Windows 7 in 2022

Windows 7 is still unironically Microsoft's best operating system. Despite being out of support since January 14th, 2020, Windows 7 still receives extended security updates (ESU) until January 10, 2023¹⁾. This is some documentation on installing Windows 7 on bare-metal and the necessary steps to ensure the operating system is still secure.

Patching not included, Windows 7 no longer supports many modern graphics cards and chipsets. Most hardware manufacturers have deprecated their Windows 7 drivers. As such, you should ensure that either your hardware or laptop has these drivers still available, that you can patch them in, or that you are willing to run older versions of graphics drivers, firmware revisions, etc.

As of 2022, Windows 7 Enterprise is the recommended edition of Windows 7 to install. Enterprise has the ability to be activated via KMS emulators while maintaining the same featureset as Ultimate, hence being preferred. You can download the ISO off of /g/'s /fwt/ thread paste. This ISO includes Service Pack 1 but all other updates after that out. To install all these updates in one shot, use the Simplex Update Pack. The hyperlink that reads Загрузите UpdatePack7R2 is the download link. Dragging and dropping the ISO onto the UpdatePack exe will automatically patch the ISO to include all current Windows 7 security updates. Finally, use Rufus to burn the ISO onto a USB stick, making sure the partition scheme is GPT and the target is UEFI. Also, set the file system to NTFS to prevent any nasty Windows installer shenanigans.

Boot the USB drive in UEFI mode and proceed through the install as normal. As we'll be using a KMS emulator to activate Windows, you don't need to force legacy boot install for Windows. When prompted about auto-updating, its fine to select “no”.

First, get a USB stick and install the drivers for your system. Afterwards, you'll need to activate Windows. KMS_VL_ALL is the best one currently available. You can download it off this pastebin(Mirror)²⁾. To install, simply run KMS_VL_ALL_AIO.cmd as Administrator and select the Auto-Renewal Activate. Afterwards, you need to install BypassESU to continue to receive security updates. The official forum post is on My Digital Life(Mirror)³⁾. After downloading and extracting, simply run LiveOS-Setup.cmd and install everything. This should allow your system to receive ESU security updates from Microsoft until Windows 7 is fully deprecated.

Note that Telemetry has been baked into recent versions of Windows 7. To prevent this garbage from being installed, besure to check Simplex's list of blacklisted updates. Avoid these updates at all costs!