One last hurrah for Windows 7

Post 00047 | December 30th 2023

It is with a bit of melancholy I post this today. Earlier in the year Valve announced that Steam would be dropping support for Windows 7 from the 1st of January 2024. This might very well be the final nail in the coffin for the now fourteen year old OS. Because of this, I decided to give the software one last go before curtain call.

Disclaimer:
Before I start all this, I should point out that Windows 7 hasn't received updates for years and that using outdated software is a security risk. I personally run it on a separate network to keep it away from other devices. Don't log into anything that you don't want compromised.

Every once in a while I like to install and set up an old operating system to see how usable it still is. Of course, if you purchased your Macintosh back in the 80's to be used solely as a word processor, it will be happily do this task for as long as your printer has ribbon. Rather, when I say "usable" I mean as a modern desktop machine. Is there a modern web browser that will render pages correctly? Do YouTube videos play?

Windows 98 and XP have been challenging to set up for a while now. The first hurdle you run into (after hopefully installing drivers without issue) is the fact that nothing network-related works due to outdated SSL certificates. Want to download a piece of software? Bad luck, https websites refuse to load. Google might have a non-https version, that doesn't mean the search results do. Instead you find a couple of more modern browser installers on another computer and put them on a USB drive. 98 doesn't come with USB drivers, so that's when you need your special floppy disk with USB drivers... The list goes on.

Usually setting up Windows 7 would be a walk in the park compared to its older siblings. Windows Update would be comically slow until you manually installed a couple of updates (via SwiftonSecurity on Twitter), but other than that it was pretty smooth sailing. Today however was a different story. The included Internet Explorer 8 was too outdated to access https websites. Much like with 98 and XP, the solution was to download more modern browsers onto a USB drive on another computer. That's when I found out that both Firefox and Chrome has stopped supporting Windows 7 in 2023. I'm sure there are multiple Windows 7-optimised forks of both Firefox and Chromium available, but for now the last official versions of both browsers are still relatively modern so I didn't bother looking. After installing these along with Internet Explorer 11 (Windows Update uses IE for fetching updates), we were back in business.

Having finally gotten online, I was able to download graphics drivers. The last version of the Radeon Software for Windows 7 was released in 2022, with the driver being from 2021. Installing the driver, I immediately remembered just how pretty the Aero interface is with its transparent, glass-like windows. It really was a shame they threw all of this away for later releases of Windows. After spending a couple of minutes moving windows around to marvel at the aero effect, I went on to download Steam which install without issue. Games downloaded as intended as well. The only unusual thing was the big red doomsday clock, saying support is ending soon.

Does it really matter?

There was a similar alarm when Steam ended support for Windows XP. Admittedly the discontinuation of XP was a bit more severe than it is for 7 now. Vista broke a lot of stuff when it launched and while some functionality could be regained with some required hacky workarounds, others problems were never fixed, which is why it could make sense running a dedicated Windows XP machine. This isn't really the case going from Windows 7 to 10 or even 11. While there might be a few games that won't run, the vast majority will; Windows 7 and 10 just aren't that different under the hood. That said, while the leap from Windows 7 to 10 isn't that great, the leap from Windows XP to 10 is. Both the OS and the hardware it runs on will get increasingly alien to old games. UAC promts, 64-bit Windows, widescreen monitors... Statistically speaking, Microsoft is bound to break stuff along the way without people noticing, or at least enough people noticing to get Microsoft working on a fix. Linux is fast becoming a worthwhile alternative for playing games. ProtonDB touts 75% games rated Platinum or Gold compatibility rating), but in my experience, a good chunk of the other 25% are older titles DirectX 7 or earlier - In other words, titles that were designed for Windows XP. That said, Steam wasn't the primary way to distribute games back then; CD-ROMs were. As long as you can find a copy, you can still play these games on a machine from that era.

I guess this is more a case of me dispairing over the passage of time. To me, Windows 7 was the first modern Windows. I still remember first hearing that "Windows is good again" in a video on the still young YouTube on a piping hot Macbook that was wheezing away because Flash didn't support hardware accelleration at the time. There was no way I was going to get rid of Snow Leopard, but in the end I did install Windows 7 as a second OS via Boot Camp. I recall being pretty impressed by it. Everything that they had re-done were actual improvements. The Windows I had known for years actually felt new and improved, like a modern OS. And in fact, it still does, which I guess is one of the reasons why I'm dismayed that it's getting discontinued. The future is the past now.

If you keep a Windows 7 machine around for the sake of nostalgia, it might be a good idea to power it on before New Years to get last Steam updates before the service shuts down. There were ways to get Steam running on XP after it was discontinued, but there's no guarantee that this will also be the case this time.