[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Well, Microsoft is not above deliberately sabotaging Windows. For example, the well known compatibility issue between D.R. DOS and Windows 3.1:

The Register article from 1999

Method employed to make Windows 3.1 incompatible with D.R. DOS

I go back to those days and recall the fun. But Win 3.1 was essentially a multi-tasking shell sitting on top of DOS, and ISTR there were work arounds developed.

(DR DOS was originally developed in response to OEM customers requests for a ROMmable version of DOS. MSDOS lack the code vs data separation needed to be able to put it in ROM. When it got to a decent point of development, DR decided there might be a retail market for it and released it as a consumer product. There was enough of one to give MS pause and get it to try to protect MSDOS.)

I *can* actually see them changing something in Windows 7, pushing a 'security update', which makes the OS very unstable on Skylake after 2017 (who have to be upgraded to Windows 10 somewhere in 2017), and Kaby Lake from the start.

Possible, but if you get Kaby Lake hardware, it wi9ll almost certainly come with Win10 pre-installed. If you happen to have bought-and-paid for Win7 with installation media, you might be able to replace Win10 with it, or partition and install it in a multi-boot configuration, but that will be a version sans said patch.

And I really don't see the vast majority of people getting Kaby Lake boxes doing that. If they're going to multi-boot, Linux will be the other OS.

And even if you do successfully install and run Win7 on Kaby Lake, what about applications? They get updated to take advantage of new OS capabilities, and you may find you can't run the latest version of stuff you use because it requires Win10. Then what do you do?

"Sorry people; it's not supported on those CPU's. If it's unstable, tough luck."

The bad thing is that Windows 10 itself is unstable at this point.

Whether it's unstable depends on who you are and what you run it on. As mentioned, it's been stable on four out of five machines here.

Given the hundreds of millions of Windows installation out there, I don't believe any version of Windows ever worked out of the box on all machines it was run on. Sometimes, you draw the short straw, but that doesn't make you representative of overall experience.

(By the way: if you use Windows 8.1, spare yourself a lot of grief by NOT installing the Intel Rapid Storage drivers above. The list of known issues under Windows 8.1 is *HUGE* and almost unending. On Windows 10, IRST only has three or four known and unresolved issues at this time.)

I don't run 8.1, and don't need the Intel Rapid Storage Drivers.
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Dennis