Microsoft Has Some Bad News about Meltdown and Spectre Fixes

According to Microsoft, the two vulnerabilities that have hit tech companies hard this month, Meltdown and Spectre, could affect PCs as their fixes will slow down PCs significantly.

According to Terry Myerson, the executive vice president for Microsoft’s Windows and Devices group, most Windows 7 and Windows 8 users that rely on older chips are going to notice performance impact of updates that protect against the two vulnerabilities.

Myerson wrotre in a blog post that some users who are using Windows 10 with Intel Haswell chips or anything older will notice performance impacts. He also said that the people running Windows 10 on Skylake, Kaby Lake or newer Intel chips probably won’t notice performance issues, although internally run benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns.

The tech giant has already provided Meltdown and Spectre patches for 41 of the 45 versions of Windows through Windows Update.

Intel made its own announcement earlier in the week about PC performance impacts of the security update and said, “Based on our most recent PC benchmarking, we continue to expect that the performance impact should not be significant for average computer users. This means the typical home and business PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing digital photos.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) nor Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) and have not been compensated for this article.