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.

Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM is Becoming "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (GIGO) "Just like Arvind and Krabanaugh." (CEO and CFO, Respectively)
There are some decent new comments about IBM this morning
If Your Company Lost About 30% of Its 'Value' in 3 Months, Then Maybe It Was Never Worth What You Claimed
Does that make sense?
Pleroma is Dying
The last social control media that I joined was Pleroma
Asia and Social Control Media
statCounter reckons it's down from over 10% to just 3% since it began tracking those things
Anonymous Threats Against My Wife and Against Yours Truly
Promoting GNU/Linux and condemning people who attack GNU/Linux is not a crime
Decades-Long Microsofter (Darryl K. Taft) and TIOBE Conflate Microsoft GitHub (Proprietary) With FOSS in Microsoft-Sponsored 'News' Site
We do not intend to do a lengthy debunking because we covered this subject several times in the past
Microsoft Cuts Continue, Visitor Center in Redmond Shut Down
This goes on and on, leading up to the next giant wave of mass layoffs
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: "Throwback VR Headset" and OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day
IBM's Accounting Claims Don't Add Up
IBM is an enigma. To Wall Street is claims to be doing extremely well, but insiders tell the complete opposite.
Links 13/02/2026: "Cofounders Fleeing MElon’s xAI" and IOC Opposes Solidarity With Ukraine's Fallen
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/02/2026: Square Function with Diode Network and Calls Against Discord
Links for the day
Links 13/02/2026: SUSE Uses Microsoft Internally, MElon's Company Helps Turn Epstein Files Into Child Abuse (After the Pornography Scandals)
Links for the day
African Browser Choices Show a Growing Problem in the World Wide Web
World Wide Web (WWW) becoming little but a transport layer for a particular proprietary application (Google Chrome) [...] we're back to the late 1990s
If You Want Digital Freedom, Then Follow Richard Stallman, the "Linux" Brand Has Changed and OSI is Microsoft (GitHub)
If you want something stable and predictable, then stick with GNU, the GPL, and GCC
Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and SRA Failing to Curb SLAPPs Against People Who Expose Wrongdoing
We'll soon show messages that we transmitted to politicians
Beware the Latest IBM SPAM, IBM is Already Down "After Hours"
After a harsh day in Wall Street IBM's shares area already down again (after trading hours)
Radicalism in Our Communities is Mostly Corporate, Not Grassroots
Infiltration and systematic destruction can be shallowly painted as "inducing manners"
Life Gets Better After Social Control Media
Don't become part of these experiments
statCounter Suggests Americans Are Dumping Social Control Media
Are Americans getting fed up with social control media and quitting in droves?
Back Doors and Fake Security
They've militarised everything, even people's home computers
Cost-Cutting and Book-Cooking at IBM
It's like cutting salaries by more than 50%
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 12, 2026
Mainstream Media Intentionally Ignoring EPO Strikes
“EPO on Strike!”
Jeffrey Epstein crypto disclosure: uncanny timing, Bitcoin demise, pump-and-dump, ponzi schemes
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/02/2026: Avoiding Coffee, Trying Ubuntu, and "Open Source Robot"
Links for the day
Microsoft Slop CEO Speaks of Layoffs
They will go along with the "replaced by AI" baloney
In Systematic Contempt of the British High Court, Brett Wilson LLP Spent Two Years Lying to Courts and Breaking Rules Against Us
We criticise Brett Wilson LLP quite lot because of its conduct
IBM Kyndryl as "Aggressive “Enron” Accounting"
IBM Kyndryl continues to nosedive today
Relationships evidence: Tiago, Tassia, Thais, Antonio & Debian favoritism, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Debian pregnancy cluster: why it is public interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
IBM Bubble Deflating After James Kavanaugh's Accounting Trick With 'Toxic Assets' Comes Under SEC Scrutiny
If something goes up based on false speculations, bonus numbers and self-serving lies, then it'll come back down, eventually...
The EPO's Corruption and Violation of Rules is Spreading to the United Kingdom (Software Patents)
Yesterday a letter was sent to the chief regarding salaries while reminding him of the next strike, which is only 11 days away
State of the Slop, Slopfarms Containment
Slopfarms still exist this year, but their visibility is limited
IBM Continues Tanking Today, Already $58+ Lower Than Recent High, Insiders Explain Why
The same CFO from the inception of Kyndryl is still the CFO at IBM
Links 12/02/2026: Pushback Against, "NATO Is Expected to Step Up Arctic Security"
Links for the day
Links 12/02/2026: "Microsoft Just Forked Windows" and Windows Notepad is a Giant Security Hole
Links for the day
Put Criminals in Prison, Not People Who Report the Crimes
Can people be sent to prison for opposing crime?
Windows Has Become Increasingly Irrelevant
There's a very massive wave of layoffs coming Microsoft's way
Our Most Successful Year Ever
The hired guns in London are eager to turn the UK into another China
Slopfarms Waning, But Not Extinct Yet
Metrics show that usage of LLMs is declining
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 11, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, February 11, 2026