Searching Win7 32-bit offifial ISO image - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: PinheadBE
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 12:21:51 am
content: Hi,To be able to run a specific Windows software on a Linux Mint 21.3 PC, I would like to find a Win7 32-bitOFFICIALISO image to be used with VirtualBox.I'm looking for the the lightest posibile edition, because that PC is not powerful at all and I need to run only ONE software so far that does not exist on Linux....Any clue where I could find one ?Thanks a lot(Note: I'm a neewbie in Linux, so it may be obvious formany, but not for me....)

author: garrettm
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 03:47:31 am
content: I'm doing something similar with QEMU/KVM rather than VirtualBox.Officially, you have to have a Visual Studio subscription to download them. But you can get access through 3rd parties "legally":https://techpp.com/2018/04/16/windows-7-iso-official-direct-download-links/Regardless of _how_ you get your installation media, you need to check that the file's SHA1 matches MS's official source file.https://tinyapps.org/blog/202301020700_microsoft_iso_hashes.htmlAfter downloading, on Windows you can use 7zip or HashCalc to check the hash. On Linux you can use "cksum -a sha1 /path/to/iso/win7.iso"I'm planning on running my Win7 VM as a "headless" service and access my apps (for test equipment) via RDP for better desktop integration. I really don't want to deal with the VM directly if I don't have to. Virtmanager lets one start up the VM in the background upon boot and then the RDP connection lets users interact with it both remotely or locally. For the fastest local experience, one would want to pass over the GPU via PCI pass-through along with a USB controller for near native performance. But this requires IOMMU and VT-d / VT-x, so older machines may not have this feature.I'm still workshoping my setup. I want to avoid encryption (since the Guest will be accessed locally at the Host) and get as much HW acceleration as possible for a snappy user experience.There's a github project that does this exact thing with newer versions of Windows/apps that I want to try and emulate for my use case:https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

author: radiolistener
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 05:25:20 am
content: If you want lightest posibile edition, it's better to use Win XP 32-bit version. This is lightest posibile edition, it consume much less CPU and memory thant Win7 or later windows. But note, clean installation may require to update certificates manually, because its all included certificates are out of date, it may leads to a problem for HTTPS connections.

author: garrettm
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 06:00:46 am
content: I wouldn't use XP unless it is required. Windows 7 has better para virtualization drivers than those available for XP. Windows 7 can run newer apps and works fine with 512MiB to 1GiB of RAM, which is nothing for today's computers. My workstation has 128GiB of 3600MT DDR4, which cost me $170... Memory is cheap. Most laptops come with 16GiB now too. A gig of RAM for a VM is peanuts.Anyways, Windows 7 can be slimmed down by stopping all unneeded services and proper configuration (possibly disabling page file, etc.). A VHD differencing disk adds interesting configuration possibilities too: Make a parent VHD with Win7 configured how you want, then make a differencing "child" VHD to store changes to the parent disk. If you break something, delete the child VHD and make a new one. This is done with Win9x VMs on PureDOS and saves space for different configs that might conflict with each other.Anyways, some software requires Vista or higher, so XP isn't always an option.In my config I plan to use a combination of a secondary LAN at the host and the Linux "unshare" command to create a new network namespace for the guest and host to pass RDP (or another protocol for remote connection) and communication with some LAN based test equipment. The Windows guest does not need an internet connection and does not need to be updated beyond what is required by the installed programs. It simply needs to run legacy apps as needed and not crash. Using it for any other purpose defeats the point of running Linux as the host OS and a dual boot should be used instead.

author: garrettm
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 06:27:15 am
content: Quote from: PinheadBE on December 07, 2024, 12:21:51 amWhat software are you trying to run? It's possible Wine can do the job (you'll need to configure DPI and maybe install Gecko and Mono first--possibly some other dependencies). In any case, a VM is the opposite of "light weight". If your PC is "weak", to best leverage a Windows VM consider upgrading your PC with more memory and a second SATA SSD/HDD. Running the Guest and Host on the same physical disk is bad for performance. I pass over an entire NVMe drive for my Windows 10 VM, and it is lightning fast to boot and feels like its running on bare metal. Passing over a whole drive provides a number of benefits over creating a virtual disk (.img, .qcow2, .vhd, .vhdx, etc.): The disk is directly bootable, in the event you want to actually dual boot. The disk can easily be accessed from the Linux host (read and write) when the guest is offline. This last item is not so obvious or simple to do with virtual disks (especially writing data, reading is simple). Guest disk activity does not compete with the Host's disk activity. And so on.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 06:47:29 am
content: I have Windows 7 bought retail, pre SP1, in both 32 bit and 64 bit , and i have a disk image of the 64 bit version. I could make a disk image of the 32 bit disc, just I'm in the process of moving and may take a couple of days to be able to image the disc.There was also a site that had torrent links to all the iso images, the official ones from microsoft.That website is gone, but it's still in arhive.org :https://web.archive.org/web/20180405152145/http://mirror.corenoc.de/digitalrivercontent.net/the ones with x86 in name are the 32 bit versions .... the torrents use public trackers so it's possible they still work just fine.

author: radiolistener
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 09:40:48 am
content: Quote from: garrettm on December 07, 2024, 06:00:46 amwhen you have so much RAM, it may be not an issue, but I have just 4 GB, so RAM consumption is very critical. For WinXP I can allocate just 256MB RAM or even less and it will be enough. Also WinXP use less disk space, so it's more easy and faster to clone.Quote from: garrettm on December 07, 2024, 06:00:46 amYes, thats true, some software may not work on WinXP because they using some modern libraries, but usually such software also don't works on Win7 either. But for most tools and software WinXP is enough and it can run it with no issue. The main problem on WinXP with software which depends on OS TLS implementation. You can enable some extended TLS support on WinXP, but it has very old version and don't supports modern crypto suites, so it may be a problem if software depends on it.

author: Postal2
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2024, 10:36:19 am
content: peter-h has the image you need.Quote from: peter-h on October 02, 2024, 06:56:42 amBut now he's fending off attacks from enraged toothbrushes:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/security/hacking-a-toothbrush/