Windows 7 is in its final days before Microsoft ends its extended support cycle for the popular operating system, which now only receives security updates. Recently, the company officially removed technical support for several product forums, including Windows 7.
A monthly security update released for Windows 7 in March 2018 (KB4088875) caused a BSOD (STOP error) on machines using older CPUs that do not support Streaming Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) 2 extensions. This affects CPUs including the Intel Pentium III series sold between 1999 and 2003.
SSE2 (a SIMD extension) was a new set of instructions for multimedia that, according to ZDNet, aimed to improve performance, allowing the CPU to process multimedia in parallel. It was introduced in the Intel Pentium 4.
The BSOD issue was not fixed in the security updates that were released in the following months. Microsoft had promised that the company would work on finding a solution and would “provide an update in an upcoming release”. However, it failed to deliver any fix until June 16. In response, it stated the following:
"Upgrade your machines to a processor that supports SSE2," says the updated article released by the KB.
We are about halfway through the year 2018 and there may not be many people using Windows 7 on a processor that is almost 20 years old. Although Microsoft has not made any official announcement, it appears that the company has now left behind the old processors that do not support SSE2. But if this move is met with criticism from a significant number of users, it could force Microsoft to reconsider its decision.
