I know the topic of running newer versions of KiCAD on Windows 7 has come up before, I have never seen a good solution. Well, if anybody here is interested, I now present you with one. As this is unsupported, you do it at your own risk, but it seems to work fine for me.
I am not interested in a discussion about running old operating systems, nor about trashing the writers of Python or KiCAD for not supporting those older operating systems. I know many people have strong opinions on this, and it has been discussed before. I will not be continuing those discussions on either side of the issue. This post is simply to tell you how this can be accomplished, if you have a desire to do it.
As far as I can tell, the only thing preventing you from running KiCAD on Windows 7 is that it requires a newer version of Python. These newer versions of Python are not supported under Windows 7, and without them KiCAD will not run. It also requires a file which is not present in Windows 7, api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll ( required by python as well). I recently discovered that some clever third parties have released a version oF that dll that can be used under Windows 7, and somebody has used it to produce newer versions of Python which can also work under Windows 7. Could my solution be this easy? Apparently it could!
The first thing you need to do is get a newer version of python running. I chose version 3.11.2 64-bit, as I am running a 64-bit version of Windows. If you are running 32-bit, I will let you figure out the changes you need to make. Download the appropriate version here:
https://github.com/adang1345/PythonWin7 and install it. you need to make sure Windows knows where python is located, go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System, select "Advanced system settings", select "Environment Variables", and in the bottom window "System Variables" edit the path statement so it includes the paths to your Python installation. On my system this is "C:\Users\Ed\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311;C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Scripts;" , your paths will be different depending on your username and whether or not you installed to the default location. You need to include the paths for both the Python root directory and the scripts directory. If you also have an older version of Python installed, the new version will need to be listed before the old one in the path statement. If you have scripts that run with an older version of python, this may cause difficulty, not sure how to fix that.
OK, hard part done. Now we need to install KiCAD. You cannot install KiCAD 7 on Windows 7, it will not allow it. You can, however, install it quite easily on Windows 10. The Windows 10 you install it on should be either 32 or 64-bit to match the Windows 7 installation that you want to run on. It can be a real machine, or a virtual machine, works either way. It can also be a Windows 10 machine you are currently running KiCAD on already. Now that you've got it installed on a Windows 10 machine, go into the "program files" directory and copy the entire KiCAD directory over to the Windows 7 machines "program files" directory. There are also kICAD directories in the C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local and C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local folders, copy those as well (don't overwrite files from older KiCAD install).
One last step. You need to copy api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll from the C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311 directory to C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0\bin or wherever your KiCAD.exe is located.
All done
Double-click the KiCAD.exe and it should run. Each time you start it, you will get a message that KiCAD is not supported on this operating system , but it runs just fine. A few of the sub apps will give you this same message each time you open them, they also work fine. One small annoyance, you can't check which version you are running, it just says unsupported.
If you have an older version installed, you will get the option of importing the settings. That works fine if you wish to do it. when the 7.0.6 update arrives, you will also not be able to install that on Windows 7. Just install it on Windows 10 and then copy the KiCAD directory from program files again, that's all you need to do.
KiCAD 7 is actually running better on the Windows 7 machine then what version 5 did. It seems to be a bit more Snappy and responsive, have not had a crash yet. If you have any problems doing this, post about it here, I will do my best to help you. No promises, but I will try.
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