Living with Windows 7: Up and Running on the NUC (Premium)

After struggling for the better part of a month to get Windows 7 installed on my older Intel NUC---I’m currently using a newer model each day as my primary PC, with Windows 10---I’m now able to move to this aging OS fulltime as I had originally planned. I think.

The issue, obvious in hindsight, was hardware compatibility: The Windows 7 installation media predates the USB 3.0 ports and M.2-based SSD storage used by the NUC, leading to all kinds of hilarity. Without USB 3.0 support---the NUC doesn’t even have a single USB 2.0 port---you can’t get past the opening screen of Setup. And without SSD support, Setup can’t “see” any internal storage, preventing Setup from continuing past that point.

Long story short, I was able to solve this problem by finding Windows 7-compatible drivers for USB 3.0 (from Intel) and for the SSD (from Samsung), and integrating them into the Setup media. Doing so is somewhat tedious---you have to apply the drivers to three different parts of Setup, first boot, the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE), and interactive Setup---but I finally got it all working this morning.

(I’m not trying to be coy by leaving this vague; no one should be clean-installing Windows 7 in January 2020. But I used these instructions, provided by Intel.)

As I experienced previously with my old Samsung Ultrabook, installing Windows 7 involves much more than just running Windows Setup. After that’s was done and I landed in an empty and very low-resolution desktop, I checked out Device Manager and … yeah, ugh.

Condensing 40 minutes of work into one concise sentence, I found, downloaded, extracted, and then installed several Windows 7-compatible drivers from Intel’s website for this particular NUC model. (I did this on another PC, using Windows 10, and copied the installers to the Windows 7 USB install media.) Installing them required several reboots, and some of the drivers wouldn’t install yet because the system wasn’t otherwise up-to-date.

But I had the display, sound, and networking going correctly, so I moved on to Windows Update.

I’ll be working on that one for a while, of course. But I also installed Google Chrome, because the ancient version of IE wouldn’t let me install the new Microsoft Edge. And then I used Chrome to install Edge, for that ironic moment I cherish so much. That said, I experienced something I also saw previously on the Samsung, where Edge “runs” but only presents a blank window (while pinning two shortcuts to the taskbar as well). The issue is that Windows 7 isn’t yet up-to-date: It will work fine once the Windows Updates are done.

Assuming this goes well, and I have enough life experience to doubt myself, I will install all the applications I use next, and then switch over my webcam and microphone connections so that I can record podcasts from this system. The goal, literally, is to just use Windows 7 for the next few weeks where po...