The End of Windows 10 Support and the Unfair Fate of an Intel i7

Windows 10 support is coming to an end. Sure, you can pay for extended support for a few more years, but that's just life support. It's already decided that the plug will be pulled eventually, and Microsoft isn't going to change its mind.

I run about seven desktop PCs at home, and all the others are Intel i7 8th gen or later, so they've already been upgraded to Windows 11. The only problem child is the Intel i7-7700K. For some reason, it's the only one that Microsoft officially refuses to support on Windows 11.

I've got TPM 2.0 installed, Secure Boot enabled, and all the requirements checked off, but Microsoft still blocks the install. What makes it even more frustrating is that just a few months after I bought the 7700K, I picked up an Intel i7-8700K—and that one upgrades to Windows 11 just fine. A single generation apart, and yet one is allowed in and the other is locked out. There's no real performance gap to justify it either; it's just Microsoft drawing a line in the sand. Supporting more CPUs would blow up their test matrix and increase maintenance costs, so they simply decided not to bother.

The truth is, hardware isn't advancing at the pace it used to. The Intel i7-7700K is a 4-core, 8-thread chip, and in more than eight years of use, I almost never felt it was lacking. At a base clock of 4.2GHz and boost up to 4.5GHz, with DDR4 memory fully populated, it ran games and dev environments without breaking a sweat. I figured it had at least another five years of life left, maybe even until the end of Windows 11's lifecycle. But thanks to Microsoft's arbitrary cutoff, a perfectly good CPU has been turned into "obsolete" overnight.

So I made a decision. Jumping to DDR5 and a whole new platform would cost too much, and since I've already maxed out my DDR4 slots, there was no real reason to. Instead, I chose to swap only the CPU and motherboard. I picked up a used Intel i7-8700—not the 8700K. The choice was deliberate: while the K series allows overclocking, in the second-hand market that's a liability. You never know how hard the previous owner pushed the voltages or how they managed thermals, so the chip's lifespan could already be shortened. For stability, the plain 8700 just made more sense.

For the motherboard, I grabbed another high-end board from the same line I was already using, since the onboard audio quality had been excellent. I ordered the CPU from Lithuania and the board from China via eBay. Waiting for shipping was a bit nerve-wracking, but everything arrived in good condition, and the system booted up without issues.

When the dust settled, it ended up being kind of funny. I now have two nearly identical systems: one with an Intel i7-8700K and the other with an Intel i7-8700. Same generation, same chipset—just one has the "K" and the other doesn't. My original plan was to stretch the life of the 7700K, but thanks to Microsoft's policy, I've ended up with two machines from the same generation instead.

For context, that Intel i7-8700K system is used mainly for machine learning. It's paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, which was the best bang-for-buck card last year. With 16GB of VRAM, it handles large models comfortably, and the power efficiency is solid too. This year, the crown has passed to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 16GB, but I don't really need to upgrade right away. I'll probably wait a few more years and jump straight to something like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 9060 16GB, hopefully at a similar price point. With GPUs, it usually pays off to skip a generation or two anyway.

The Windows 11 upgrade itself was successful. The system runs fine overall. But honestly, I still don't like it. Even something as basic as File Explorer feels noticeably slower compared to Windows 10, and that affects real-world performance. It eats up more system resources in places it shouldn't, and I keep asking myself, "Is this really an upgrade?"

Still, there's no choice. Once Windows 10 support ends, there'll be no more security updates, and it won't be safe to keep using it. So like it or not, moving to Windows 11 is the only option. Part of me still feels disappointed, but in the end, I'll just have to accept it and adapt.