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Come to think of it, I guess and hope the info in certificate is outdated, and they're living somewhere outside of fear of Putin's bombs.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