Bonum Certa Men Certa

Intel Helps Microsoft Kill Windows 10, Push Software People Don’t Want, and Fight the Reverse Upgrade Treadmill

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

Intel is helping Microsoft kill Windows 10, by only creating a WiFi 7 driver for Windows 11.



Even though the two systems are barely different except that Windows 11 is a lot slower and uses a lot more memory, and has a platform for Microsoft to put ads all over the shell when they want to, Intel is only writing WiFi 7 drivers for Windows 11, Linux, and ChromeOS.



This sort of reminds me of a Pentium 4 system I moved back to Windows 98 only to realize that the driver EXE from Intel was saying Windows 98 was unsupported.



What? How could that be? Windows 98 has WDM.



So I unpacked the EXE with an extractor and right clicked the INF file, and told Windows to install it, and the drivers went in, rebooted, and all the hardware came up and was recognized.



Intel has been doing this forever because it helps kill off older PCs.



What the user should do is just install a Linux distribution that lands support for it, but I don’t suspect it will take very long for people to hack the driver up and install it on Windows 10 anyway.



This happened with Skylake chipsets. Microsoft quickly cut off Windows updates if it detected a Skylake or later CPU. It wasn’t long before people had defeated this and started installing the updates anyway, and nothing bizarre (other than Windows being really buggy on everything) happened.



It’s manipulation, is what it is.



The guy at Walmart in the early 2000s admitted to me that they had tons of customers bringing back Windows XP PCs with some botched Windows 98 installation on them, and I’m betting some got whacked by the driver setup “error” from Intel, which was completely fake, and a lie, and just didn’t know how to bypass it.



People fondly remember XP because they don’t remember the horror show that was unleashed in 2001 that was barely compatible with anything (you had to constantly apply Application Compatibility Updates, and wait another month if the program you had wasn’t on the list) and had pop-up spam and worms.



I call what happens with new Windows releases and the rush to get something older on the computer the “reverse upgrade treadmill”.



Microsoft’s last version was so much less terrible then the current one that users are desperate to purge it, but many don’t know what they’re actually doing and bungle it.



There wasn’t anything XP had that I needed, not even multi-core support because it was a single core Pentium 4.



I knew how to fully purge IE and friends from 98 (Bruce Jensen did a great job writing this, btw!) and go back to the Windows 95 B shell, and extend Windows 98 with “backports” from Me, various hotfixes that still applied without IE there, DirectX 9, and KernelEx.



I recently saw someone on YouTube deploy a kernel extender add-on to Windows 2000 and then he started grabbing applications for it like the current (in 2020) release of Pale Moon and doing all kinds of funny things with it.



So like, Microsoft kneecaps you and then hackers (Not in the mainstream media sense, but people like me who want it to work forever and so here’s a hack, there’s a hack, you get a hack, everyone gets a hack! Oh you want some? Get some! And Firefox works again…) start going nuts with it because they want to use it forever, and so they do. And they find that you can run 2020s software on Windows 2000 and do a lot of stuff you’re really not supposed to be able to do, once you’ve neutered Microsoft’s “enforcers”, like Intel, and Mozilla, which quickly leave you unsupported on a system that can’t even browse the Web soon.



And I mean, whose computer is it?



I had a licensed copy of Windows 98 that I removed from another system first (even though there was no activator to enforce that).



One reason Microsoft wants Windows 11 as a disservice, or in the Clown, is so the party’s over and all you can do is keep paying them.



PCs can last a long time and how would they ever sell you a new one if yours just worked for 10 or 15 years like mine do?



Better switch to Linux.

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