SSD. For my hobby electronics development, it’s surprisingly not much slower than my i7 Macbook with 32GB ram. Theoretically it should be at least 10 times slower, but in use it doesn’t feel slow at all, not even half as slow.
When I bought it, this laptop was already a deal I couldn’t resist. And over the years, it turned out as an even better deal than I imagined. When I added an SSD, some 7 or 8 years ago, this laptop gained a whole new life.
Not to suggest your laptop had one, but there were, in fact, some single-core chips that used the “Core” name: the Core Solo and Core 2 Solo. Some were distinct models and some were just binned versions of the equivalent duo with one core disabled.
The end of the Pentium 4 era and the beginning of the “core” era was when intel’s marketing department really started to go wild with confusing names.
You still had the Pentium D (dual-core with “pentium 4”-style netburst architecture)
You had the original 32-bit Core Solo and Core Duo (which did *not* use the “core” microarchitecture, but were a variant of pentium M called “yonah”)
You had the “pentium dual-core” (which started off using yonah, then switched to the “core” microarchitecture but still didn’t call itself Core)
and of course then you had the first Core CPUs that actually used the “core” microarchitecture, the “Core 2”, in which the ‘2’ of course meant it was the sequel to Yonah and not that it had two cores.
(not to mention you could get a stripped-down Celeron variant of pretty much every one of these and it was always just called “Celeron”)
and that’s before they decided they shouldn’t actually name things based on the number of cores but instead based on a sequence of odd numbers (i3/i5/i7/i9), silver/gold, etc!
A tiny bit of research shows that CPUs without POPCNT where never on the windows 11 supported list anyhow.
So “Latest windows 11 release might not work on your hardware not supported by windows 11 in the first place”… all for the clicks I assume.
bu it is MS, unless their lastest OS runs on a steam powered abacus they are evil for abandoning users
Well Linux allows one to use older versions, while Microsoft can close that loophole.
https://youtu.be/rJ5N80K-uLk
It allows, but how much trouble will you have running newer software on it?
Oh, you can backport, of course!
They sure do love to make everyone else accept their own decades-old choices. On the desktop of a windows machine, create a new folder called “con”.
Yea, I’m very disappointed that Hackaday left that very important detail out of their article.
“Microsoft removes support for (some) unsupported CPUs” would be more correct, but is a bit weird as how can you remove support for something that’s not supported in the first place :)
Same happened with Windows 8 when the 8.1 update/upgrade came out.
Unlike the predecessor, 8.1 64-Bit now required cmpxchg16b to be available.
Microsoft bricked quite a few PCs that way. Especially older Athlon 64.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/448350/new-windows-8-1-requirements-strand-some-users-on-windows-8.html
How quickly people forget. 😞
I miss old Microsoft.
There was a time when Microsoft had OEM versions of DOS, OS/2 or Windows.
These DOS PCs were “MS-DOS compatibles”.
Windows was available for non-IBM systems, too.
Let’s think of editions for Tandy 2000, PC-98, FM Towns or DEC Rainbow 100.
Or, the Windows NT releases for RISC PCs. Alpha, MIPS R-4000, PPC..
The current Windows supports ARM and Apple Silicon, even.
I seriously don’t understand modern Microsoft anymore.
The company can find technological excuses for not supporting something, while at same time can easily support anything it has an interest in.
Agreed; even though they were staunchly anti-FOSS, they would at least have the decency to ensure their software had reasonable compatibility with old hardware. Now though? It’s like no one in the C-suite has a technical background anymore.
I second that.
I suppose that’s because the real Windows gurus at Microsoft are all retired by now.
That would explain why Win32/Win64 API stagnates or why Microsoft tries so desperately to integrate Linux.
The DOS, Windows NT or OS/2 gurus at Microsoft are nolonger here.
The whole story reminds me of Commodore (CBM) after the C64/Amiga engineers had left the company.
But the process of deteriorating isn’t new, I suppose.
When dot-Net Framework was being introduced, we could have started to realize that the underlying architecture wasn’t being updated anymore.
Instead, Microsoft had released new layers of abstraction each year.
A bit akin to applying make-up to an aging lady.
It helped for a while, but now the wrinkles nolonger can’t be hidden.
Windows, as an architecture comes to an end.
Not the product name itself, but the NT line. As it happened with Windows 9x line years before.
The next Windows will be Linux based, not sure.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.
Let’s imagine an Linux-based Windows that incorporates something like WINE.
It’s totally possible, from a technical point of view.
I’ve got a house full of Win10 boxes, none of them candidates for upgrade, including a fairly expensive and not that old Dell Precision workstation.
I’ve been toying with Elementary OS and have become a bit enamored of Linux in general. Other than my seat of SolidWorks, there is nothing I need Windows for.
So when the time comes and my “friends” at Microsoft stop supporting 10, my path is clear.
Let’s see how this strategy works out for Natella and his cohorts.
Sounds great. You won’t regret going the Linux route. I’ve been Windows free now for quite a few years now. Last Windows box was running Win7 years ago. I’ve settled on KUbuntu LTS myself. Linux is solid and dependable on my laptops/desktops/servers/SBCs. Miss nothing about M$.
A Macintosh suits me nicely… it’s a 2012 27″ iMac running Ubuntu. No golden cage for me, thanks.
Windows and iOS free since 2008, and never looked back. I’m only surprised a man of your apparently massive intellect and experience couldn’t make it work for you?
The people who need luck are the ones chucking out perfectly good computers in order to keep up with the ridiculous hardware demands of Windows 11.
There are people who are very enthusiastic about all sorts of variants, but in reality someone whose default is Windows workstations would do better to grab a boring, well supported one. I think Ubuntu has some annoying flaws so maybe go for whichever version of Mint looks good and then forget about the details.
Haiku?
You can’t be serious….
I’d pick a fairly “mainstream” Linux distro long before I’d jump into Haiku. The one poor dev has been working on that thing for what, 20 years and it’s still in beta….
Nope, not for me.
Just because the instruction is present in the binaries doesn’t mean it won’t work: that’s what the “illegal instruction” CPU trap is for. As long as the OS provides an emulation of the instruction hooked to that trap, you should be fine (if a bit slow).
That feature exists since the 80286, at least.
8087 math co-processor emulation software used this.
It made x87 versions of AutoCAD/Sketch run on an system without FPU (NPU).
I was wondering about the illegal instruction trap in combination with virtualisation. Can a VM emulate those instructions if the OS doesn’t handle them?
I despise windows 11. I wasn’t onboard with the hatred of every other release like others, but 11 is garbage. I took one upgrade….no more. If it wasn’t such a hassle, I’d downgrade it.
So who cares about 11 and hardware requirements. You don’t want 11 anyhow. I certainly don’t need to rehash why its junk here. Since I took the “free upgrade” many others have as well and written plenty of reviews. Many will be paid for and friendly, but read between the lines on what they didn’t like but weren’t allowed to say. Or just find those who aren’t shills
That’s exactly how I felt about Windows 10.
Also for political reasons. A certain line was crossed.
I didn’t approve how it treated the user.
My personal PC belongs me, I’m the administrator.
If I make mistakes, I’ll take responsibility.
Windows is supposed to be a servant, an assistant. Not the lone center of attention.
That’s why years ago, I promised myself to boycott it. And I held my promise.
I told everyone “I won’t support Windows 10”.
And so I didn’t. Family, friends and colleagues had to find other helpers for Windows 10 related things.
yeah, 10 was definitely an issue, but it turned out a lot of it could be mitigated. They did so much under the guise of security (and how many zero days have come out anyhow?!). In 10, you could get around pretty much everything. 11, the decided to remove all useful shortcuts, hide useful guis in favor of useless ones, and even the sound changes that are supposed to sound “less aggressive” whatever that’s supposed to mean, just sound dumb. The look and feel is like copying the mac. Most things you can still bypass, but the number of hoops you have to jump through to do so is far worse than it used to be.
Thanks for you reply and information.
The dilemma is that I’m neither a fan of Windows 10 or 11, though Windows software has begun to require it.
So I have to leave that part of my life behind me and look. for an alternative. But so is life. It was never meant to be easy. *sigh*
A few years ago, tinkering with Windows was still a fun hobby.
Most applications available still had “Windows 98/Me/2000/XP” or “Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/7” as a requirement.
That was normal Win32 software, like IrfanView, WinRar or WinAmp.
Software that would technically run nicely on a 486 processor..
That’s when programming for Windows was still fun.
It was possible to get things running on both vintage systems and current systems.
Projects could be made using MinGW and SDL1, qt framework, .NET 1/2/3 framework, Visual Studio 6 or Delphi. Just to name a few.
Even Unicode and GDI+ applications could be made run on both old systems (via unicows.dll and gdiplus.dll on Windows 98)
But for the past 5 years or so, applications seem to be starting using bloated frameworks that require Windows 10 as a minimum.
Not even Windows 7 will do anymore.
That’s a very sad development, indeed. Because Windows used to be a very legacy-friendly and hacker-friendly OS.
Compatibility was its only justification for existence, after all.
To run a simple application, everyone could use the Windows he/she/they wanted to, no matter how old the Windows version was.
Even Windows 98SE on a little laptop (say, Libretto 50CT) was fine.
Which is still being popular in the retro community, btw.
That was before the release of Windows 10, at least.
It somehow changed things for the worse.
Had a bad influence on programmers, I mean.
Because, now application writers nolonger seemed to be interested in creating plain but highly-efficient Win95 (Win32c, GDI, maybe DDraw) applications with pure i386 code.
Even if it’s totally sufficient for something basic like a text editor or, say, an NES ROM patcher.
The latter could be made a nice little Win32 console application.
Which still is more modern than a humble DOS textmode application.
But no, these days such an utility has to use PowerShell or full grown Visual Studio 2024.
This is so depressing.
Imagine once Windows 10 is EOL, all Windows applications will require Windows 11 as a minimum requirement. That only Windows version available. How dystopian.
“It’s all down to the POPCNT CPU instruction. ”
I remember having to upgrade from a phenom because the DRM used instructions I didn’t have.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/582160/discussions/0/1621724915821336073/?ctp=1
I’m running a four year old PC with an AMD Ryzen 3 and Windows update says my PC doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11, so…
What is this “Windows” everyone keeps talking about? I remember an OS from the 90’s called Windows-something–maybe Windows 94 or 95? I had to write device drivers for it as part of my job. But I eventually realized that it was a crack-addled product of some company with a bad case of not-invented-here syndrome and robber baron leadership, and I found multiple better alternative OSes, the best of them free (as in beer). Since then I’ve been in front of a computer almost every day, usually programming or analyzing data (or both), but not on anything called Windows. Apparently much of the world still thinks it was a good idea(?)
“[..] and I found multiple better alternative OSes, the best of them free (as in beer).”
Me, too. There was BeOS, the multimedia OS of the 90s.
It was fresh and dynamic, freed of all that dusty 1960s legacy.
For a while, it seemed like Zeta almost made it in my country.
I still remember the ads on television.
Check your head, it’s the thing living there rent free.
I agree with some of the other commenters: good luck getting windows 11 to run properly on any pc that didn’t have it from the factory.
Pish, tosh & twaddle.
Where I work, we sell i-series (from about 4th-gen on) laptops, desktops & AIOs all day long – with windows 11 as an option. They function just fine.
(This feature update is going to cause us problems…)
Just a ho-hum to me. Glad I’m not tethered/bound anymore to M$. I can do everything I want to do in Linux and have a lot of choices. Freedom of choice. Don’t like a DE? Pick one that works for you. Simple. Or if you like , at login pick a DE you want to use for that session. Compilers? Clang, gcc, Rust, python, Perl, Pascal with Lazarus, Fortran, Net Beans, Java, etc. All at your finger tips. Office applications, Cad systems, Browsers, email clients, etc. List goes on and on… And no telling you want you can load, not load. Freedom. Of course you do have to have a brain as this isn’t exactly a ‘hand holding/call tech support’ experience at times (few and far between though anymore). Price of freedom is you have to ‘work at it’ :) … as in government.
Oh, and in context to article, Linux runs on ‘most’ old hardware and well as newer platforms whether x86, x86_64, Arm, Arm64, etc… Servers/Desktops/Laptops/SBCs.
Yes, provided that enough RAM is available.
Otherwise, it may still run, but will mercilessly wear out the physical medium of the swap partition.
Once again microsoft – this ‘upgrade’, are you doing this for us, or are we doing it for you…..
I am fine with an OS using newer instructions in order to be faster and more efficient, otherwise we would be able to book win95 on a 386.
But on idea that would be cool is if a dll could be versioned to run on older CPU’s
Such as;
ntkrnl.dll, ntkrnl-13900.dll, ntkrnl-12600, ntknl-ryzen.dll, etc
It’s possible to have multiple copies of these DLLs around.
In the Windows XP bootloader configuration file, boot.ini, for example, they can be defined.
So it’s possible to select them at boot time.
I’m grateful for the state of operating system choices these days. It’s saved me thousands of dollars, and many of my computer systems from the scrap heap. Reading news about Microsoft slowly tightening the noose/requirements for Win11 over the past two years has been further reassurance to me that getting away from Windows altogether was a smart move.
BTW, for anyone “stuck” with Windows due to software/employment reasons, I’d urge you to try virtualization, e.g. VirtualBox, QEMU, or KVM. With proper setup, they’re actually pretty darn good now. Or heck, give dual-booting a try. Most Linux distro installers will do that for you, with just a few clicks.
“BTW, for anyone “stuck” with Windows due to software/employment reasons, I’d urge you to try virtualization, e.g. VirtualBox, QEMU, or KVM. With proper setup, they’re actually pretty darn good now. Or heck, give dual-booting a try. Most Linux distro installers will do that for you, with just a few clicks. ”
Good idea in principle, bad one in practice.
VirtualBox and all other VM software have dropped backwards compatibility in the past years.
Especially for XP, which is most important for running legacy software.
VirtualBox 4.3 (?) is last version to be run on an Windows XP host.
VirtualBox 5 is the last release to run on 32-Bit hosts.
It technically runs (crawls) on XP, but causes error messages and is dog slow (VM needs 30sec to run).
VirtualBox 6.0 is the last release to support 3D graphics (Direct3D 8/9, OpenGL) for Windows XP guests.
VirtualBox 7 is being required for Windows 11 guest support.
Bottom line:
You need different versions of Virtualbox to run all of your VMs in best fashion.
But you can’t have multiple copies of VirtualBox installed same time.
So you have to mix VM software.
Virtual PC 2007 runs on 32-/64-Bit versions of Windows XP/Vista/7.
For the latter, it needs XP’s ddraw.dll in Virtual PC folder, though. Otherwise, screen output is very sluggish.
VMware Player can be used, too.
Old versions like 3.1 or 4 may still run on XP hosts and don’t demand for hardware-assisted virtualization yet (AMD-V/Intel-VT).
VMWare Player 7 and up don’t run on 32-Bit hosts anymore.
You see, it’s not as easy.
In an ideal world, you could have upgrade your host OS over the years and keep all your previous VMs running as before.
But that’s not how things work in practice, sadly.
VM software drops support for older guest platforms and older hardware.
The other way doesn’t work, either.
You can’t stay on an old host system and keep upgrading VM software over the years, while hoping that it allows you to ar least un future OSes with basic functionality.
The developers of VirtualBox, VMware etc. don’t think that far.
Instead, they’re merely interested in the present.
15-year-old CPUs aren’t going to be on motherboards with the required TPM 2.0 hardware. However, if you can modify the microcode then you can implement or reroute missing instructions and CPUID calls. A thin hypervisor layer can then be used emulate the TMP 2.0 requirement.
Honestly, seems like a lot of work to avoid upgrading your hardware BUT malware authors could benefit from helping keep old hardware running new software. Even after being discovered users may tolerate the infection as removing the infection means getting new hardware. They would no longer be parasites but instead be symbiotes.