2026-07-09
So today I blew the dust off my old gaming rig from around 2012 and re-installed Windows 7 Home Premium on it.
The most gorgeous Windows logo ever made.
Why? I just wanted to take a trip down memory lane with it. I had spent many evenings playing WoW on it from about the fall of 2012 - spring 2016. Basically most of Mists of Pandaria and first patch or so of Warlords of Draenor. Played some Skyrim and Fallout 4 on it as well.
It was equipped with an AMD FX-6300 6-core processor, 16GB of DDR3 G.Skill RAM, a 500GB Samsung SSD (from back when SSDs were both expensive and super fast compared to traditional platter drives.) For a graphics card it originally had an EVGA GTX 780, but I had pulled and sold that a few years ago. So I pulled an AMD Radeon RX 480 I had laying around and put that in there. It was all enclosed in an NZXT tower and powered by an EVGA 650W power supply. This thing was a beast back in 2012.
I was surprised, given its age, how fast it ran with Windows 7. I mean, I guess I didn't expect it to be slow. But it booted within seconds and was snappy to run. Even running a browser such as r3dfox on it (https://github.com/Eclipse-Community/r3dfox) which is a modern fork of Firefox altered to run on Windows Vista and 7, ran very well. I could watch YouTube, peruse eBay, and generally browse with no noticeable latency.
It's really unfortunate that I can't run Windows 11 on the machine, and even something like Bazzite, while it runs OK, is noticeably slower than Windows 7. If I could, I'd just run Windows 7 on the ol' rig and be done with Windows "upgrades" that do nothing but add bloat and AI features I never asked for nor wanted (we won't get into that. Not today, anyway.)
OK, so maybe I'm a little bias. I remember running Windows 7 from the RC back in the fall of 2009 to about spring of 2016 when I shelved the aforementioned rig and replaced it with a newer one running Windows 10. During that time, I got a girlfriend, bought a house, and almost got married. I moved back out on my own after a while, picked up WoW, made a lot of good friends and had a lot of good times raiding and PVPing. So Windows 7 and that rig in particular are sort of tied to a period in my life that was pretty good.
Objectively speaking, though, Windows 7 is unfortunately not really supported anymore. You can't really run a modern browser on it (unless you want to run Supermium or r3dfox), it's not being patched by Microsoft anymore, so it's probably chock full of security vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited, and it lacks some modern features, such as the easier window tiling that came with more modern Windows, default drive encryption, and support for modern NVME drives and USB 3.0.
That aside, I still think Windows 7 was the best version of Windows Microsoft ever made. The aero glass and general aesthetic was beautiful. It was snappy, simple, and still respected you as the end user. No forcing AI on you, or trying to get you to sign up for OneDrive. It harkens back to a simpler time when Microsoft still treated you as the owner of your PC and Windows was there just to make it useable (and I'd argue, the case of Windows 7 with its looks and sounds, even pleasurable to use.)
I mostly run Linux these days, as I've been turned off to Windows 11 by forced updates, Copilot, and the potential for Recall to rear its ugly head again. But I do occasionally think back to Windows 7 and remember it fondly.
