Hi, a friend asked me to possibly uppgrade her PC used in her graphic design bussiness.
It's some sort of AMD athlon 64 system running windows 7 loadded with graphic design software. She doesn't want to change to win10/11 and I don't feel like reinstalling all the software either. So decided to clone her 1TB SSD to new 4TB SSD (believe it or not but her SSD is 99% full) and to improve performance possibly change the mobo/cpu to something more modern, preferably some sort of AMD Ryzen as I sense trouble going from AMD to Intel or viceversa.
So looking for any recomendations of a good system that still has Windows 7 drivers available.
Much appreciated.
Ryzen isn't officially supported on windows 7, so you will have to find some workarounds; sorry be the bringer of bad news.
Windows 7 is supported up to Kaby Lake, for bare metal windows 7 you need to be looking at 2016-era components.
That's probably too old, so perhaps you can virtualize the current image?
Problem, VMWare prices just went through the roof.
Possible solutions can include:
- Industrial pc vendor that still sells win7 compatible gear
- Virtualization
- Getting an Enterprise (ltsc) version of windows 10 perhaps?
Otherwise it's a challenge:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11182/how-to-get-ryzen-working-on-windows-7-x64Or maybe upgrade the workflow to Windows 10 or 11?
If
you don't plan the upgrade, hardware failure or malware will do it for you.
It was tough finding Windows 7 drivers even 5 years ago for a lot of devices and chipsets. You might get some Microsoft drivers if you're lucky.
It is about time to move on from Windows 7 (despite of how awesome of an OS it is)
That being said the most modern machine i had a go at running Win7 was Cofee Lake. And it was fighting me all the way. I didn't even have working USB once booted into it, No networking, no graphics drivers etc.. So i had to copy a network card driver onto the SATA HDD in order to get working LAN, so that i could more easily get the other drivers onto it. Most of the motherboard features worked once drivers were installed. However the Intel Graphics drivers was hard coded to refuse to install on Win 7, so i had to download a sketchy driver from weird parts of the internet where this check was patched out and then it worked fine. Also by default there are no drivers for NVmE SSDs, so booting from one is tricky.
The trick i found that makes getting Win 7 onto newer machines easier is to get an install ISO that has Win 7,8,10 all packed into one. They do this by taking the Win 10 installer and feeding it files from older windows versions. The benefit of this is that the Win 10 installer has much more up to date drivers that then even get passed along to the windows install. So this elegantly gets around the problem of Win 7 missing some critical low level driver, causing it to blue screen during boot (since that makes installing the missing driver very difficult if the machine doesn't boot in the first place)
The path of least resistance is to upgrade the SSD as you are doing, and possibly upgrade the ram as best possible for this mobo. Those two alone should speed things up considerably. Don't mess with CPU or mobo upgrades.
Next is to review the OS & software, as I'd guess it is pretty well bloated by now. You'll want to uninstall everything no longer needed, remove all update remnants left lying around by the OS patch process, and so on. ccleaner or similar to help decrapify it.
Otherwise, if more power is needed, and when isn't it ... I'd clone the OS to a vm. The customer will always be able to run everything just as it was, forever (sounds like she is resistant to change). This gives you the chance to give her a modern system, with a minimal Win10 on it, and virtualbox, and then you can present her with an auto-starting vm of her Win7 build. The only possible gotcha I can think of here is if any of her software relies upon graphics cards, which don't pass thru in virtualbox ... most office software runs fine in VM's, but you'll need to check her graphics design apps.
If there is a GPU requirement, then perhaps the path is towards Win10 (pro) with Hyper-V, and there you'll need to sort whether or not Hyper-V can pass thru to one VM, which is her Win7 environment. I've heard it can, but I tend to use VBox and others, so don't know the details of Hyper-V ...
hope this helps ...
Besides from drivers she would need a license for Windows 7. Unless the copy of Windows 7 she has now is a retail license, otherwise MS usually licensed to the computer itself if the Windows copy she got is from the PC manufacturers. Also she would need the DVD that came with the PC. Cloning the HDD won't work because of the drivers.