We have 1000s of Windows 8.1 PC running Intel Kaby Lake CPUs. Now it seems we cannot download Windows updates. But Win 8.1 is still mean to be in support until 2018. It seems we need to upgrade to Win 10 but that is not possible this year (for a variety of reasons I wont go into).
Unable to download Windows 8.1 updates for corporate network
- Thread starter GodAtum
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Good timing on this thread. I just watched a YouTube video a few minutes ago discussing this. Microsoft have dropped support on W7 and W8 for newer CPU's. Apparently the reason given was that older versions of Windows can't take advantage of newer CPU features so it was done to help the customer. Although a suspected tin foil hat reason is to promote adoption of W10 which has been slow. He did even mention the fact that official support for W8 should have continued into 2018.
I can't link to the video as there are a couple of swear words in it but look for Microsoft drops support for Windows 7/8 Ryzen Kaby Lake by Barnacles Nerdgasm (apparently an ex MS employee he says).
I can't link to the video as there are a couple of swear words in it but look for Microsoft drops support for Windows 7/8 Ryzen Kaby Lake by Barnacles Nerdgasm (apparently an ex MS employee he says).
I did find an offical microsoft support article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ch-you-receive-a-your-pc-uses-a-processor-tha
Personally i think it's outrageous. I can't see why is not possible to support a newer processor, which will itself be backwardly compatible with older processors. For possibly the sake of profit they have put your companies software security at risk. If you do indeed have thousands of impacted PC's then you will be a large corporate customer and should get your sourcing team to drag MS in to explain themselves.
I hope this goes up to board level (our CEO is a "Sir")!I haven't tried this and anyway I don't have a newer CPU. But in theory you might be able to run W8 in a virtualbox guest running on Linux. Then spoof the guest CPU to be an older model to allow updates:
https://superuser.com/questions/625648/virtualbox-how-to-force-a-specific-cpu-to-the-guest
It would obviously need a bit of testing but you could install Linux on a test workstation (something like Mint which works and looks quite like Windows), then Virtualbox and W8 as a Vbox guest. Naturally this is an extreme measure and not to be taken lightly. But if a W10 upgrade isn't feasible at this point it may be a possible to use this to get specific W8 software running OK on peoples machines and still allowing Windows updates.
https://superuser.com/questions/625648/virtualbox-how-to-force-a-specific-cpu-to-the-guest
It would obviously need a bit of testing but you could install Linux on a test workstation (something like Mint which works and looks quite like Windows), then Virtualbox and W8 as a Vbox guest. Naturally this is an extreme measure and not to be taken lightly. But if a W10 upgrade isn't feasible at this point it may be a possible to use this to get specific W8 software running OK on peoples machines and still allowing Windows updates.
Soldato
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It has been known for some time that only Windows 10 would support Kaby Lake and some certified Sky Lake systems, why did you deploy this configuration on such a large scale when you knew it was unsupported?
I'm guessing his 1000s of PCs have been working perfectly fine, and it wasn't known that Microsoft would lock these processors out of Windows Update despite clearly being able to run the operating system. Fair enough if you're not going to get the full performance of the CPUs while using an older OS, but it's insane that they would attempt to circumvent their own lifecycle policies by preventing updates from installing on new hardware.
yeah this was not know until very recently (last week i think)?
Soldato
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They said a long time ago that Kaby Lake on 7 & 8.1 would be an unsupported configuration, just because you had it working previously doesn't mean it was ever supported.
Here is a list of Windows 7 & 8.1 systems that are supported on Sky Lake https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/11675/windows-7-windows-8-1-skylake-systems-supported
Soldato
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Yes they originally said they would only support Sky Lake until 2017 but have now extended that for certified systems, Kaby Lake has never been stated to be supported on 7 & 8.1.
They got called out on the nonsense they were trying to pull, that's why they 'extended' it to be in-line with the lifecycles of 7 and 8.1.
If it's unsupported they should have prevented 8.1 from installing in the first place, not arbitrarily lock you out of security updates after the event.
When you say you aren't able to download updates are you computers getting updates directly from Microsoft?
If you download from the Update Catalog can you install manually? If Microsoft is only blocking the download to Windows 8.1 clients you might be able to work around this by downloading and deploying updates using WSUS.
If you download from the Update Catalog can you install manually? If Microsoft is only blocking the download to Windows 8.1 clients you might be able to work around this by downloading and deploying updates using WSUS.
Unsupported in terms of back porting CPU relevant feature updates, etc. but AFAIK its only become apparent very recently that it would knock out all updates. This is quite a big issue as the systems a lot of corporations have been buying have been upgraded to these CPUs but still basically sold as the same package and it isn't as trivial as just upgrading business wide to Windows 10.
