Earlier this year, Microsoft pushed out an update for Windows 7 that, when installed, would cause systems running CPUs without SSE2 support to blue screen. The company said it was “working on a resolution” however, a few months later, it appears that resolution is to “buy a new PC”.
Martin Brinkmann over at gHacks decided to do some digging, after the notice disappeared from Microsoft’s most recent patch KB.
In the notice, Microsoft said it was “working on a resolution” and would “provide an update in an upcoming release”.
It seems the company decided it was easier to just drop support for non-SSE2 chips instead, going by a KB article dated May 8:
Symptom: A stop error occurs on computers that don’t support Streaming Single Instructions Multiple Data (SIMD) Extensions 2 (SSE2).
Workaround: Upgrade your machines with a processor that supports SSE2 or virtualize those machines.
That’s quite the workaround.
But let’s be honest for a minute: who does this impact exactly? Probably no one you know. Or anyone the people you don’t know know.
To be specific, you’d have be rocking a Pentium 3 or Athlon XP, the last mainstream processors lacking SSE2. Everything from the Pentium 4 and Athlon X2 up is right as rain.
Still, Microsoft should probably update the system requirements for Windows 7… just in case.