In August 2000, nearly 18 years ago, Intel proudly showed off its newest CPU family, the Pentium 4.
ZDNet was there to cover the announcement and highlighted one of the signature features[1] of the new chip:
The Pentium 4 does have other advantages over the Pentium III, analysts said. It packs an improved floating point unit and a new set of multimedia instructions, called SSE2, that allow the chip to process multimedia in parallel, thereby speeding performance. [emphasis added]
I'm old enough to remember that announcement, and yes, the addition of support for Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) was a big deal at the time. It was a high-end feature in 2000, but by 2004 or so every mainstream processor supported this feature. The CPU in your more modern CPU almost certainly supports a later version; the latest and greatest release is SSE 4.2.
The point is, if you're running a PC today, in mid-2018, that doesn't support SSE2, you should be charging admission to your computer museum. You probably upgraded it from Windows 98 to Windows XP and then to Windows 7, and you've been humming along for nearly two decades, which is impressive.
SSE2 support became a big deal in 2012, when Microsoft announced that SSE2 support was one of three mandatory features for its new OS. Windows 10 has the same requirements.
That was six years ago, an eternity in computing terms, so imagine my surprise when the subject came up again just last week, this time in the context of Windows 7.
The problem began with the March 2018 monthly security update for Windows 7 (KB4088875)[2], which included this warning under the "Known issues" heading:
A Stop error occurs on computers that don't