Living with Windows 7: Applications (Premium)

Using Windows 7 again is like riding a bike: Curiously uncomfortable at first, but then familiar, and then it all comes flooding back. And after finally getting several hundred Windows Updates installed—a big milestone for any new Windows 7 install these days—I moved on to other tasks.

First up was the driver situation. I was able to get a clean Device Manager thanks to Samsung’s website-based driver downloads. But the Samsung “SW Update” app won’t work anymore, and I wanted to see if there were more up-to-date drivers available. So I installed and tried Intel’s Driver & Support Assistant.

Nope. I’m guessing that has a lot to do with the age of the PC (again, 3rd-generation Intel Core i5 processor. So I moved on. Next up: Applications.

When it comes to installing applications on Windows 7, I seem to recall installing Windows Essentials first. Indeed, back in the day, no install of Windows 7 was complete without Windows Essentials, a collection of once-useful Microsoft applications that the firm had previously separated from the operating system so that it could update them more frequently.

It was a good idea for a time, but most of the component parts of Windows Essentials are now horribly out-of-date, unsupported, downright pointless, or some combination of the three. And while I had long-ago saved a full installer just in case, I quickly discovered in firing it up that its time has passed. Windows Essentials, alas, is no longer so essential.

That said, there is one part of this suite that I do need, and so I downloaded and eventually installed OneDrive from the OneDrive website. I write “eventually” there because my first attempt failed because the OS itself wasn’t up-to-date enough. So once all of the Windows Updates finally and mercifully completed, I tried again and it worked just fine.

In fact, OneDrive seems to look and work nearly identically to how it does in Windows 10. There’s just one major exception: Files on Demand is not an option. Which is fine: I simply synced the handful of folders I use regularly, pinned them to Favorites in File Explorer (now called Quick access), and off I went.

I was also interested to really try the new Microsoft Edge in Windows 7. Since it’s not quite finalized, I installed the same Beta version I’ve been using in Windows 10, and that install went off without a hitch on the first try. But when I went to sync with my Microsoft account, it initially failed, complaining like OneDrive that the system wasn’t yet up-to-date enough.

So as was the case with OneDrive, I tried again when the Windows Updates were complete, and sync worked just fine.

Installing PWAs (like Twitter) and pinning websites I use frequently (like Gmail and Google Calendar) also worked fine. But because there’s no Windows Mail app, which I use for secondary accounts like Outlook.com, I’ll need to pin the Outlook.com website to the taskbar as well.

Beyond the browser and OneDrive, I really only use a handful of traditional desktop applications. Microsoft Office can be obtained the same way as with Windows 10, from Office.com, and OneNote, which ships as part of Windows 10, can be found at OneNote.com, albeit in OneNote 2016 form, which is vaguely entertaining.

I use the Microsoft Store version of Adobe Photoshop Elements because of its liberal installation and usage rights; one of the big issues I had previously was that you could only install Elements (depending on the version) on a small handful of PCs and you had to remember to de-activate them if you were going to wipe out or stop using a PC. But this being Windows 7, I had to go back to a pre-Store version of Elements, so I checked my archives and decided to install Photoshop Elements 14. It installed fine, but slowly, and works nearly identical to the supposedly much more modern version I’m using elsewhere. (Updates occur through a standalone Adobe Application Manager application, but I assume I won’t see that very much.)

I also installed my NotePadWF app to see how that worked on Windows 7. As expected, it required a .NET Framework install first, which was time-consuming. But it mostly works OK: The status bar layout is screwed up for some reason, and the checkboxes in the menus look weird. Nothing serious enough to troubleshoot, given the support lifecycle for Windows 7. (See below.)

And while I don’t really expect to write much if any code on this PC, I did fire up the Visual Studio Community 2019 installer and expect that process to conclude sometime on or before January 15. I guess nothing really moves all that quickly on this PC, especially if it involves some kind of a download. (I did create a basic version of the Notepad app, and the checkboxes look correct in that version. So I assume this is related to me enabling high-DPI support in the real app.)

There are a few small utilities I always find useful, like the Greenshot screenshot tool, and that installed just fine from the web. Of course, this being Windows 7, I also had to find some antivirus, so I went with AVG AntiVirus Free for no particular reason.

By the way, when I think about the utility of Windows vs., say, any version of Linux or Chrome OS, it is the availability of some of these applications—most notably Photoshop Elements, Office and OneNote, and OneDrive with its local sync capabilities—that makes any Windows version, even Windows 7, so much more immediately useful to me. I realize there are workarounds and alternatives, web-based in some cases. But the familiarity of this arrangement makes Windows 7 so much more immediately useful to me than any OS alternative. (Most of these applications are at least available in macOS, but the inherent inefficiencies of that system present their own problems.)

Put another way, Windows 7 isn’t just familiar, it’s basically the same as Windows 10 from an application perspective: There are no UWP apps I really miss at all, but the apps that matter to me most all work fine. This likely means that Windows 8.1.1 would likewise work just fine for me. And on the flip side, that moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10 shouldn’t be all that difficult unless one is using truly weird/ancient software that, for whatever reason, won’t run on the newer OS.

Put even more simply, I like it. I still like it.