Unofficial Windows 7 Service Pack 2
github.com260 points by XzetaU8 a month ago
260 points by XzetaU8 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.
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!
Not bad for an XFCE mod, but falls under the “rough facsimile” category I mentioned.
:-D Can't deny that. I have not tried it myself. (Possibly "yet".)
I did try Wubuntu.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/wubuntu/
Not good.
it is the other way around. ms copied heavily from what people where doing with compiz and gnome 2 back in the day
No... get the timing and the attribution right.
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.
i did not know about quartz but compiz was not the only 3d compositor iirc xcompmgr which became compton was older
I am not claiming Compiz was first. It's just the one I still use so it happens to spring to my mind. (My own laptops run Ubuntu with the Unity desktop.)
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 thought probably sgi would have done something but it turns out it was amiga lol
The Amiga did not have hardware 3D at all, so I doubt that.
Hmmmm.
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."
>AmigaOS is small but everything runs in ring 0.
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...
OK, I concede. :-)
I would suggest a few hours of open source work on Amiga stuff as penance :^)
OMG, please no!
Look, I am writing a news story about the release of update 3 for Amiga OS 3.2.2 -- is that enough?
That's just sad news, a reminder that AmigaOS still isn't Open Source, and that the ownership drama[0] isn't settled.
It really is.
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.
IMHO, what's important for Windows 7 is the established userbase and all the hardware that's already running on Windows 7, not it's UI.
Maybe, but there’s no reason why a thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone DE on a lightweight Linux couldn’t run just as well or better on the same hardware.
> but there’s no reason why a thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone DE on a lightweight Linux
Why not a "thoughtfully engineered Win7 clone Desktop Environment" (without Linux :-) ). By the way: people are working on ReactOS:
Your opinion. Win 7 was the best Windows UI, both in looks (Aero) and usability. It was abandoned primarily because Microsoft was trying to achieve some hybrid desktop/tablet/mobile UI that worked poorly for all form factors. Win 11+ (or whatever the next version is called) would be well-suited to return to an Aero-like UI.
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.
> retro XP game machine
This still gets me as I vividly remember when the family computer was finally going to move past Windows 98 in 2001.
This capability exists in large part because large parts of heavy industry still run on software that only runs (right) on XP.
Care to share sources for those alternative media with modern drivers?
Likely the "XP Integral Edition" that is updated every now and again
https://zone94.com/software/operating-systems/123-windows-xp...
a 44GB torrent with all kinds of drivers, from SATA controllers to NIC to GPU
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.
I didn't know what's in that package/torrent but those 1gb drivers are drivers AND applications which are frequently not required at all.
How much of the Nvidia driver is just GFE?
GFE and its replacement "nVidia App" are bloated and large, but the drivers themselves are still 600-900MBs each.
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.
I've been using https://www.ntlite.com/ for a while now for various custom/integration needs at home. Well worth it.
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.
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
God I wish I could replace Windows 11 with Windows 7
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.
Ok, you're right, it's irrelevant to a discussion about the OS; the point I was trying to make is that this old machine is robust, it can be taken apart, completely, and screwed back together, and still work fine. Not all machines can do that.
But that's not inherently some property of it being an old machine. One could have an ancient machine where that's nearly impossible to do with proprietary fan sizes and headers and have a machine built yesterday which is easy to do.
Just the other month I replaced my laptop battery (not removable but easily done), fans, repasted the cpu and cleaned out the heat sink.
It gave a 5 year old laptop a completely new lease of life.
Nothing you're describing is unusual.
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?
Anything not made by Microsoft?
I've seen a number of applications especially around that time move to ribbon or ribbon-like UIs. Pretty much all of Corel's apps moved to a ribbon. Redgate tools. Solidworks. AutoCAD. Foxit PDF. NitroPDF. Lots of healthcare apps like Epic. I dunno, I've probably seen several dozens more odd domain specific software suites with it over the decades. I've also seen a lot of in-house custom apps made with the ribbon UI toolkit.
What version(s) of Corel's apps used the ribbon? Not CorelDraw 2024 according to this screenshot:
https://www.coreldraw.com/static/cdgs/product_content/cdgs/e...
(I'm a happy user of CorelDraw X7 on my Win7 machine ;-)
> last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated
Isn't the modern (Windows 10, don't know about 11) file explorer UI a "ribbon" UI?
Of sorts. Not a full ribbon like in Office.
Windows 8 and 10 have a real ribbon, Windows 11 went back to a normal toolbar.
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 use win64devkit on Windows Vista. Modern and up to date devkit and at the same time very lean, portable and practical. https://nullprogram.com/blog/2021/03/11/
Motherboard is from 2009, is on every day, sometimes stays on for a week. Not one problem so far; not sure what I would do if it failed though!
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'm willing to bet if you put modern SSDs in old computers people would prefer Office 2003 to modern Office.
Office 2003 on spinning rust launches and completes tasks faster than modern Office on brand new machines with NVME drives.
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.
How modern can you go with XP? Would you have to do weird adapters/emulators to get a full install working?
Someone up thread mentioned that there's a WinXP image available that has a ton of back ported drivers and things baked in for NVME support and modern chipsets. So...pretty darn modern I think!
I certainly wouldn't, the ribbon has much better discoverability than tiny toolbars. And Office 2003 performed reasonably well with HDDs anyway.
It really was the peak of Windows in terms of usability, aesthetics, and speed.
That was Windows 2000.
I'll split hairs and go w/ Windows Server 2003. It has all the XP kernel improvements, very little bloat, but sticks with a mostly Windows 2000 visual style. I ran it as a daily driver on a Thinkpad back in the 2004 - 2010 timeframe and really enjoyed it.
If you haven't heard about it already I think you'd be interested in the [ReactOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Development) project which has been working on building an OS that is binary compatible with Windows Server 2003 while being GPL licensed. It's far from daily drivable but it's a fascinating little project.
YES, Windows Server 2003R2 was the best version of Windows ever. I worked with it professionally for about 8 years, if you just used MS software on it (exchange sql server etc) that thing NEVER crashed, when we deployed a 2003R2 (as opposed to a 2008/2008R2) we referred to it as deploying the VMS (openVMS).
BTW: However, i never used the 2003 64-bit version.
Nothing stops you from using the classic theme on XP, and conversely, you can enable the eye-candy themes on 2003.
There was a 64bit XP around this timeframe as well and can use the classic theme.
Windows XP 64-bit is based on the Server 2003 code, funnily enough. My old ThinkPad didn't have a 64-bit CPU so I couldn't use it.
XP 64 was kinda good but crippled by poor driver support and thus stability issues.
You could disable most useless services back then so it could be even faster.
At first, sure. But then, with all the service packs it became all but unusable on the computers on which it came preinstalled and used to run fine.
There was just 1 service pack for w7 and I've never noticed it making the system work slower.
I meant “updates.” The same happened to Windows 2000. Lean and fast at first, it turned itself into a hog.
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.
However, what about a risk that someone in Ukraine is adding a little bit of malware in it?
Same risk as any other country, huh?
of course not
Because?..
because we live in the real world, not some egalitarian fantasy
You might elaborate, but you chose to spill nonsense. I see no difference in that department, a hacker might live anywhere.
would he live in a place where nobody has access to the internet or electricity? Or where most people lack basic skills, i.e. cannot solve simple math problems or answer basic questions?
I don’t understand your reasoning. Are there many countries like that? Why would Ukraine (not even Russia) mean something fishy? As if, say, the US or UK person cannot be fishy. Some super-rural place like Africa is simply irrelevant here, I believe.
> 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.
Maybe you're unaware of actual improvements made since Windows 7, such as swap/pagefile memory compression.
Or security improvements.
It's telling that all these improvements are eclipsed in users' minds by the worsening of the actual experience of using it. That's how despised the UI changes are.
I don't really see why the UI is despised. Windows 8 was bad, 10 brought sanity mostly back, and 11 is in a good state now IMO.
I feel the exact opposite.
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.
> 11 is simply trying to be MacOS
Not even. You can position the "Dock" on the side of the screen in MacOS.
Took a few years after Windows 11 was released, but FWIW you can now have a taskbar item for each window. It's in the Taskbar Settings -> Taskbar behaviors -> "Combine taskbar buttons and hide labels".
I also waited until that was an option, it was a total deal-breaker for me. But it's working quite nicely now.
Win11 default to middle taskbar is not based on macOS, it's based on Chrome OS. Which is far more popular than macOS and a serious competitor to Windows and what kids are learning on these days.
In any case it can be changed to the default far left corner in settings easily.
11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.
They can pry my vertical taskbar from my cold dead hands
If you're ever forced to use W11, ExplorerPatcher will let you rollback the taskbar to windows 10 and move it to the sides.
TIL you can't move it to the sides any more in Windows 11, wild. Just one more reason for me to stay on Windows 10 no matter the forced-obsolescence schedule.
I'm pretty old now; if I knew who made that decision and that they were coming to my country, I'd flip a coin on the risk of prison time for punching them unconscious.
Regarding missing features: Is anyone around here who has found an alternative to the original “quick launch toolbar”?
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.
Honestly I'm surprised MS hasn't done more with the great dockable interface UI tech they built for for Visual Studio a few decades ago, and also gradually adopted by Adobe Photoshop and every other productivity application. I don't know if MS invented it but they definitely mastered it well in oldschool VS.
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".
that's why there's still two completly different UI for managing settings? With some settings available in an UI done in the new, flat style and the old control panel that's still there?
> 11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.
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.
> 11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.
Why my rectangle window has round corners ? Where is the scrollbar ? /s
I also chuckle every time I need to resize window by dragging an imaginary intersection of tangents to that rounded corner of some apps, that’s just hilarious.
the thing that I remember the most about Windows 8 is that someone decided that a live graph of file copying speed is a feature.
Isn't it?
Not if it isn't moving.
That one felt more like entertainment to keep people distracted since they couldn't get copying up to a reasonable speed.
It's not an entertainment, it gives more info than just a single stat "estimated time".
linux community is a nerdy bunch and you don't see that in any linux distribution, it's useless even to the nerds with computer stats constantly on display.
As a Linux user - I'd welcome such a feature. Linux is a poor UI landmark, regardless of how nerdy its users are.
Mind that copying files on linux tends to be much faster too, especially once you're copying many small files.
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.
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
You could take a look at Windows Server 2012. It's 8 and has ESUs until Oct 2026.
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.
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.
> Windows 8 build 7861's PDF Reader
Was not aware there ever was a Win32 desktop PDF reader shipped by Microsoft.
Ah, if there’s one thing you should run very outdated versions of, it’s a PDF reader. Can I get a TIFF reader last updated in 2010 to go along with it?
Same. I only ever saw, and still do, PDFs by default opening in Edge.
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.
>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.
But surely that relies on a bunch of “UWP” and Windows 8 APIs? The screenshots I managed to find make it look very much like it relies on the Metro UWP garbage.
Windows 8 shipped with build 8400 (apparently), so I assume this PDF reader is pre-UWP rewrite from one of the early Windows “8” builds, that were mostly Windows 7.
As far as I could tell/recall the Windows 8 Reader app was always a thin wrapper around Edge (Spartan) (which is also when it broke, when Edge switched to Chromium). I suppose it is possible it worked with Trident (IE11), too, or the "Service Pack" includes some version of Edge (Spartan), which would have been all the hard work on that, though that isn't listed.
7861 was a fairly early build of Windows 8, compiled in 2010 [1]. In the sreenshots it looks more like Windows 7 than Windows 8, so maybe it predated the full Metro implementation?
I don't see anything resembling an actual release, just a bunch of files in a repo...?
I nearly replied, "RTFM." Given the README says you can either use the ISO or the packaged release found within the repository's releases...except...
There are no releases (no installation executable, nor ISO).
The README does make it clear that it's a work in progress though.
Oh, this is such a wonderful thing. Hope it can support a minimal, secure version of a modern browser.
