Wednesday, May 13th 2020
Microsoft Begins Phasing Out 32-Bit Support for Windows 10
It seems Microsoft has begun the long process of phasing out 32-bit support for Windows 10 beginning with version 2004, all new OEM Windows 10 systems will be required to use 64-bit builds and Microsoft will no longer release 32-bit builds for OEM distribution. This will not affect those of you running 32-bit versions of Windows 10 who will continue to receive updates and Microsoft plans to continue to sell 32-bit versions of Windows 10 through retail channels for the foreseeable future. This is likely just the first step in what will probably be a multi-year project to gradually phase out 32-bit support as more consumers and businesses switch to 64-bit systems.
Source:
Microsoft
22 Comments on Microsoft Begins Phasing Out 32-Bit Support for Windows 10
It's a bad joke, but I'm not sorry.
Keep in mind this should not be confused with support for 32-bit applications, which needs to be maintained indefinitely.
We've had the tools to deal with legacy software via emulation and virual machines for almost as long as 64-bit hardware has been around.
Back in 2012, I remember public schools here were receiving netbooks because of a government program and the specs wouldn't have been able to handle a 64 bit Windows at the time (Atom N455, 1 GB of RAM). Heck, they barely got away with running 32-bit Windows 7 and a few apps...
The Atom chips of that era were actually leftovers of Intel's failed attempt to get into the smartphone market. Dumping them into the PC market was a terrible mistake that hurt the credibility of Atom (which was already seen as a poor performer before those single-core, super-crippled variants popped up) It wasn't until Bay-Trail (Silvermont architecture, with out-of-order instruction processing and at least 2 cores) started to undo the damage to the Atom name.
Microsoft made a mistake catering to that garbage, and they've failed to correct that mistake despite those awful POS processors being EOL and out-of-support for the last 7 years.
For a sample of something really old that still works on Windows 10 64-bit, I use a government application that was coded in Visual Basic 5.0 and makes use of some of Microsoft's old APIs from Windows 95-era (most of them part of MDAC, like ODBC 3.5 or Jet DAO, but also some ActiveX controls, apparently) and uses some components by then Seagate's Crystal Reports (1997) for creating forms.