Meltdown, spectre and old motherboard and CPU.

banger said:

They told me my motherboard is too old to be updated so I run the risk of AV not catching anything or get a new machine which I dont really have the money to do!

The crazy part is that buying a new machine doesn't fully resolve this either. The fact that MSI support refers to your mb instead of your cpu probably means that they think you ment the recent Intel ME vulnerability, which you aren't affected by. There's not much users with older boards and processors can do to protect themselves againts Spectre at this point in time (or at least not that I'm aware of), unless this microcode can be updated without a BIOS code, which apparently some users told me it is possible. Contact MSI and demand a BIOS update, I will do it tomorrow because I haven't gotten one for my X99

Thanks Faith I will open another ticket. I did originally open a ticket about Meltdown but now have included Spectre. Let me know if you get a BIOS update?

I will let you know in here tomorrow

margrave55 said:

And yet another Internet rumor takes root.

I'm not insinuating that it is a certainty, however we know that it isn't impossible, history shows us this.

BIOS updates microcode on every boot, or Linux kernel does too but apparently Windows 10 is not able or MS is not willing to do this.

How did you check?

I have been getting in an argument with someone on another forum as they were saying the Windows patch is sufficient to protect against meltdown but my PS script says the patch is not enabled due to no hardware support. I googled the BIOS and I have the latest produced BIOS installed.

The poster who was arguing the software patch by MS is enough posted this link in his defence CPU bug patch saga: Antivirus tools caught with their hands in the Windows cookie jar • The Register