windows 11 24h2

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Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “unbootable” on some older PCs

Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2 / /

is anyone still reading this using a Core 2 Duo? —

New Windows version needs CPU features that became common in the late 00s.

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We've installed Windows 11 on systems as old as this Core 2 Duo Inspiron tower. As of version 24H2, the OS may no longer be bootable on these systems.

Enlarge / We’ve installed Windows 11 on systems as old as this Core 2 Duo Inspiron tower. As of version 24H2, the OS may no longer be bootable on these systems.

Andrew Cunningham

Officially, Windows 11 has higher system requirements than Windows 10. But to date, once you’ve bypassed those requirement checks, there have been few consequences to running Windows 11 on old hardware. Unsupported or not, Windows 11 would run on pretty much any 64-bit PC that could boot Windows 10—we’ve run it on PCs as old as a Windows XP-era Core 2 Duo desktop.

That’s apparently changing a bit in Windows 11’s 24H2 update, which Microsoft began testing earlier this month. According to posts from a user named Bob Pony on X, formerly Twitter, the latest Windows 11 builds refuse to boot on older processors that don’t support a relatively obscure instruction called “POPCNT.” Short for “population count,” it’s used for “counting the number of bits in a machine word,” according to an explainer by programmer Vaibhav Sagar.

It’s unclear why POPCNT has become the load-bearing CPU instruction for a whole bunch of Windows components, but it looks like the Windows kernel, the system’s USB and network drivers, and other core system files now require the instruction as of Windows 11 24H2.

In modern x86 CPUs, POPCNT is implemented as part of the SSE4 instruction set. For Intel’s chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD’s processors, it’s included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.

That effectively bars mid-2000s Intel Core 2 Duo systems and early Athlon 64-era PCs from booting Windows 11 at all, not that they officially supported it in the first place. This means the change should mainly affect retro-computing enthusiasts who spend their days making YouTube videos in the “we installed Windows 11 on a potato, let’s see how it runs” genre rather than users of actual systems. Even if you upgraded these PCs with 4 or 8GB of RAM and changed out the creaky old hard drives for SSDs, these are not PCs that will run Windows 10, Windows 11, or any modern apps particularly well.

These same retro-computing enthusiasts may also find a way around this requirement eventually. Windows 10 and 11 won’t boot on systems without SSE2 support, for example, but that hasn’t stopped people from finding a way to do it anyway.

Though Windows 11’s system requirements suggest CPU clock speed and the amounts of RAM and storage your PC has, system requirements in the modern era have become more granular and esoteric. For example, it seems as though Windows 11’s CPU requirement (an 8th-gen Intel Core CPU or newer, or an AMD Ryzen 2000-series CPU or newer) is driven at least partly by support for “mode-based execution control” (MBEC), a security feature that accelerates some of the operating system’s memory integrity protections. No CPU manufacturer is including stuff like POPCNT or MBEC in their marketing materials, but modern Windows support is increasingly dictated by these kinds of features.

Listing image by Microsoft

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Microsoft starts testing Windows 11 24H2 as this year’s big update takes shape

microsoft, Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2, windows 12, windows insider program / /

24h1 isn’t even over yet —

Windows 11 23H2 didn’t make its first appearance until much later in the year.

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Windows 11 24H2 has made its first appearance.

Enlarge / Windows 11 24H2 has made its first appearance.

Andrew Cunningham

The next major release of Windows isn’t due until the end of the year, but it looks like Microsoft is getting an early start. New Windows Insider builds released to the Canary and Dev channels both roll their version numbers to “24H2,” indicating that they’re the earliest builds of what Microsoft will eventually release to all Windows users sometime this fall.

New features in 24H2 include a smattering of things Microsoft has already been testing in public since the big batch of new features that dropped last September, plus a handful of new things. The biggest new one is the addition of Sudo for Windows, a version of a Linux/Unix terminal command that first broke cover in a preview build earlier this month. The new build also includes better support for hearing aids, support for creating 7-zip and TAR archives in File Explorer, an energy-saving mode, and new changes to the SMB protocol. This build also removes both the WordPad and the Tips apps.

Some of these features may be released to all Windows 11 users before the end of the year. During the Windows 11 era, it’s been Microsoft’s practice to drop new features in several small batches throughout the year.

The early change to the 24H2 numbering is a departure from last year, where Windows 11 23H2 didn’t appear publicly until the end of October. And even then, it was mostly just an update that rolled over the version number and Microsoft’s support clock for software updates—most of its “new” features had actually rolled out to PCs running Windows 11 22H2 the month before.

There are some signs that this update will be fairly significant in scope. In addition to all the features Microsoft listed, there are signs that the company is revising things like the Windows setup process that you go through when installing the OS from scratch. The current setup screens have remained essentially unchanged since Windows Vista in 2006, with only light and mostly cosmetic tweaks since then (and even in the redesigned version, window borders are still done in the Vista/7 style).

Logistically, this initial build of Windows 11 24H2 allows Windows Insider testers in the most unstable Canary channel to switch to the less unstable Dev channel without completely reinstalling Windows. Eventually, this… window will close, and the Canary channel will jump into a new series of build numbers.

Whither Windows 12?

Some news outlets and users have taken this update’s announcement as proof that the rumored “Windows 12” won’t happen this year. The existence of Windows 12, largely inferred based on rumors and stray statements from PC makers and analysts, has never been officially confirmed or denied by Microsoft.

A 24H2 update does suggest that Windows 11 will continue on for at least another year, but it doesn’t necessarily preclude a Windows 12 launch this year. Windows 10 received a 21H2 update the year Windows 11 came out and a 22H2 update the year after that (not that either came with significant new features). Microsoft could decide to rename the upcoming feature update on relatively short notice—like it originally did with Windows 11, which began as a design overhaul for Windows 10. Windows 12 might happen, or it might not, but I wouldn’t take this Windows 11 24H2 update as decisive evidence one way or the other.

AI was said to be a major focus for the hypothetical Windows 12, as it has been for the last few major Windows 11 updates. Trendforce went as far as to say that “AI PCs” running “the next generation of Windows” would need a “baseline” of 16GB of RAM, though when asked about this, a Microsoft representative told us that the company “doesn’t comment on rumors and speculation.” Trendforce also said that these AI PCs would need neural processing units (NPUs) that met certain performance standards.

To date, Microsoft hasn’t imposed any specific system requirements for Copilot or Windows’ other generative AI features, aside from 4GB RAM and 720p screen requirements for the Windows 10 version of Copilot, but this could change if more of Windows’ AI features begin relying on local processing rather than cloud processing.

Listing image by Microsoft

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