Microsoft and Nvidia are targeting owners of old PCs and laptops. What's going on?
What is Nvidia going to do?
Drivers with a version higher than 555 will not be able to ensure normal operation of video cards on systems with processors that do not support the POPCNT (Population Count) instruction. If you install a new driver on a PC with an outdated chip, the computer will display a “blue screen of death”, BSOD, or will work unstably.
It is understandable that NVIDIA refuses to support outdated hardware. The company does not want to waste resources on supporting chips that are rarely used now. Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad without POPCNT instructions were released until 2006 inclusive. The instructions were first added to Intel with the Nehalem microarchitecture (introduced in 2008) and later, in Core i7 processors, starting in 2008. And also in Core 2 Duo and Quad, released in 2007 and later.
In addition to Intel, AMD also has chips without POPCNT, including processors that do not support SSE4. The instructions have appeared in the company's chips since 2007.
One can imagine that equipment with such chips is used somewhere in production, archives, and so on. But it is unlikely that such old computers will be updated by installing the latest software. Usually they are used for specific purposes: ensuring the operation of machines, managing production lines, working with archival information. So the problem is not relevant for the vast majority of Windows OS users.
If you need to know if your PC's processor supports the necessary instructions, NVIDIA has created a simple guide. To check, you need to:
download the utility from the Microsoft Corporation website;
unzip the contents of the Coreinfo zip file;
select the executable file, right-click on it and click “Open in Terminal”;
In the command line window, type .\coreinfo64 -f and press Enter.
If the list of supported instructions includes POPCNT, you can live in peace. If not, it is better not to install updated drivers from Nvidia.
Okay, what about Microsoft?
Microsoft turns off support for processors without POPCNT and SSE4.2 with the release of the 24H2 update for Windows 11. The update will be available for download at the end of 2024. The company may release a similar package for Windows 10.
To avoid having to update your PC, you need to disable the update channel for Windows 11, starting with 24H2. This can be done using standard Windows tools and third-party utilities. But Microsoft says that without timely updates, your computer will be vulnerable to new threats.
The issue also affects users subscribed to the Windows testing program. Mandatory support for SSE 4.2 instructions has been added to the 24H2 test build 26080.
How not to update
Old PC users can solve the problem in several ways. The most logical is to update. Or you can disable updates, as I described above.
Another option is to install Linux instead of Windows, one of the distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint and Manjaro. They do not consume many resources, approximately at the level of Windows 7 Service Pack 1. And they have several advantages over the resource-intensive Windows 11:
regularly updated, so each one is fresher than Windows 10;
all current software is supported;
Distributions are released that support only 32-bit processors, and they are also updated.
Perhaps, this won't last long. Linux developers are currently getting rid of support for outdated processors. The Linux team is doing the same for old x86 chips. In 2023, Linux 6.7 removed the code responsible for the operation of Intel Itanium chips based on the IA-64 architecture. The cleanup was suggested by Linus Torvalds himself, who called these processors “dead” back in 2021.
If this continues, Linux will cease to be a salvation. By the way, it would be interesting to know whether the upcoming Windows update threatens the stable operation of the PC. And if so, what will you do: upgrade the hardware, install new software or just disable updates? Tell us about it in the comments.
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