I miss the magical feeling windows releases like XP and 7 gave you. Now it’s an exercise in crossing your fingers and hoping the next update doesn’t use more dark patterns to destroy your privacy and security.
The problem is virtually defunct regulators inviting all kind of toxic and exploitative behaviour from big corporations. Sure they _do something_, but it is ineffective and more like windows dressing.
I booted into my 7 partition the other day because for whatever reason my frayed 10 partition wouldn't let me run an offline defender scan.
My suggestion is, install Microsoft Security Essentials (you can get a copy of the installer out of archive.org) and definition files are still published for it and are up-to-date. MSE is what became Defender in 10. The Defender in 7 is not the same and doesn't scan for the same things. MSE is needed to replace it.
Congrats on being a parrot in the "oh noes, taken over by bots!" securitah echo chamber.
W7 is just fine. Daily driver on multiple machines, never been "taken over" or turned into a crypto miner or a hub for a bot network, never had a single virus or other issues.
Seriously. Also less and less software is supporting 7. Importantly, Firefox ESR 115 is the last modern browser to support Windows 7 and it's entering EOL after this month[1]; Chrome dropped Windows 7 support in 2023[2].
Right now I wonder if a browser or chrome embedded framework (and then when applications that use it update past the cut-off version) is the 'killer app' that motivates upgrades. The CEF cut-off for win7/8/8.1 was when their extended support periods ended, and presumably they upgraded the underlying SDK they to rely on features not present pre-win10, and presumably oct 2028 (+3 years) is when the same will happen again
Just made dirty hack and be able to run latest LibreOffice 25.8 on Win7 despite official "unsupported status". Save dialog is not working but luckily software is cross platform and has it's native dialog and it can be enabled in options.
that's quite a bold statement. i am doing all my stuff without any problems.
If you check ms bulletin you'll see that quantity of bugs in recent Windows is waaaay above old crony, just see ghacks for comparison. I'm applying patches from 2008R2 which are still coming (till 2026). Having two firewalls, h/w and s/w, all unneeded services are stripped off or disabled. So the chance is slim to none.
I ran into a problem at my new job where TI's typically garbage software doesn't work on Linux, not even inside a windows VM with the USB device passed through.
Though it's hard to tell if it doesn't work because of the VM or if it's just simply broken garbage.
3. You just prefer how it works after being used to it for decades.
Had a Mac through work for a couple of years, so it's not for lack of trying. Also had Ubuntu as main boot for a while.
They are kinda destroying much of what I like, though. As if the Windows designers at MS are all using Macs as their daily driver and want to make it the same. I had to hold off upgrading to Win11 for a while due to the stupid new task bar couldn't ungroup windows. Why continuously hurt power users?
To be honest, I’ve tried to find tutorials for using Linux daily and have come up short. It seems too intimidating or maybe like it will require a lot of fiddling unless you’re a software engineer.
Honestly, I can’t say I ever had that magical feeling.
In the 90s, it was more a case of “let’s see how much more system resource this new OS will consume when idle”. And the 00s was that and “let’s see how much more stupid this OS treats me”.
By the time 7 came and MS started taking resource consumption seriously, I’d already given up on Windows completely and had been using desktop Linux full time for several years.
I do have a Windows 10 floating about for gaming. But it’s really more of a chore to use than a joy. Albeit only because I seldom boot into Windows so I have to plan ahead to compensate for the two hours of system and application updates needed before Minecraft (Bedrock edition) will even start. A chore that’s hard to explain to my kids who, understandably, expect things to “just work”.
any particular reason you're on bedrock instead of java? don't you get both versions when you buy the game? i bought mine when java was the only version and i think they gave me bedrock for free when that came out. or is it because of the lack of crossplay? just curious
That’s a fair question. You’re right about the crossplay part. Kids have consoles, which only support Bedrock. So if I want to play with them, then I need to play Bedrock too.
Which is a pity because, like yourself, I first played the Java edition too.
As an aside, I think Bedrock is the only version that supports VR. I don’t play VR Minecraft often, but sometimes it’s fun. Albeit only for about 15 minutes, then the motion sickness kicks in (curiously it’s the only VR game I’ve played that does give me motion sickness)
My kids play minecraft Java on a raspberry pi and I set up a server running GeyserMC so their friends on tablets could play with them. I'm still deeply annoyed that MS seems to want to kill off Java though.
If you do, have a look at CoreProtect and whitelisting the users you want to be able to play.
The kids already have Nintendo Switches. A raspberry pi wouldn’t be practical and they’d never want to use it when everything else is on the Switch.
We also have our own Microsoft servers. It’s pretty easy to set up a Bedrock server. Though most of the time the kids just host their own on their Switch.
CoreProtect isn’t really needed because they know not to visit public servers and ransoms can’t join our private servers even if they wanted to.
i've got possible good news for you then, there's a project that adds a translation layer between the two server protocols[0]. it has some limitations dealing with the different quirks and features that differ between both games[1], but it looks like everything else works fine. you could try that out if you find it to be a better option than wrangling with windows updates
as for VR, there's a third party mod for java[2], i tried it a couple years back and it felt pretty smooth, had no issues with it, but i don't have a point of reference to compare it to bedrock VR because i never tried it
I tried bedrock cause I heard it was written in C++, but it somehow ended up running worse than the Java version. Weird lag spikes and constant glitches. (Also the UI is written in JavaScript?)
Then when I ran a Windows 10 debloater, it deleted Bedrock because it was a PWA, and it turns out Bedrock stores the world files inside the application folder, so the world got deleted too.
I remember staying up late on a school night to grab a beta iso for windows 7 because they were (supposed to) limit how many people could download it. That was the last time I ever got excited about a Microsoft product
I'm kind of surprised that Chromium blocks audio on autoplaying videos except when clicked but allows audio on mouseover interactions (encountered here). Takes me back to early 00s era sites with random surprises (in a good way here since its quirkiness is communicated with the design).
there are two audio Easter eggs on the page: Fallout 2 narration if you hover on the header image of the man watching tv from "Brazil" movie and if you hover "Unlisted Retrograde Holdout" text you will hear voice from "Human Traffic"
You won't be able to use more than compatibility modes if any with hardware newer than about 2015, because the drivers were built to a newer kernel ABI. It's great for legacy gaming, I still maintain an install for that purpose, but the idea of using Windows 7 in 2025 for a legitimately compute-bound workload is rather silly. Good heavens, even your disk IO is likely to run at half or less the speed it could!
The aesthetic here slaps, though. The sort of overcooked reheated Geocities fantasy of what I assume an Eastern European teenager would imagine American kids having access to - well, there are two Georgias in the world and I grew up two states over from the other one, and in some ways I think I get it. After all, the rich folks back home lived in their own little world, too. Cobbling together what we could, dreaming of bigger and better...who'd we have believed, telling us then how fondly we would come to look back on those days now?
I'm surprised, but maybe I shouldn't be. And maybe if I put more work into picking a motherboard for a new Windows 7 build, I could even have working USB-C ports! It can't be as hard as a Hackintosh, probably...
Still, it's hard to see Windows excelling at anything but gaming, and if it's possible to get DX12 support on Win 7, I've never been able to find a working explanation of how. Compute loads I already have targets for.
The site disables the scrollbar. I have both "Always show scrollbar" enabled and widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled set to false... disappointing that firefox has poor controls for the user.
Website is tested only in Firefox 115 ESR, RedFox 140 and Supermium 132.
Sorry that you stumbled upon such issue, mouse scrolling should work, at least.
You are also could try smartphone for mobile layout.
Scrollbar is on the wrong side. On Firefox, I use layout.scrollbar.side to set it to the left. Not sure if there's even a way to make it match the browser prefs.
Horribly designed page. Why does everything need to blink? Why is the text so poorly rendered? You can accomplish a retro design while retaining some semblance of readability.
It’s clearly a personal pet project where they’ve heavily leaned, hard, into some creative ways to present traditional documents.
We all complain about dull corporate themes and walled gardens making the web stale. But you can’t have a creative fun web without having the odd site that breaks some readability conventions.
Personally, I’d rather see more personal sites like this and fewer stuff on Medium or using boring React/Vue/whatever themes. But each to their own.
I stayed with Windows 7 a looong time, until there was a (IIRC) JPEG2000 bug which was exploitable via the browser, and the "modern" browsers for Windows 7 were all unpatched. But I guess if I studied this page I can figure out if that bug is still dangerous.
The design is so much cooler than actual 90s websites were. More like the professional titling for a 90s cyberpunk flick like Hackers which was out 30 years ago next month.
I'm doing web projects during my free time. The website is based around Hugo framework, but since Windows 7 support was dropped i continue to maintain it with custom js/scss
And yeah, love this movie, despite it is a bit childish these days.
Note, you can click "plain txt file" near the top to read without flickering:
https://trackerninja.codeberg.page/doc/win7eol.txt
I love the aesthetic of the site, but the flickering titles are just horrible IMO.
Flicker removed
I'm still looking for the ISO download link so I can try it on my spare laptop but I am unsuccessful. The website is really confusing.
https://trackerninja.codeberg.page/menu/_windows/
thank you
I miss the magical feeling windows releases like XP and 7 gave you. Now it’s an exercise in crossing your fingers and hoping the next update doesn’t use more dark patterns to destroy your privacy and security.
You don’t even really have a legitimate reason to hope for those things at this point. It’s just a matter of how much worse MS are going to make it.
The problem is virtually defunct regulators inviting all kind of toxic and exploitative behaviour from big corporations. Sure they _do something_, but it is ineffective and more like windows dressing.
You don't remember the controversies with XP and XPAntiSpy?
In 2025, I can only think of two reasons to use Windows as a primary operating system:
1. You develop Windows software, exclusively to be deployed on Windows.
2. You play games that use kernel-level anti-cheat that are incompatible with Linux.
I am really really happy with Debian+KDE combo.
3. Your employer’s IT team refuses to let you use something else.
At work or at home? At work, I'd argue the employer is mostly using it. Windows's problems are their problems then.
> Windows's problems are their problems then.
Unfortunately, the user bears the masochism of using Windows. The employer gives only the deadlines.
I am having Windows 7 not only at home, but at work also and successfully doing web apps and sites.
I booted into my 7 partition the other day because for whatever reason my frayed 10 partition wouldn't let me run an offline defender scan.
My suggestion is, install Microsoft Security Essentials (you can get a copy of the installer out of archive.org) and definition files are still published for it and are up-to-date. MSE is what became Defender in 10. The Defender in 7 is not the same and doesn't scan for the same things. MSE is needed to replace it.
Congrats on your vulnerable system. I hope you're not doing anything important at all on it.
Congrats on being a parrot in the "oh noes, taken over by bots!" securitah echo chamber.
W7 is just fine. Daily driver on multiple machines, never been "taken over" or turned into a crypto miner or a hub for a bot network, never had a single virus or other issues.
That you know of.
easy enough to tell by merely monitoring traffic flow from suspected machine.
Seriously. Also less and less software is supporting 7. Importantly, Firefox ESR 115 is the last modern browser to support Windows 7 and it's entering EOL after this month[1]; Chrome dropped Windows 7 support in 2023[2].
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-users-windows-7... [2] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7100626
Right now I wonder if a browser or chrome embedded framework (and then when applications that use it update past the cut-off version) is the 'killer app' that motivates upgrades. The CEF cut-off for win7/8/8.1 was when their extended support periods ended, and presumably they upgraded the underlying SDK they to rely on features not present pre-win10, and presumably oct 2028 (+3 years) is when the same will happen again
Just made dirty hack and be able to run latest LibreOffice 25.8 on Win7 despite official "unsupported status". Save dialog is not working but luckily software is cross platform and has it's native dialog and it can be enabled in options.
Who needs 115 ESR? I am running RedFox 140.
that's quite a bold statement. i am doing all my stuff without any problems. If you check ms bulletin you'll see that quantity of bugs in recent Windows is waaaay above old crony, just see ghacks for comparison. I'm applying patches from 2008R2 which are still coming (till 2026). Having two firewalls, h/w and s/w, all unneeded services are stripped off or disabled. So the chance is slim to none.
I ran into a problem at my new job where TI's typically garbage software doesn't work on Linux, not even inside a windows VM with the USB device passed through.
Though it's hard to tell if it doesn't work because of the VM or if it's just simply broken garbage.
3. You just prefer how it works after being used to it for decades.
Had a Mac through work for a couple of years, so it's not for lack of trying. Also had Ubuntu as main boot for a while.
They are kinda destroying much of what I like, though. As if the Windows designers at MS are all using Macs as their daily driver and want to make it the same. I had to hold off upgrading to Win11 for a while due to the stupid new task bar couldn't ungroup windows. Why continuously hurt power users?
> As if the Windows designers at MS are all using Macs as their daily driver and want to make it the same.
I’m 100% sure that some months or years ago, someone working or who worked on the Windows team explained just here on HN that it’s exactly that.
To be honest, I’ve tried to find tutorials for using Linux daily and have come up short. It seems too intimidating or maybe like it will require a lot of fiddling unless you’re a software engineer.
Honestly, I can’t say I ever had that magical feeling.
In the 90s, it was more a case of “let’s see how much more system resource this new OS will consume when idle”. And the 00s was that and “let’s see how much more stupid this OS treats me”.
By the time 7 came and MS started taking resource consumption seriously, I’d already given up on Windows completely and had been using desktop Linux full time for several years.
I do have a Windows 10 floating about for gaming. But it’s really more of a chore to use than a joy. Albeit only because I seldom boot into Windows so I have to plan ahead to compensate for the two hours of system and application updates needed before Minecraft (Bedrock edition) will even start. A chore that’s hard to explain to my kids who, understandably, expect things to “just work”.
any particular reason you're on bedrock instead of java? don't you get both versions when you buy the game? i bought mine when java was the only version and i think they gave me bedrock for free when that came out. or is it because of the lack of crossplay? just curious
That’s a fair question. You’re right about the crossplay part. Kids have consoles, which only support Bedrock. So if I want to play with them, then I need to play Bedrock too.
Which is a pity because, like yourself, I first played the Java edition too.
As an aside, I think Bedrock is the only version that supports VR. I don’t play VR Minecraft often, but sometimes it’s fun. Albeit only for about 15 minutes, then the motion sickness kicks in (curiously it’s the only VR game I’ve played that does give me motion sickness)
My kids play minecraft Java on a raspberry pi and I set up a server running GeyserMC so their friends on tablets could play with them. I'm still deeply annoyed that MS seems to want to kill off Java though.
If you do, have a look at CoreProtect and whitelisting the users you want to be able to play.
The kids already have Nintendo Switches. A raspberry pi wouldn’t be practical and they’d never want to use it when everything else is on the Switch.
We also have our own Microsoft servers. It’s pretty easy to set up a Bedrock server. Though most of the time the kids just host their own on their Switch.
CoreProtect isn’t really needed because they know not to visit public servers and ransoms can’t join our private servers even if they wanted to.
i've got possible good news for you then, there's a project that adds a translation layer between the two server protocols[0]. it has some limitations dealing with the different quirks and features that differ between both games[1], but it looks like everything else works fine. you could try that out if you find it to be a better option than wrangling with windows updates
as for VR, there's a third party mod for java[2], i tried it a couple years back and it felt pretty smooth, had no issues with it, but i don't have a point of reference to compare it to bedrock VR because i never tried it
[0] https://github.com/GeyserMC/Geyser
[1] https://geysermc.org/wiki/geyser/current-limitations/
[2] https://www.vivecraft.org/
That is interesting news. I’ll take a look.
Thank you for sharing.
I tried bedrock cause I heard it was written in C++, but it somehow ended up running worse than the Java version. Weird lag spikes and constant glitches. (Also the UI is written in JavaScript?)
Then when I ran a Windows 10 debloater, it deleted Bedrock because it was a PWA, and it turns out Bedrock stores the world files inside the application folder, so the world got deleted too.
So yeah I switched back to regular Minecraft.
I remember staying up late on a school night to grab a beta iso for windows 7 because they were (supposed to) limit how many people could download it. That was the last time I ever got excited about a Microsoft product
I'm kind of surprised that Chromium blocks audio on autoplaying videos except when clicked but allows audio on mouseover interactions (encountered here). Takes me back to early 00s era sites with random surprises (in a good way here since its quirkiness is communicated with the design).
there are two audio Easter eggs on the page: Fallout 2 narration if you hover on the header image of the man watching tv from "Brazil" movie and if you hover "Unlisted Retrograde Holdout" text you will hear voice from "Human Traffic"
Strumming the main menu makes pip-boy sounds too.
On Firefox, you have to click on the page at least once before mouseover plays audio
You got me, page also have a sound from UFO X-COM
So it is. I thought it wwas something else, but it's X-COM / UFO as you said. On https://sounds.spriters-resource.com/ms_dos/xcomufodefensexc... it's ui_message.wav
Neat site, i've ripped sound by myself.
You won't be able to use more than compatibility modes if any with hardware newer than about 2015, because the drivers were built to a newer kernel ABI. It's great for legacy gaming, I still maintain an install for that purpose, but the idea of using Windows 7 in 2025 for a legitimately compute-bound workload is rather silly. Good heavens, even your disk IO is likely to run at half or less the speed it could!
The aesthetic here slaps, though. The sort of overcooked reheated Geocities fantasy of what I assume an Eastern European teenager would imagine American kids having access to - well, there are two Georgias in the world and I grew up two states over from the other one, and in some ways I think I get it. After all, the rich folks back home lived in their own little world, too. Cobbling together what we could, dreaming of bigger and better...who'd we have believed, telling us then how fondly we would come to look back on those days now?
I am on Ryzen 7950X/64Gb[swap in RAM]/1Tb 980 PRO NVME/24Gb3090Ti. Blazing fast.
And yeah NVME operations are actually faster than on windows 10.
Blazing fast where? I may have overlooked some GPU and memory benchmarks.
For example Blender rendering is faster than in windows 10, but slower comparing to Linux.
I'm surprised, but maybe I shouldn't be. And maybe if I put more work into picking a motherboard for a new Windows 7 build, I could even have working USB-C ports! It can't be as hard as a Hackintosh, probably...
Still, it's hard to see Windows excelling at anything but gaming, and if it's possible to get DX12 support on Win 7, I've never been able to find a working explanation of how. Compute loads I already have targets for.
It was easier for me to read this .txt version of page. https://trackerninja.codeberg.page/doc/win7eol.txt
i’m sorry, there may be useful information here, but this web page is unusable in its current form
for real, at least on FLOORP (firefox fork) it is a buggy mess
The site disables the scrollbar. I have both "Always show scrollbar" enabled and widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled set to false... disappointing that firefox has poor controls for the user.
Website is tested only in Firefox 115 ESR, RedFox 140 and Supermium 132. Sorry that you stumbled upon such issue, mouse scrolling should work, at least. You are also could try smartphone for mobile layout.
Scrollbar is on the wrong side. On Firefox, I use layout.scrollbar.side to set it to the left. Not sure if there's even a way to make it match the browser prefs.
That said, the scrollbar does look pretty cool.
That red mouse pointer on the web page - it's from Amiga Workbench!
That's correct.
Horribly designed page. Why does everything need to blink? Why is the text so poorly rendered? You can accomplish a retro design while retaining some semblance of readability.
It’s clearly a personal pet project where they’ve heavily leaned, hard, into some creative ways to present traditional documents.
We all complain about dull corporate themes and walled gardens making the web stale. But you can’t have a creative fun web without having the odd site that breaks some readability conventions.
Personally, I’d rather see more personal sites like this and fewer stuff on Medium or using boring React/Vue/whatever themes. But each to their own.
I'm here hanging out on HNN. I've never complained about dull, "stale" Web design.
I prefer plain js/scss and sometimes pug backed into webpack.
Everyone has it's own opinion. And if i tell you that it is just one of four different projects i have?
And yeah, do you have any projects to showcase to us?
Flicker removed from Win 7 support page.
I'm still using Windows 7 with server patches. There are no bugs, nagware, or unnecessary Microsoft features.
Nice one mate
I stayed with Windows 7 a looong time, until there was a (IIRC) JPEG2000 bug which was exploitable via the browser, and the "modern" browsers for Windows 7 were all unpatched. But I guess if I studied this page I can figure out if that bug is still dangerous.
5950x, 1050 Ti I am still using Windows 7! (Alongside with latest Linux Mint for actual important stuff).
Unfortunately now the quality of software is only going downhill.
Nice config. Yeah, software going downhill and not only on windows.
Beautiful website
design matches 90s era
The design is so much cooler than actual 90s websites were. More like the professional titling for a 90s cyberpunk flick like Hackers which was out 30 years ago next month.
I'm doing web projects during my free time. The website is based around Hugo framework, but since Windows 7 support was dropped i continue to maintain it with custom js/scss
And yeah, love this movie, despite it is a bit childish these days.