Windows 10 support for Legacy Intel CPUs

Filingo · November 27, 2020

Hello,

I was told that Windows 10 support for Core 2 Quads has stopped.

but I just installed Windows 10 64 bit on a Pentium E5400 which was not supposed to be supported according to this table:
Does My Intel(R) Processor Support Microsoft Windows(R) 10?

It's Wolfdale and it worked with build 1809. What does it mean? Because I want to "upgrade" to a Core 2 Quad q9450 instead of the E5400 but I don't know how long will I be able to install Windows 10 on this machine, or maybe Windows 10 supports them up to build 1809?

Thanks

Tika · November 27, 2020

Why do you want to get a Core 2 Quad.

Filingo · November 27, 2020

Just now, Tika said:

Why do you want to get a Core 2 Quad.

I have an old machine and I put an SSD there and now I just want to put a Core 2 Quad and a GPU to connect to a non-smart television via HDMI

manikyath · November 27, 2020

important note: this is about driver support, not about running at all.

there's some processor families that dont work at all with windows 10, you're just running on a platform that lacks optimizations to run things properly.

Tika · November 27, 2020

Just now, Filingo said:

I have an old machine and I put an SSD there and now I just want to put a Core 2 Quad and a GPU to connect to a non-smart television via HDMI

Could a Raspberry Pi just substitute? Or run the PC with Linux?

Slayer3032 · November 27, 2020

I have a Q6600 that runs Windows 10 off a 60gb ssd and had 1x4GB DDR3 until I realized that and stuck a random 2gb dimm into it the other day when I swapped out the 10+ year old Thermaltake TR2. It boots to desktop in 15 seconds from pressing the power button and is overall a joy to use over a bunch of low end systems I've had. It just took the 20H1 update after I swapped the PSU.

LGA775 is great for a basic web browsing computer, the largest issue I've found with it is that it doesn't support audio passthrough in chrome for chromecasting tabs. I had to stick a HD5450 into it though for Windows 10 support, the HD4530 or whatever used to be in it seemed to have support dropped for it. There's far more modern gpus that are much more capable and something newer that would come with modern codec support would likely be a really good pairing for it.

That Intel chart just looks like a chart that indicates which CPUs they will ship microcodes to Microsoft for. Don't worry about it, Intel only even pushed updates for anything pre-Haswell just for Spectre mitigation as they don't manufacture anything that old anymore.