MS messed up updates for non-SSE2 capable CPUs (Athlon XP) !!!

Stephie · 16 Feb 2018

Hi ! Obligatory disclaimer - I'm new & will do my best not to break forum rules, but just in case I do please be forgiving !

My OS is windows 7 (ultimate) running on a supported CPU without SSE-2.
Starting last month, either deliberately or by blunder (personal turnover at Microsoft ?),
windows updates including the "security only" which I hand pick have been BAD ! Updates will download
normally but the installation fails immediately or in other cases will fail after the first rebooting (when prescribed).

Turns out this sad state of affairs is due to a blunder, deliberate or not, Microsoft has newly been sending updates compiled to generate SSE2 instructions, disregarding the fact that my supported CPU
cannot execute them, - my CPU officially supported in Windows 7 but MS could care less !-

To add insult to injury, Microsoft does not detect the incompatibility or warn that their updates might crash the system - and in fact one of them "security" updates was very difficult to revert because, after rebooting, the Explorer.exe process handling the desktop kept crashing, and the normal loading of Windows could not proceed to a point a user could have accessed control panel or anything. A non-geek would probably been unable to recover at all from such a state :=(

Long story short : did anyone notice and/or complained ? I don't participate in microsoft online forums, I am not in a position to join or action competent support within MS, and maybe the company even doesn't care at all about the <1% people who have these old CPUs. If however someone on this Forum has a way to report the blunder to professional MS support, please do !

Yesterday again MS warned me to update my "Defender" definitions, which - surprise, surprise - resulted in the same (0xC000001d) failure indicative of unwanted SSE2+ instructions in their binaries. Needless to say I'm stopping all windows "updates" from now on until and unless they acknowledge and repair their blunder.

I suppose a class action is out of the question, even in the US (I am European).

torchwood · 16 Feb 2018

Hi Stephie,

Dont know about SSE2 limitations, but as this followed the January updates a wild stab in the dark would be the Spectre/Meltdown hardening updates that were issued.

If my assumption is correct then i suspect all further updates will also fail, saw your other post.

can you zip the CBS log, i'll check and see if anything else is causing it.

BTW W10 is allready refusing to update what they consider to be "out of date" computers.

MS TECHNET is about the closest place to go for this kind of info

Roy

Stephie · 16 Feb 2018

Hi Roy !

torchwood said:

Dont know about SSE2 limitations, but as this followed the January updates a wild stab in the dark would be the Spectre/Meltdown hardening updates that were issued.

Nope - I did not even try to install any spectre§meldown related updates, since they would have done little to nothing useful on my old Athlon XP anyway and I (rightly, it seems after the fact) suspected the MS "cure" might be worse than the disease :=)

The security update which caused the mess I'm reporting was the latest Internet explorer 11 cumulative (not that I use IE directly for Internet browsing or anything, but, as you know, several DLLs that come and are updated with IE are used, crucially, by parts of the Desktop and other parts of the windows GUI). I had applied all previous IE cumulatives to this machine, and a lot of other security-only fixes without any problem - until Jan, 2018 !

After reverting the awkward mess that IE update did, I made a promise to myself not to update Windows any more... A few weeks later, there came the "urgent" Defender's notification and, right, I thought, it's just malware definitions they're sending my way, so, OK, let's accept them and BANG! again, application failure 0xc000001d which means invalid SSE2 ! There's no way it's not MS's fault, the only question is : careless blunder, or deliberate decision to drop old annoying CPUs if they think they can get away with it :=)

torchwood · 16 Feb 2018

Hi Steph,

You can actually turn off IE11 via Programs & Features .. turn features on or off (top left)

Roy

Stephie · 17 Feb 2018

torchwood said:

You can actually turn off IE11 via Programs & Features

No you can't ! All it does is hide it by removing user access to IE as an internet-browsing interface.
But it does not remove it, in fact IE is a collection of system libraries without which Windows (the Desktop, and more) cannot function. This is why it is such an unforgiveable blemish on MS to carelessly replacel defective versions of previously good system files. The bad cannot be undone by ordinary means... I had to start Windows up in "safe" mode, console only and even thus, reverting to a restore point proved very difficult ! For instance, no "control panel" applet could be used, because "Control panel" itself triggers the bad DLLs.

Well, well... My point wa,s and remains : was this reported to MS previously ? Anybody ?

Kraken Boy · 13 Mar 2018

Hello !

Because my problem seems identical, I take the liberty of mentioning facts regarding XP and not 7. Sorry !

I noticed the same problem since about two or three months. MSE downloads definitions normally but fails when installing them. I have 4 computers running XP SP3 and two of them have P III Cpu's (without SSE2). The problem concerns these two machines only whereas the two others (P IV) are not affected, updating normally.

Excuse my basic English, it is not my mother tongue.
Regards

erpster4 · 20 Mar 2018

for all you folks who are using old non-SSE2 based CPUs it's time to make & save money and invest in getting motherboards that use processor chips with SSE2, NX/XD & PAE instruction sets in them.

I've gotten rid of a proprietary motherboard (A7V8X-LA Kelut-GL6E) in my relative's old Compaq Presario SR1303WM computer that used to use AMD Athlon XP / K7 Sempron CPUs. But since the board started failing and getting some random freezes/lockups using 32bit Win7 SP1 Pro, I decided to change the motherboard and put a used Intel G101GGC board (an old one) that uses Intel Pentium 4 "Prescott" or "Cedar Mill" series CPUs. Had to do a fresh install of Win7 Pro for the OS to recognize the P4 hyperthreaded CPU I put on there.

So ALL the PCs that I have now encountered all have CPUs (Intel or AMD) with at least SSE2, NX & PAE support (many of them 64bit).

There's no telling whether future Win7 updates (until Jan. 2020) will reliably support non-SSE2 CPUs on 32bit Windows 7.
Better in the long run to just dump those boards using non-SSE2 processors and upgrade the motherboard, RAM sticks and get SSE2/NX/PAE capable processors as a vast majority of programs being released nowadays require SSE2 CPUs.

erpster4 · 20 Jun 2018

Sadly, it seems like Microsoft is unwilling to patch non-SSE2 systems like the Intel Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon XP as Microsoft updated MS KB articles like 4088875, 4088878, etc.

with the following statement revised June 15, 2018

Known issue:
A Stop error occurs on computers that don't support Streaming Single Instructions Multiple Data (SIMD) Extensions 2 (SSE2).

Workaround:
Upgrade your machines with a processor that supports SSE2 or virtualize those machines.

And these stories have came out recently on the Computerworld web site:
Microsoft quietly cuts off Win7 support for older Intel computers
Is Microsoft already killing off Windows 7?

So it's pretty much Game Over for attempting to install new updates for Win7 on non-SSE2 processors for the rest of 2018 and beyond.

poolmon · 21 Jun 2018

I just ran across an article today highlighting this issue.
https://www.extremetech.com/computin...s-on-older-pcs

MS messed up updates for non-SSE2 capable CPUs (Athlon XP) !!!

MS messed up updates for non-SSE2 capable CPUs (Athlon XP) !!!

I noticed exactly the same problem