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Comment by bittercynic | Hacker News Reader

They say no downside, but if you need to run windows 7 in virtualbox, you still need an intel mac (or other non-arm computer).

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Windows 7 is sixteen years old. There are full x86 emulators available. Seems like a niche pursuit.

I have an old card printer that I only use occasionally, and firing up a windows 7 virtual machine is (was?) the most convenient way to do it. I think it's not so uncommon to have old devices around that don't work with newer versions of windows.

Perhaps a Macbook is now fast enough to just run Windows 7 in full emulation? Haven't tried, though.

Edit: Checked on Youtube. Yeah, Windows 7 seems to be fast enough on an Apple silicon Macbook in full emulated mode. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9zqfv54CzI

I don’t think that use case is worth designing a computer for in 2025

I have an old 2019 MBP running Windows 10 for old gaming

Today I was testing an x64 msi installer and app in a Windows ARM VM on UTM and it worked just fine with the Windows built-in emulation.

Windows ARM?! Make article about it

So it was with PowerPC, Sparc, SGI CPUs, and a bunch of older now obsolete architectures. I don't think we should be limiting the technological potential to keep old Windows drivers afloat, and they weren't native to the platform to begin with. You can always get a PC and virtualize Windows 7 just fine.

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