Last year I was also in a Windows 7 rabbit hole. There's lots of ongoing stuff in the community, and even huge driver packs for Ryzen hardware.
The website that led me down that hole was the one from "spacedrone808" [1] who appeared regularly in /r/windows7 mod posts and issue trackers.
There's also the snappy driver installer project [2] which shares a 44GB torrent with all kinds of drivers, from SATA controllers to NIC to GPU. There's also driverpacks which is sometimes down, sometimes not. In the web archive of either of those you can still find the torrent links though.
Oh and there's driveroff [4] which led me down the rabbit hole of Russian hacking communities that backport software to win7, which is amazing to see that there's this isolated modding community on the internet that uses hardcore win7 modded variants, with self-built firewall software, backported hash file databases for antivirus tools etc.
I’ve long suspected that a Linux desktop environment designed to closely mimic Windows 7 (with light modernization where it makes sense) would prove popular, and the existence of all this reinforces that idea. A rough facsimile can be built using KDE, Cinnamon, or XFCE, but many details will still be wrong (and aren’t practically fixable without forking) and I think that’s enough to prevent many users from considering Linux as a viable alternative.
Windows Vista/7 screwed up file associations badly, you can do far less with them than you could under Windows 95. Under Windows 95, you could customize the right click menu for any file type, and add all your favorite programs to that menu as a different option. That's gone since Vista, which added in the buggy "Open With" submenu.
The worst is that today, if you associate Icon files with an icon editor, Icons suddenly lose their ability to display themselves, and instead turn into pictures of the associated application!
Similarly I went on an XP odyssey late last year. I acquired a retired workstation from $dayjob that I decided to turn into a retro XP game machine. It was very late for XP but within a generation or two before Intel, Nvidia and the motherboard provided drivers (Ivy bridge and GTX 660 GPU).
But that didn't get you through the installer... I discovered a plethora of alternative install media with built in community drivers providing support for nvme drives, modern ACPI extensions etc.
It's so complete you can install it on today's current hardware.
My primary machine is still running Win7; every time I say this here I get a lot of flak, the only result of which is that every time, I'm a little more afraid to confess it; but I will not move to a more recent version of Windows.
Everything works fine and fast; Office 2003 was peak Office (last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated, which, for such a brilliant idea supposed to revolutionize productivity applications, is a bit strange?); browsers won't update to Manifest V3 so uBlock Origin runs along smoothly; most VST plugins released recently, are compatible with Win7 and those that aren't, usually are bad and bloated.
Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
I have a much newer PC running Ubuntu, but it's just not as good — lots of little annoying details; and a bit unstable.
> Office 2003 was peak Office (last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated, which, for such a brilliant idea supposed to revolutionize productivity applications, is a bit strange?)
Apparently I'm not alone ;)
I still find the classic menus (with full menus always on) easier to quickly parse than looking at all those icons stretching through the entire width of the window.
Edit: also if you're looking for a lightweight note taking app, try OneNote 2003/2007. Uses 8-32 MB of RAM which was a lot back then but today isn't nothing.
> Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
This is a crazy irrelevant example. Why would you expect any other OS to act differently? CPU fans connect with a 4-pin header, it's not like switching out a major component of your system.
My primary machine isn't Windows 7 anymore, but I have a Windows 7 machine I keep around for a particular kind of work. I access it with Remote Desktop and keep it in an isolated network segment.
I've kept the various versions of other software on the machine static, along with the OS. For what I use it for it's very pleasant to use. Muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts that I've built-up over the nearly 15 years I've been using the machine isn't disrespected by developers introducing change for change's sake. Nothing moves around on its own. Nothing changes without my approval. I really like it.
(The physical machine itself is a Ship of Theseus. It's a Dell laptop that has had some combination of donor screens, keyboards, motherboards, batteries, and disks over the years. I really appreciate that, too. The Latitude machines of its era are really easily disassembled and serviced.)
> the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated
Other than, I dunno, Explorer, Paint, WordPad, Visual Studio, Dynamics, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Live Writer, SQL Server Report Builder, Mathematics, and then some.
What other applications were you expecting them to add it to?
I am entertaining an idea to acquire the same setup for recreational game development using older tools and libraries. Have you followed any guides or do you have any recommendations where to start? Also how reliable those older mobos? I have heard that capacitors are usually close to a malfunction stage, have you had any issues with hardware so far? Thanks.
I support a lot of different manufacturing places and so see a wide, wide, variety of hardware.
You don't know how terrible Windows 11 is until you start going backwards, peeling off layers of the onion. Once you're back to XP/2000, you're like..oh shit. People spent years thinking about how this would all work. And it's crazy fast. Windows snap into place almost instantly. Sure, search doesn't work, but search doesn't work on Windows 11 reliably either.
Everything you actually need to work? Works better and faster in the old stuff. When I remote into those machines even the remote session feels faster. How does a Windows XP machine running on a 733mhz machine from the last century feel faster at navigating windows and settings and launching programs than my 3k dollar workstation from last year?
I used Windows 7 for way beyond its expiry date, until there was an exploit for some image format that meant I had to upgrade my browsers.
Corporate users of Windows 7 still get updates, and there's somebody in Ukraine who redistributes these updates, or at least the digital certificate signing the updates says they live there: https://blog.simplix.info/update7/
Come to think of it, I guess and hope the info in certificate is outdated, and they're living somewhere outside of fear of Putin's bombs.
When I switched from Win 7 to Linux few years back I couldn't toss my faithful i7 that served me well for nearly a decade so it sits under my workbench. Normally I would convert my previous PC's Windows install into a VM that ran on the new PC but this time I decided to leave the machine be. It's till running Win 7 for my CAD and PLC software and I use it a few times a month. I did move some stuff to a 7 VM but when you have a fully working machine ready to boot... Now I can update it and reliably keep it running. Awesome.
Windows Server 2012 R2 (Windows 8.1 Server) is nice. It's probably my favorite pre-Windows 10 version of Windows Server (though 2003 R2 comes close, as does Server 2008 R2). It also has ESU's thru October 2026, if memory serves.
The best part of newer windows is the upgraded WDDM. It smoothes out so many glitches with the display system. But you'd need the updated kernel for that. For that reason and other advancements I think it's probably better to just use Windows 11 and strip out the things you don't like.
I like the Windows 7 theme much better than later versions, though.
Heh, I think the Aero glass stuff feels pretty dated and has problems with readability. But Win7 is just so much smoother than 11 (or even 10), even though my brand new Win11 workstation is orders of magnitude more powerful than the decade-old hardware I run 7/10 on.
And especially graphics glitches. Like a half-opacity lock screen sometimes being drawn on top of everything for several seconds after unlocking.
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The website that led me down that hole was the one from "spacedrone808" [1] who appeared regularly in /r/windows7 mod posts and issue trackers.
There's also the snappy driver installer project [2] which shares a 44GB torrent with all kinds of drivers, from SATA controllers to NIC to GPU. There's also driverpacks which is sometimes down, sometimes not. In the web archive of either of those you can still find the torrent links though.
Oh and there's driveroff [4] which led me down the rabbit hole of Russian hacking communities that backport software to win7, which is amazing to see that there's this isolated modding community on the internet that uses hardcore win7 modded variants, with self-built firewall software, backported hash file databases for antivirus tools etc.
[1] https://win7sp2.neocities.org/
[2] https://sdi-tool.org/
[3] https://driverpacks.net/
[4] https://driveroff.net/
The worst is that today, if you associate Icon files with an icon editor, Icons suddenly lose their ability to display themselves, and instead turn into pictures of the associated application!
But that didn't get you through the installer... I discovered a plethora of alternative install media with built in community drivers providing support for nvme drives, modern ACPI extensions etc.
It's so complete you can install it on today's current hardware.
This still gets me as I vividly remember when the family computer was finally going to move past Windows 98 in 2001.
My first reaction was "that's an absolutely insane amount of drivers", but then I realised that some GPU and printer drivers are already around 1GB.
How much of the Nvidia driver is just GFE?
It's also nifty when I need to slap hardware drivers into a Windows 11 ISO on the fly to bring up a new machine.
Everything works fine and fast; Office 2003 was peak Office (last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated, which, for such a brilliant idea supposed to revolutionize productivity applications, is a bit strange?); browsers won't update to Manifest V3 so uBlock Origin runs along smoothly; most VST plugins released recently, are compatible with Win7 and those that aren't, usually are bad and bloated.
Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
I have a much newer PC running Ubuntu, but it's just not as good — lots of little annoying details; and a bit unstable.
Apparently I'm not alone ;)
I still find the classic menus (with full menus always on) easier to quickly parse than looking at all those icons stretching through the entire width of the window.
Edit: also if you're looking for a lightweight note taking app, try OneNote 2003/2007. Uses 8-32 MB of RAM which was a lot back then but today isn't nothing.
This is a crazy irrelevant example. Why would you expect any other OS to act differently? CPU fans connect with a 4-pin header, it's not like switching out a major component of your system.
I've kept the various versions of other software on the machine static, along with the OS. For what I use it for it's very pleasant to use. Muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts that I've built-up over the nearly 15 years I've been using the machine isn't disrespected by developers introducing change for change's sake. Nothing moves around on its own. Nothing changes without my approval. I really like it.
(The physical machine itself is a Ship of Theseus. It's a Dell laptop that has had some combination of donor screens, keyboards, motherboards, batteries, and disks over the years. I really appreciate that, too. The Latitude machines of its era are really easily disassembled and serviced.)
Other than, I dunno, Explorer, Paint, WordPad, Visual Studio, Dynamics, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Live Writer, SQL Server Report Builder, Mathematics, and then some.
What other applications were you expecting them to add it to?
Isn't the modern (Windows 10, don't know about 11) file explorer UI a "ribbon" UI?
You don't know how terrible Windows 11 is until you start going backwards, peeling off layers of the onion. Once you're back to XP/2000, you're like..oh shit. People spent years thinking about how this would all work. And it's crazy fast. Windows snap into place almost instantly. Sure, search doesn't work, but search doesn't work on Windows 11 reliably either.
Everything you actually need to work? Works better and faster in the old stuff. When I remote into those machines even the remote session feels faster. How does a Windows XP machine running on a 733mhz machine from the last century feel faster at navigating windows and settings and launching programs than my 3k dollar workstation from last year?
Corporate users of Windows 7 still get updates, and there's somebody in Ukraine who redistributes these updates, or at least the digital certificate signing the updates says they live there: https://blog.simplix.info/update7/
Come to think of it, I guess and hope the info in certificate is outdated, and they're living somewhere outside of fear of Putin's bombs.
Are they planning to add support for perMonitorv2? High DPI is the only thing that makes Windows 10/11 better than 7.
I like the Windows 7 theme much better than later versions, though.
And especially graphics glitches. Like a half-opacity lock screen sometimes being drawn on top of everything for several seconds after unlocking.