With the introduction of a bunch of pervasive telemetry and spam following the releases after Microsoft Windows 7, many users have chosen to stay behind on Windows 7 in the hopes of upgrading at a later date when the espionage might be purged from Windows.

Even without any official support, Windows 7 still survives as a very simple and stable operating system that is highly performant on modern hardware. Due to intentional software-based planned obsolescence and the pitch for Windows 10 systems, some things stop working and alternatives have to be found.

This document details surviving on Windows 7, along with the required patches and popular alternatives that will allow a user to still run Windows 7, whilst still being able to be productive and using the tools of the trade that sometimes seem more important to be used than the work itself.

Starting with a fresh install of Windows 7, possibly Windows 7 Enterprise, the following section details some of the milestones involved in setting up Windows 7 for the first time. After installing Windows 7 and trying to update to the latest KB, there will be issues given that Windows 7 contains an old certificate chain that will make the SSL connection to the Windows update server impossible. There are workarounds like installing some KB updates manually and only then trying the built in-update. It is first recommended to update Windows 7 to the latest KB update and then work backwards by stripping unnecessary bloat or telemetry.

Even Windows 7 has a lot of telemetry added but fortunately a lot of it can be just removed, for example using a heavily curated list of updates that can be removed. The list will remove some of the more sketchy updates and it does not seem to remove or hinder any of the performance. For example, the Direct2D patch for browsers is kept and some of the "recommended" removals are disabled because they have been deemed to be harmless or to hurt performance.

One recent effort has been to backport newer Windows API routines to Windows 7 which makes a bunch of applications available on Windows 7. Lots of applications that use Electron (a web-based UI framework) can be made to work on Windows 7 using VxKex even though there is no official support for Windows 7. VxKex is worth installing and also worth giving a try in case an application or game cannot run on Windows 7 but ultimately the best solution is to downgrade the application to the last version that supported Windows 7.

The next move would be to remove all meltdown and spectre mitigations, in particular on an end-user computer because the sum total of patches roughly set performance back on older architectures by a whooping that is unaffordable and not a proper resolution. It is hardly likely that this hardware-level technique will be used by an attacker and even if, an antivirus will be ran in the background to ensure that any malware, virii and other nuisances are dealt with.

With that said, the last stage of the setup involves setting up an antivirus and right about any choice will be alright.

Software planned-obsolescence affects gaming the most and since the release of Windows 10, as well as the work performed on Windows 11, we've seen some of the non-demanding games be released with an extraneous requirement demanding to be run on Windows versions above Windows 7, even though the graphics or the rest of the realization of the game does not seem to warrant an upgrade of the base operating system. There are lots of indie games, or even brand games that add little in terms of graphics performance compared to games that could run on Windows 7 (for example GTAV) and yet require Windows 10 onward to be installed.

Unfortunately there is no easy solution to this one and in the past there has been an effort to bring virtualization up to speed in terms of GPU usage, with the notable mention of Parallels on MacOSX, but the whole movement seems to have been politically unsuccessful with GPU virtualization never reaching its full potential (ie: being able to work at passthrough speeds).

With that said, as well as considering the fast-paced planned obsolescence that games are responsible for (via their graphics SDKs, like DirectX), and the bad support for GPUs from virtualization software, it is suggested to just get a separate computer for gaming, one that can be adjusted as necessary for whatever superfluous requirements game releases might come up next with, whilst maintaining the work computer separately. It is also clear that pirating will be expected such that the security threat brought in with downloading games would warrant a different machine. Furthermore, due to being in the golden era of espionage, game companies have started extracting data wholesale from players, even in terms of multiplayer games via the usage of anti-cheat software that is more or less just an excuse for espionage, such that, just like pirating and malware, it might not be desirable to mix a work machine with a machine just meant to play games.

If the hardware available is well-performing, software development can be virtualized properly in order to access .NET frameworks or Windows APIs that would not be available on Windows 7 anymore. Development software like Visual Studio is really RAM and CPU bound such that given sufficient RAM and spare CPU cycles, a virtual machine could host all the development needed. Similarly, some environments, like Android development, are typically very messy, requiring various software to be installed the non-standard way with plenty of files sprawled allover the operating system such that the context separation of virtualization is more than warranted.

For virtualization, VMWare seems to work the best on Windows 7 and has a fairly robust virtualization stack that can be used to run a development machine. One trick is to use VMWare and run the actual storage on NVME because VMWare supports using a physical disk, which makes the virtualization blazing fast in particular when the only requirement is to run a program like Visual Studio.

Google also participates in software planned-obsolescence without actually offering something too compensatory that would warrant an operating system upgrade in particular when it comes down to browsers. Even the Mozilla foundation participates in the planned-obsolescence by refusing to maintain backward compatibility even though followup browser versions do not offer anything special that would, yet again, warrant an operating system upgrade.

As an example, up to the current date, all these browsers only really supported H.264 as a codec and only very recently has the Mozilla foundation negotiated to include a H.265 codec as well, such that visible progress on these browsers has been less than stellar over more than a decade.

With that being said, here are some alternatives that work well:

• Thorium is a Chrome/ Chromium fork with accent placed on optimizations that works great as a replacement for Google Chrome,
• Mercury is a Firefox fork with accent placed on optimizations that is a good replacement for Firefox

Both of the former are updated such that the very small changes that websites make to their layout using newer web development paradigms will be accounted for, while at the same time benefiting from various optimizations what will make the browsers much faster as well as decoupling from Google, respectively Mozilla foundation for the sake of privacy.

The browsers listed currently natively support x264 videos which means that a good practice is to search, download and encode every video to x264 in order to ensure playback support in the browser. We even went as far as to have a command that represents a lowest-common denominator of parameters to FFMpeg that re-encodes video clips to x264 in order to allow native playback in the browsers. Note that "native" support means that the video can be played back directly by the browser without the server that is making the video available having to transcode the video. Conversely, playing any codec that is not natively supported, will make the website that is offering the video have to convert or transcode the video on the fly into a video format that the browser will understand. Alas, transcoding takes place on the server and the local graphics card, even if powerful, cannot do much about the situation yet, of course, when playing the video clip as a file, the local graphics card will take over and will be able to convert the video, which is what the media codecs are for and there is a good support for them on Windows 7.

Given that one of the main uses of computers is "media", whether that implies listening to music or watching movies, media support on Windows 7 is easy to both boost in terms of support as well as perhaps cover more than ulterior versions of Windows can cover by using codecs like the K-Lite Codec Pack. The K-Lite codec pack will make Windows support right about any media format natively as well as offer the old "Media Player Classic" media player that has been updated and modernized. "Media Player Classic" with the codec pack is able to ply right about any media as well as handle the playback of CDs, DVDs and others, as outdated as they may be.

As an alternative, if need be, the VLC media player still supports Windows 7 but it seems a lesser solution with some red flags raised over recent years, such as guilt-tripping donation schemes, extracurricular activities that make the software look like an excuse for politics and some other scandals that did not put VLC in a good light. Nevertheless it is self-standing solution that works well in itself.

Windows 7 supports a combination of Adobe CC that mixes some 2019 and releases 2020 with some distributions available that provide the latest supported just for Windows 7 and even if pirating for some is a sin, it might be the only way to obtain the latest versions supported by Windows 7. Arguably this should be enough given that progress in the Adobe CC is far from exponential in terms of releases such that all versions are more or less the same. However, there are some quirks that can't be helped, for instance, Premiere Pro supports only a certain number of codecs such that newer video recordings might require some conversion between being opened in Premiere Pro.

The most recent Office suite supported is the 2016 release and it covers most features typical to the Microsoft Office suite such that it should be sufficient. There are some quirks however, for example, Google and others have started to eliminate user access via IMAP and SMTP in favor of using web-based authentication and their own E-Mail accessing API such that Microsoft Outlook will not be able to set up a Google E-Mail account. Workarounds exist, along the lines of creating a proxy bridge that translates regular SMTP and IMAP to whatever Google is using in order to provide backward compatibility to Outlook.

Due to Microsoft Outlook not working, the second most-complete E-Mail client is Thunderbird, which is regrettable because it is an under-performing mess of a client ridden with bugs and unexplained slowdowns for heavy E-Mail usage.

YMMV but BlueSoleil seems to be the best well-behaving Bluetooth stack on Windows 7, even if other stacks like Toshiba seem more complete and pipelined in terms of features, BlueSoleil works the best by implementing Bluetooth services properly. For example, with Toshiba it is impossible to automatically reconnect with Stereo Headphones and reconnecting requires a repair of the devices.

For less-critical software, the following table should provide a reference point to the last or best working version of software for various software packages. Suspiciously, many software companies or organizations have obsessively removed versions that were supported on Windows 7, almost to the point of appearing suspicious given that they already do have a backlog of past versions that work on Windows 7. As versions are discovered, they should be mentioned here.