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It was a good idea for a time, but most of the component parts of Windows Essentials are now horribly out-of-date, unsupported, downright pointless, or some combination of the three.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 t...