What I don't get is that Windows 7 is in extended support until 2020, so if you bought Windows 7 retail and upgraded your CPU to one of these blocked next-gen versions, how is blocking windows update even excusable???

Because, EULA???

Ah the thing where you agreed to sacrifice a goat at midnight

This is no patch. This is a hack. This is the bypassing of a DRM protocol, an undoing of an antifeature and part of the ongoing war. I await the MS counterattack.

Why would MS bother? Like a Hackintosh, it's an unsupported configuration of the OS. If anything breaks, you're totally on your own.

Is Windows 7 abandonware to Microsoft? If so then this violation of terms might just fly under the radar of their massive team of lawyers.

Some points:

1. I see this as a public-spirited project that favors consumers over a rapacious corporation.

2. At a time when farmers can't even repair their own tractors any more (http://modernfarmer.com/2016/07/right-to-repair/), this hack will probably result in legal action.

I see a string saying "Only detected non-exempt updates on device with unsupported processor" when I was disassembling the code, so obviously MS has a way to mark patches as "exempt".

If you had read the original announcement about this over a year ago you would already know that this was the case and what the exemptions are:

>Through July 17, 2017, Skylake devices on the supported list will also be supported with Windows 7 and 8.1. During the 18-month support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends. After July 2017, the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windo...

Outdated, see: https://blogs.windows.com/business/2016/08/11/updates-to-sil...

What is the technical reason for Microsoft's actions?

I've used Windows for decades and don't recall anything like this happening in the past.

There isn't (a real) one.

Chip manufacturers bent over backwards to make sure their chips ran Windows perfectly. This is obviously changing and they are not investing as much as they used to in compatibility with existing software.

Err, no. This is 100% Microsoft trying to kill all Windows prior to Win10 by making it virtually impossible to continue to use the older Windows versions (i.e. by blocking updates and removing support for new hardware).

There's nothing technically different enough about these new CPUs that anything significant needs to be done by Microsoft - in fact, it took more code to deny the ability to install on these new CPUs than it would take to allow it.

Win10 was 'Free' except now you have no recourse except to buy into the new system. Welcome to the world of tomorrow.

Can you expand on this and provide some technical details or links?

The 80186 was a market failure because, mostly, PCs built with it were not completely compatible with software already existing. This was because the components the 186 integrated were not copies of their IBM PC analogs. IIRC, at that time, the "gold standard" of PC-compatibility was Flight Simulator: if anything was even slightly different, it wouldn't run. Many PC almost-compatibles had special versions of it.

Intel learned their lesson and all subsequent processors were crafted to be exquisitely compatible with all processors that came before them and to make it easy to build computers that ran all previous PC software. AMD64 (the architecture) is limited by the need to run x86 code seamlessly. Everything is there, from string copy instructions , x87, MMX, SSEx, either explicitly or as parts of newer standards that superseded them. Until recently, every PC chipset had, deep in it, a fully functional ISA bus.