Solved Windows 11 24H2 has un-bypassable hardware requirements...

As much as I may get some back lash for this, just upgrade.

The Ryzen 1200 even supports SSE4.2 and can be had with RAM + board for less than 100 GBP which is insane.

biohaze said:

As much as I may get some back lash for this, just upgrade.

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I have a 15th gen CPU+MB+RAM+M.2 spec'd out in another tab.

Think of this as an academic exercise.

I do think it would be really interesting if Westmere still works but Gulftown does not. There are very few differences between them:

saturn49 said:

I have a 15th gen CPU+MB+RAM+M.2 spec'd out in another tab.

Think of this as an academic exercise.

I do think it would be really interesting if Westmere still works but Gulftown does not. There are very few differences between them:

https://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/96/Intel_Core_i7_i7-950_vs_Intel_Xeon_W3690.html

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I used to run an E5640 on an ASUS P6X58D-E, I already know.
It was a good chip and did better than the 2500K later on due to Hyperthreading.
It also had a larger L3 cache than the i7 variant.

Mine easily hit 4.45ghz. vThe motherboard doing well over 220mhz BCLK, which is insane.

It would do more, but you had to do odd tweaks like raising PCI-E bus speed to stabilize higher than 225mhz.

Ahhh old pic.

The W3670 came today and....as many of you suspected, it didn't help. So I was left with the GPU (GTX 660), something on the motherboard, or declaring the system cursed. As a last ditch effort, I went into the BIOS and disabled everything I could find:

• USB 3.0 ports
• Azalia Codec (wtf is this anyway? The on-board sound?)
• On board Ethernet
• eSATA ports
• extra unused Marvell/Gigabyte SATA controllers
• High Precision Event Timer (HPET)

And...Windows 11 booted. It complained that it had crashed during install, but it booted.

A fresh install in this state? Finished fine.

Once I had Windows 11 booting, I set out to find which of the above things was the culprit. My money was on the HPET (32-bit instead of 64) but no, it was the Ethernet. The bog-standard, boring, every-board-includes one Realtek RTL8111E chip. Enabling that resulted in a bluescreen at boot again. Disabling and it went away.

Armed with this knowledge it wasn't hard to find others that had found this before me. A poster there claims the 8111E works while the 8111D doesn't. In my case, it is the exact opposite. Gigabyte changed the Realtek chip between the rev 1 and rev 2 of the GA-X58-UD3R board from 8111D to 8111E. And apparently this exact combination of board (Rev 2, RTL8111E) and the default Windows 11 driver (9.1.410.2015) results in a bluescreen. The strange part is my working Rev 1 board (8111D) uses this exact same driver. And the same driver works fine on both boards on Windows 10. So I'm guessing it is a race condition or something in this 10 year old driver that Windows 11 manages to tickle.

The fix is simple - just update the driver before upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11. I updated the Realtek driver to 10.75 from here, then ran the Windows 11 upgrade and it worked fine. Just to be safe, I told Windows 11 NOT to download/install updates at the beginning and also kept the Ethernet cable unplugged (which also prevents the crash, according to the above thread). An hour later I had Windows 10 running on a i7-950. I didn't keep the W3670 in because the BIOS defaults to running the memory too fast and I didn't want to change too many things at once.

So for those of you who said it was a driver issue, I award you 100 Internet Points each. It was an insidious, annoying, time-wasting, Microsoft-includes-old-broken-drivers issue, but it was a driver issue.

Been there done that, sharing my experience to help others. That's what the forum is about. To find help and to share knowledge.

I think you'd have to have a pretty old CPU that doesn't have SSE4 -- even a GEN 6 intel i5 has it from a laptop at least 7 years old !!! so in these cases installing via DISM /Apply-Image will work.

You can also install as a VM if you use a Linux host and use KVM/QEMU as the virtualisation software - but that's a bit more complex for a load of people -- it DOES work however.

Eventually though if your CPU no longer has native instaructions issued by Windows or the VM software can't intercept and "emulate" these then I'm afraid at that point it's all over and there's not a lot you can do about it.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

I think you'd have to have a pretty old CPU that doesn't have SSE4 -- even a GEN 6 intel i5 has it from a laptop at least 7 years old !!! so in these cases installing via DISM /Apply-Image will work.

You can also install as a VM if you use a Linux host and use KVM/QEMU as the virtualisation software - but that's a bit more complex for a load of people -- it DOES work however.

Eventually though if your CPU no longer has native instaructions issued by Windows or the VM software can't intercept and "emulate" these then I'm afraid at that point it's all over and there's not a lot you can do about it.

Cheers
jimbo

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Emulating SSE4.2 in a virtual machine should work but I guess performance will suffer. It's not worth it. I suggest to keep using 23H2 as much as possible. Even after EOL Windows Defender should receive definition updates, exactly like Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows 7 does today. If you are concerned too much, just install a third-party antivirus and keep it updated. So unless you need new features or compatibility with new hardware, you should be OK for a few years more. We still use Windows 7 at my work, no problem whatsoever. We even have a couple of computers running XP with Microsoft Security Essentials updated.

spapakons said:

Emulating SSE4.2 in a virtual machine should work but I guess performance will suffer. It's not worth it. I suggest to keep using 23H2 as much as possible. Even after EOL Windows Defender should receive definition updates, exactly like Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows 7 does today. If you are concerned too much, just install a third-party antivirus and keep it updated. So unless you need new features or compatibility with new hardware, you should be OK for a few years more. We still use Windows 7 at my work, no problem whatsoever. We even have a couple of computers running XP with Microsoft Security Essentials updated.

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I'm still using XP a lot -- (in a VM though) as I have some older Disk cutting Vinyl hardware for creating bespoke vinyl disks !!! -- this sooftware only works on XP and getting new hardware for the disk cutting costs around €25,000 !!!! - also the XP system can copy music from Minidiscs so they can be transferred to vinyl --- it's not a bad business - loads of people want their own Vinyls -- the old problem was sourcing the blanks - but these days very easy -- really cheap from China, Korea etc - -- I can even do the odd 78 !!!! .

I have also sourced some unofficial XP SP4 stuff around with some SATA drivers -- these seem to work - better than using IDE in a VM !!.


I don't think though there's any USB 3 drivers out there for XP -- although I don'r really need those.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

I'm still using XP a lot -- (in a VM though) as I have some older Disk cutting Vinyl hardware for creating bespoke vinyl disks !!! -- this sooftware only works on XP and getting new hardware for the disk cutting costs around €25,000 !!!! - also the XP system can copy music from Minidiscs so they can be transferred to vinyl --- it's not a bad business - loads of people want their own Vinyls -- the old problem was sourcing the blanks - but these days very easy -- really cheap from China, Korea etc - -- I can even do the odd 78 !!!! .

I have also sourced some unofficial XP SP4 stuff around with some SATA drivers -- these seem to work - better than using IDE in a VM !!.

Download Windows XP Service Pack 4 Unofficial 3.1b

Windows XP Service Pack 4 Unofficial is a cumulative update rollup for Windows XP (x86) English as well as security enhancements not addressed by Microsoft....

www.majorgeeks.com

I don't think though there's any USB 3 drivers out there for XP -- although I don'r really need those.

Cheers
jimbo

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You can install the regular version of Windows XP Home SP3 or Pro SP3 and then install the unofficial SP4 service pack. I had found it only in English, but I don't mind since I prefer using the English US version of Windows.

jimbo45 said:

I think you'd have to have a pretty old CPU that doesn't have SSE4 -- even a GEN 6 intel i5 has it

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For Intel SSE4.2 first appeared with the 1st gen Intel Core i3/5/7. My System Two runs 24H2 and the latest Canary builds on it's 1st gen i5.