Unofficial Windows 7 Service Pack 2

cookiengineer · 2025-03-23T05:31:08 1742707868

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/

cosmic_cheese · 2025-03-26T17:52:01 1743011521

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 fixiable without forking) and I think that’s enough to prevent many users from considering Linux as a viable alternative.

userbinator · 2025-03-26T17:59:27 1743011967

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.

AndrewDavis · 2025-03-23T09:40:43 1742722843

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.

FirmwareBurner · 2025-03-23T10:41:12 1742726472

Care to share sources for those alternative media with modern drivers?

kotaKat · 2025-03-23T13:35:34 1742736934

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.

hxorr · 2025-03-24T05:06:33 1742792793

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

Sunspark · 2025-03-26T17:51:52 1743011512

You could take a look at Windows Server 2012. It's 8 and has ESUs until Oct 2026.

mdaniel · 2025-03-23T16:46:41 1742748401

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 · 2025-03-22T22:09:23 1742681363

God I wish I could replace Windows 11 with Windows 7

sylens · 2025-03-23T01:33:23 1742693603

It really was the peak of Windows in terms of usability, aesthetics, and speed.

Koshkin · 2025-03-23T14:51:57 1742741517

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.

imcritic · 2025-03-26T17:51:15 1743011475

There was just 1 service pack for w7 and I've never noticed it making the system work slower.

netsharc · 2025-03-23T00:11:42 1742688702

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 · 2025-03-23T01:44:24 1742694264

> 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.

Rohansi · 2025-03-23T05:35:01 1742708101

Maybe you're unaware of actual improvements made since Windows 7, such as swap/pagefile memory compression.

nsonha · 2025-03-24T10:23:35 1742811815

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.

imcritic · 2025-03-26T17:52:18 1743011538

Isn't it?

FirmwareBurner · 2025-03-23T10:52:28 1742727148

Or security improvements.

thrtythreeforty · 2025-03-23T13:28:40 1742736520

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.

Rohansi · 2025-03-23T15:50:46 1742745046

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.

Sohcahtoa82 · 2025-03-24T17:21:55 1742836915

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.

pathartl · 2025-03-23T17:49:54 1742752194

11 is almost way more consistent in its UI. I'd even go as far as to say it's better than 7's.

Pxtl · 2025-03-24T04:25:18 1742790318

They can pry my vertical taskbar from my cold dead hands

hulitu · 2025-03-23T17:59:56 1742752796

> 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

hard_times · 2025-03-22T18:48:54 1742669334

> Windows 8 build 7861's PDF Reader

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

smileybarry · 2025-03-24T05:26:14 1742793974

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?

MortyWaves · 2025-03-22T19:46:41 1742672801

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.

gruez · 2025-03-22T23:32:46 1742686366

>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.

MortyWaves · 2025-03-23T11:05:25 1742727925

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.

smileybarry · 2025-03-24T05:25:08 1742793908

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.

CamperBob2 · 2025-03-22T22:54:45 1742684085

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

wrayjustin · 2025-03-22T23:49:19 1742687359

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.

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