Unofficial Windows 7 Service Pack 2
github.com
github.com
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.
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.
https://zone94.com/software/operating-systems/123-windows-xp...
This still gets me as I vividly remember when the family computer was finally going to move past Windows 98 in 2001.
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.
Why not a "thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone Desktop Environment" (without Linux :-) ). By the way: people are working on ReactOS:
Both Vista's Aero compositor (not 7) and Compiz copied from Apple Quartz Extreme.
Apple worked out how to use a 3D accelerator to speed up a 2D GUI.
Quartz Extreme was first released in Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002.
Vista and Compiz were both 2006.
As far as know, Apple invented the concept of a display compositor using 3D hardware. If anyone has prior art from before 2002 I'd love to know.
I am not sure I personally consider that closely enough related to count.
It often seems to me that even today Amiga fans are so passionate about the machine that they make rather exaggerated claims that do not really stand up.
For instance in many places I have read the claim that AmigaOS was a microkernel OS, or closely-related claims such as that it was the first widespread microkernel, or the first GUI microkernel, and so on.
The point of a microkernel is that only the microkernel runs in kernel space (in x86 terms, in Ring 0) and the rest of the OS is divided into multiple "servers" which run in user space (again in x86 terms, in ring 2 to 3). This in turn brings a problem, which is how to make comms between the microkernel and the servers fast. IPC is the big problem and that is what microkernel OSes struggle with, which has shaped the design of Mach, XNU, L4, seL4 etc.
AmigaOS is small but everything runs in ring 0. There is no division and so there is no need for tricky performance-critical IPC and all processes can read and write each others' RAM. That makes it (1) easy (2) fast (3) not a microkernel.
I would regard direct blitting into 2D windows as not unique, not the first such implementation, and not the same as 3D compositing.
"Methinks milady doth protest too much."
Not accurate.
In AmigaOS, everything runs in unprivileged mode, except for some specific critical code within exec.library which runs in supervisor mode or interrupt mode.
What's true is that exec.library does offer a call to run code as supervisor[0], and that there's no memory protection.
0. http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodo...
Look, I am writing a news story about the release of update 3 for Amiga OS 3.2.2 -- is that enough?
FWIW I am also linking to AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS...
I wish "Notch" Persson or some other billionaire nerd would just buy the things and declare the whole lot freeware. There surely cannot be much residual value to extract any more.
I did try Wubuntu.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/wubuntu/
Not good.
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!
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?
That "optimized for Game X" thing where GFE/nVidia App brags that the driver has all sorts of custom relationships with all the recent exciting games is strangely literal in most cases because the drivers include a frankly wild amount of application/game-specific microcode/optimizations.
BTW: However, i never used the 2003 64-bit version.
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.
Isn't the modern (Windows 10, don't know about 11) file explorer UI a "ribbon" UI?
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.
It gave a 5 year old laptop a completely new lease of life.
Nothing you're describing is unusual.
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?
https://www.coreldraw.com/static/cdgs/product_content/cdgs/e...
(I'm a happy user of CorelDraw X7 on my Win7 machine ;-)
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.)
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.
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?
On that 733mhz machine with Office 2003, Excel will be open within a few seconds if I double click on it--if you move up to a 1ghz+ machine it opens up so fast it might as well be instant.
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.
Why my rectangle window has round corners ? Where is the scrollbar ? /s
I mean the ‘real’ one which was introduced in Windows 95 - up to Windows 8 (IIRC), which could be separated from the Taskbar and be docked at any side of the desktop, horizontally or vertically, and could also be stacked in both directions.
Let me dock/add-to-tabbed-pane/split-dock-into-multiple-panes and have the autohide/pin toggle for any window attached to any any edge of the screen, and make the Taskbar and the Quicklaunch and the Start Button just another set of Pane Windows, just with enforcement that (where appropriate) they cannot be closed or otherwise removed from the active screens, with a redundant always-accessible explorer rclick-context entry just in case you've somehow completely lost them.
Then make "maximize" mean "join the central pane as a new tab".
Yeah no. Enable full-width taskbar icons (like the Windows XP style wide ones) and notice how each one of them is of a different width. It's just terrible, it's almost like someone told an intern who's never used anything prior to Windows 7 to design it.
7 was the peak. 8 was awful because it tried to be both a desktop OS and a tablet OS. 10 doubled-down on the flatness that I despise. 11 is simply trying to be MacOS, which is a massive bug, not a feature. I use Windows because it's not MacOS.
Personally, I use WindowBlinds on my Win10 PC to skin it to look like Win7. I love the grey taskbar with items that look like 3D buttons. Most of all, I much prefer that if I have 3 Firefox windows open, then I should have 3 Firefox items on my task bar. I should be able to switch windows in a single click.
When I'm eventually forced to downgrade to Windows 11, I'll have to buy the new WindowBlinds11 and Start11 to bring back the UX that I love.
I also waited until that was an option, it was a total deal-breaker for me. But it's working quite nicely now.
Not even. You can position the "Dock" on the side of the screen in MacOS.
In any case it can be changed to the default far left corner in settings easily.
That one felt more like entertainment to keep people distracted since they couldn't get copying up to a reasonable speed.
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.
I tried using Windows 11 but it was so annoying. Not only it is huge, but also Microsoft was able to screw up the Windows OOBE process and overall Windows experience so badly. I don't want to setup a Microsoft account just to run these old programs. I mostly wanted a disposable Windows 7 box but I didn't even know if I would be able to make it work with virtualization (emulation maybe).
Wine actually worked great for me sometimes, but it was a bit of a hassle as well.
Was not aware there ever was a Win32 desktop PDF reader shipped by Microsoft.
I looked into it and I'm even more confused.
https://github.com/i486girl/win7-sp2/blob/1c57943c2e4f5e27e7...
This appears to suggest the appx file will somehow just run on Windows 7 which can't be right.
They extracted the .exe from the appx.
There are no releases (no installation executable, nor ISO).
The README does make it clear that it's a work in progress though.