Last month Microsoft blocked Windows Update from working on computers with Intel Skylake or AMD Bristol Ridge or newer chips if those computers are also running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.
In other words, if you have a new CPU, Microsoft wants you to run its newest operating system, Windows 10. And the company is willing to cut off support for older operating systems to get you to update.
But GitHub user Zeffy is having none of that. He’s released a patch that lets you get security updates and other software updates through Windows Update even if you have a new CPU and an old OS.
It’s not like Microsoft didn’t warn us this was coming: as Bleeping Computer notes, Microsoft has been saying since early 2016 that it would only support Windows 10 on computers with the most recent Intel or AMD chips.
But some folks probably didn’t see (or pay attention) to those messages, and some folks may have given Windows 10 a try and decided they preferred an older version of Windows.
Zeffy’s script patches Windows DLL files to skip the CPU version check, allowing users to download updates that are intended for systems with different chips. Since the patch script is open source, anyone can inspect it before giving it a try.
It’s worth noting that it’s possible that Microsoft could find a way to block the current script, but I suspect if that happens it would just be the next step in an arms race where hackers would try to figure out how to bypass Microsoft’s restriction and Microsoft tries to figure out how to stop them from doing so.
A bigger issue is that there may come a time when a Windows update that’s not intended to run on Kaby Lake, Bristol Ridge, or Ryzen chips has some sort of compatibility issue that stops a computer from working properly when a user decided to try to install that update anyway.
First sentence: s/Intel Lake/Intel Kaby Lake/