Unofficial Windows 7 Service Pack 2

github.com

260 points by XzetaU8 a month ago


cookiengineer - a month ago

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.

[1] https://win7sp2.neocities.org/

[2] https://sdi-tool.org/

[3] https://driverpacks.net/

[4] https://driveroff.net/

mdaniel - a month ago

https://github.com/i486girl/win7-sp2/blob/main/LICENSE is pretty rich, given that the whole repo is just a bazillion binary files from Microsoft

apatheticonion - a month ago

God I wish I could replace Windows 11 with Windows 7

netsharc - a month ago

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Come to think of it, I guess and hope the info in certificate is outdated, and they're living somewhere outside of fear of Putin's bombs.

vintagedave - a month ago

> Better DPI support in aero.msstyles -> Credits: Vaporvance (high DPI classes from Aero10 that will be ported to Windows 7)

Are they planning to add support for perMonitorv2? High DPI is the only thing that makes Windows 10/11 better than 7.

MisterTea - a month ago

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.

hxorr - a month ago

Anything like this for Windows 8? I know most people's favourite is 7, but I prefer 8 as it is very lightweight, and performs well on older PCs

BearOso - a month ago

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.

moon2 - a month ago

Comes in handy. I was doing PS3 hacking a few months ago and most of the tools that were made for that work better on Windows 7. My main computer is an M3 Macbook Pro.

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.

hard_times - a month ago

> Windows 8 build 7861's PDF Reader

Was not aware there ever was a Win32 desktop PDF reader shipped by Microsoft.

CamperBob2 - a month ago

I don't see anything resembling an actual release, just a bunch of files in a repo...?

- a month ago
[deleted]
zkmon - a month ago

Oh, this is such a wonderful thing. Hope it can support a minimal, secure version of a modern browser.