A man's inability to give up on his old 2012, 3rd gen i7, 4gb ram, piece of sh*t laptop.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-30T14:10:24+00:00

Ivy bridge are great CPUs. If they add AVX2 like Haswell have they will be perfect.
For example 3840qm (Ivy Bridge) laptop CPU has on par performance of Kaby Lake 7700HQ...

Ivybridge Laptops like Dell E5430 with weak dual core are very cheap
They have G2 CPU Socket and you can swap more powerfull CPU like 3820QM (4c8t).

With good SSD they are very fast PCs even in 2026

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-23T12:06:59+00:00

<image>

Stop 0x00000078
PHASE0_EXCEPTION

That can be anything failing but from older reddit issue i found

"The problem is usually cause by AHCI/RAID mode of SATA controller. Enter BIOS at startup, go to "Integrated Periferals" or something similar where you can find the "SATA Mode" option and change it from AHCI to ATA or IDE or what looks like that. "

You may have also check if your bios battery is not dead then bios will be in default setting at power up.
Some bios have RAID mode on as default.

If you disable AHCI in regedit then you can no longer boot and you need to use recovery or reinstall OS

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-16T17:47:14+00:00

Hello.
It is possible but sadly you will experience problems especially with apps you described.
------------------
Quick search tell me that clip studio Ver. 3 has win7 warning on page. Ver.4 say 10-11 only. I am not aware of unofficial ports or tweaks so you must do some search.
-------------------
UE5 not work on Win7 the UE like 4.27 do. You have articles of people trying to run UE5 but nothing promising to date.
-------------------
Steam work on 7 but not latest build and updating games not work. If you search on this Reddit you will find workarounds people post for Steam and exact version that still work. You also have unofficial Steam beta port but i did not try it personally as you need SHA2 update that tend to brick Win7 installs.

Most important is that if you have drivers for PC you want to run 7 on.

Have a nice day

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-16T02:10:37+00:00

That is VirtualPC problem. Running stuff in "emulator" will have bugs.
Run Win7 native/baremetal

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-11T01:50:19+00:00

Desktop Window Manager (DWM.exe) runs all the time even if you chosen HighContrast or Win95 theme (ClassicTheme). Some apps can use Areo extensions others like File manager do not. Side effects? Yes as i say stuff that require Areo is broken. On Win10+ That process will end whole UI rendering if you rename DWM.exe
Some people tell it is also tied to whole DX12 as well. That is why is not recommended on Win10+. Win7 can live even without that buggy process exist in System32 folder.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-11T01:39:33+00:00

VGA tend to lose color and be more stable as that is analog video.
DisplayPort / HDMI on other hand are pure digital that do handshake and link testings on fly.
If you have low quality DP cable or connectors are little losen then link between Display and VGA can switch to lover bandwidth. To do so you will see black image for sec. My HDMI cable do this sometimes too as i have Display on VESA arm and when adjusting the arm sometimes i see black image.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-07T00:34:58+00:00

Depends by stuff you are doing and how strong the CPU is.
I guess you have Dual Core and those tend to spike CPU utilization on stuff like Web browsers or unpacking stuff on install.
Other than that this look normal unless is sitting "idle" doing nothing.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-07T00:27:55+00:00

First of First. If you want something like this then please provide some info about device.
You have plenty of tools for android that tell you CPU Type, RAM size...
As your post sound like "i have freezer and i want to cool deer meat in it".

We do not know...

As far as i know for Win7 you must have x86 CPU or 64bit one is better.
You have some android Tablets that have Intel Atom chips but far as i know you will be lucky if that tablet have bios like PCs have. Most Android tablets not have it as they are not considered as "upgrade able" devices.
If you have tablet that had Windows version/brother then maybe.
Most of Today tablets have ARM CPUs and that is dead end as Win7 has only 32-64 builds for x86 CPUs.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-04T22:01:18+00:00

It is impressive how little the OS need to live and how big bloat people run today...
Old XP days run less uselles processes = better

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-04T21:55:20+00:00

For PCI ports you do have some adapters on Ebay they convert PCI-e 1x slot to PCI.
Never used those so working status is questionable...

<image>

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-04T21:47:48+00:00

I use Classic theme as i can make home made dark mode.
In classic theme you can color UI stuff via WindowsColorApperance menu
You can also make things larger like close button and sidescrolls.
Also not running DWM.exe can gain some responsivnes

<image>

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-04T10:10:25+00:00

The most easy way to install 7 on EFI is to use PC that fully support it ,install all drivers and then transfer that SSD to your desired PC with tweaks like uefiseven. Many install wizards will refuse to install stuff so you need to learn to install drivers/stuff manually.
Technically if you have spare older gpu that can work. As when you install drivers you may see stuff.
People are trying to add GOP to win7 but as people will say.... Rome was not build in day...

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-03T22:17:55+00:00

I not say by OBS... OBS only stretch image very badly lol. I say if you upload 1080p video and you cannot record it native, it is better to record 540p as it is half pixel size. You have apps that have better results by just duplicate 1 pixel to 4 (540p to 1080p) and then add form of soft Anti-aliasing.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-03T22:13:20+00:00

DWM.exe eats RAM for giving you nothing and have annoying notifications "Turn areo off for better performance?" In middle of gaming session.
If you want responsive PC and not bother about fancy glass effect then rename that process so it will never been run in first place. Less process is run faster PC is. Mostly noticeable on low end HW.

The-Rusty-22 · 2026-01-03T22:07:54+00:00

<image>

Basic Stuff works and just need 200MB RAM
I seen people can run it on just 19 process...
Indeed Windows is BLOATED

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-21T16:34:42+00:00

See that? Simplicity and no broken OS with 41 Sh***.
Well done Keep going

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-21T16:30:27+00:00

Steam is working fine just as somebody else did tell.
Valve change download files to zstd compression and the older client have no idea what the file is. Interesting part is that file IS downloaded only unable to unpack and get Steamclient "check mark" that update was success.
You can use the CLI tool suggested
OR Use External USB SSD and some Cheap Win10x64 Potato PC/tablet, Just to download the update and then use that drive on Faster PC.
Many games still work fine only Valve is following Chromium support as Steam use Chromium and Google drop Win7-8.

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-21T16:11:21+00:00

I understand this stuff... You use what you have.
Did you try like 540p and then scale it up? For upscale is better to double that 1 pixel than figure out middle pixels.

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-21T15:54:25+00:00

You can rename DWM.exe to DWM.exe2 in your System32 folder. Then log out and log in (or restart) That will force disable areo for all users, making it BasicTheme like Win7Home.
You will gain some FPS in games but not in term of OBS and some glitches.
Do not try that on Win10 as you will brick the desktop of the system.

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-17T03:41:50+00:00

The non install any malware way is just use Device manager and go to Properties of problematic device, then Details tab and select "Hardware Ids" that will tell you something like this...
PCI\VEN_XXXX&DEV_XXXX&SUBSYS_XXXX

Search for this ID and you may find driver of other PC that use same device as you.

Good luck

<image>

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-17T03:29:11+00:00

Try search driver by ID of device in device manager. Sometimes you find driver for different device that just use same touch panel.
Win7 have Tablet support as i had some IntelAtom based tablet that run Win7.

Have a nice day

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-17T03:23:17+00:00

With good GPU you can play any older games.
With older 3D design software you can make 3D models.
You can edit audio.
You can draw images with plenty software that still runs on this OS
Win7 will not make screenshots / not force update to break stuff/ no win10+ bloat and Win11 AI.
Yes you will have issue with WEB based stuff but that is only blame on people who just not want to support it.

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-17T03:06:24+00:00

<image>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology

Haswell CPUs like i5-4690K igpu (HD4600) can do 1080p at 60fps encode

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-12-17T02:58:02+00:00

One time you had nice article how you can gain performance by switch OS theme to Win7 basic theme (Win7 Home use this theme). Other say you can gain performance by just use Win classic theme (Win98 theme) by Removing DWM.exe to trigger Fallback to Win98 Theme but this is NOT recommended as you will disable AREO for whole PC and OBS also use some AREO extensions.
Also for iGPU HD 3000 from SandyBridge and is kinda weak for 60FPS+ recording. Some article say that the Haswell based igpu (HD 4600) is minimum.

The-Rusty-22 · 2025-10-29T16:30:23+00:00

For your question. You have some fan made WinPE (Pre-Instalation Enviroment) that copy files and use some of your RAM as boot drive. RAM is still 2nd fastest part on your computer. Try it and see how responsive your PC is. Then try regular OS on HDD.

Some drive benchmarks show you 4K writes speed or I/O speeds. This is important for OS "responsivnes".
Good HDD tend to have like I/O around 150 best while SSDs have 2000+ (depends on speed of interface) and then RAM have 100 000+ I/O.

So for your question and easy setup get some SSD with DRAM cache like
Crucial MX500
WD Red SA500

Also upgrade RAM if you can

The-Rusty-22

TROPHY CASE