I'm sure you can remember from my Technology is like Magic post where I talked about old Windows systems. I talked about some stories from my childhood from using "CMD Tricks", it's miracle backwards compatibility, the beautiful login screens of XP through 7, and well, it's downsides. But I still made it clear then that I loved 7. Windows 7 is one of those kind of dead systems now, as it was discontinued five years ago, an event I made a lost skit for. You know, I was sitting at home, eating doritoes when the phone rang... "Windows 7 is kil". No, it was unbelievable then.

Nah, I'm fucking with you, we all saw this coming in Janurary 2020. Windows 10 had been out for about 5 years at that point and was a majority of systems at the time. This was also around the time programs made the switch from having 7 support to going to purely just Windows 10. Plus, we also had only maybe a while before 11, so it was just the cycle of life. It was bound to die.

I made the skit around Feburary to March 2020, actually. I think... It was around when the popups started coming up on my old 7 system! Which was pretty late. It was a good quick joke, but I really wish I owed 7 more for it's wonderful UI design. It's eye candy. I never give it enough credit for that. I know I sound like a Fruitiger Aero kid here, but really, 7 is a UI I miss looking at.

But all of this numbing rambling is not good for a blog post. Let's get right into the meat!

Windows 7's Iconic design

I love the design of 7. This is kind of no surprise considering it was one of my childhood operating systems, serving me for basically most of 2014 through early 2021! There was a few hiccups from 2016-2017 where I picked up 10 instead and found it super slow, and even some hiccups in the early half of 2018, around before July. Again, no surprise, my system was on an HDD... I was bound to be swearing and cursing at a monitor trying to run it, with just a 5200 RPM drive.

Of course, we have to ignore the one slipup when I installed XP on my main laptop with no drivers to work with (I think I tried to dualboot but installed XP last! Whoops), the many times I've installed Windows 10 on a machine that had specs of a Vista era machine, the many computers I've went through by doing reckless shit with it... All of the other countless, reckless, stupid mistakes I've made to the many devices I've had before I picked up a gaming laptop and practically watched as most of my problems began to come back twice as hard.

But it was a system I loved. I made a lot of mistakes, but 7 was always that reliable, pretty go-to. The aero glass was good looking, the taskbar was a memorable one, it had the last of the poppy, pretty design that a lot of people called "Fruitiger Aero", the simple system requirements...

But, sometimes-

Dead?

Dead. They killed it 5 years ago. I made that obvious earlier, thank you title card.

Everybody knows what comes to dead things. A retro device might be fun when it first comes out, but it has to die one way or another when it ages. Stuff like game releases for a game console stopping, online services shutting down, companies locking propietary devices by bricking it when the hardware is no longer needed... All that stuff that comes to outdated devices.

Of course, some devices stay legendary and become adored, even in death. The NES and SNES remain stamples of retro consoles, the Wii is still regularly modded, the 3DS might be freshly dead but has new life, the... Actually, that's enough.

Sometimes, things die and go extinct, and that sucks. Many projects deserve this, including the ""cutting edge"" 3DO, the CD-I, the Game Com, and the many other throwaway devices that tried to start up and failed to the hands of Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and, well... Sega.
But that's not always the meta. A lot of stuff deserves another chance though for their services, their nostalgia. When you become attached to something, you tend to want to go back to it to relive those memories. And sometimes, people make revival projects to keep these things alive.

Yeah, but...

Fucking titlecard... Let's talk about revival projects.

ROBLOX was a subject for a while with RBXPri, RBLXLegacy, Novetus, Finobe, Tadah... And those things are all basically dead now that ROBLOX did their version of 9/11 by forcing account authentication to load assets. AKA, if your project didn't ask the user to put their cookie, bye bye!
But before this was such an issue, ROBLOX's revival community thrived. Finobe was basically a 2016 haven, and one of the very few revivals that had that working for a while. You know, long before Syntax had 2018. But it was a big part of it, at least.

We had this for software too. Take in the old AIM Phoenix, a revival of the AOL Instant Messenger program from the 90s and early 2000s. Phoenix ended up being insecure, had questionable content on it's servers... And then NINA came along to replace it. We also had Escargot for Windows Live Messenger and MSN Messenger, two of the same program. We didn't leave Windows out of this either -- Operating systems get "Extended Kernels", projects to make modern programs work on the old operating systems. Stuff like the Vista Extended Kernel, OneCore for XP, Vxkey for 7...

That's no fun!

Okay, sure. In theory, you can stick it to Microsoft and run NOTHING but XP with OneCore and try to daily drive that. Go right ahead and see how that goes. But sometimes, these kinds of projects have flaws that can't really save you. Some stuff isn't meant to be backwards compatible this way.

It's not going to be smooth as Windows 10, where you just tell programs you're Windows 11 (yes, that IS real, by the way). There's unexpected undeveloped APIs not having been ported yet, some systems just being unable to handle it, driver incompatibilities...
And that just sucks. I want to run Windows 7 as a main for the nostalgia, sure, but it's impractical. My anxiousness with trying to handle updates and drivers on my own, the issues with compatibility, all these hoops and jumps and all of this that I'm not really equipped to handle. I'm not a cybergenius. People call me the tech lord when I help them, reset their computer or give them a guide to do something specific and obscure, but outside of that? I'm pretty fucking stupid. Can't work with hardware well, struggle to diagnose and I'm too broke to repair my own shit.

That makes you wonder... If we can't get the OS, can we at least get the UI?

Revert8Plus

Perfect, let's start there.

R8P (its short name) was started by TeknixStuff (often called Tech Stuff) to restore Windows 7 UI elements. I can only guess this project was started in Janurary 2024 (as that's the first public video made about it that I can tell), possibly for private purposes (Should have probably searched for more information, but...) before being released to the public. The initial versions worked with Windows 8, but starting with v4, it was only for 10 and 11 versions up to 22H2 (anything later than that is fucked). While reimplimenting Aero with R8P was possible and definitely kind of works, it's super intensive, so I turned it off.

To be honest? It does a pretty solid job, even though this UI respectfully died for the flat moveover in ~2015 (~2012 for Apple and Microsoft! iOS 7 and Windows 8.0 respectively), so I can't really complain. Some things are bound to disappear, but for a project to bring back something so desperately... It kind of works. I like it.

Miracle medicine

Though, it is kind of a hacky mess...

Firstly, it runs off of Windhawk, a program for Windows that practically makes this entire mess work. It's a modding engine that hooks into essential Windows programs to do changes, such as adding dark mode, fixing some bugs, or doing, well... The crazy shit that Revert8Plus does.
But it tends to sometimes be a little slow. Slow, buggy, a bit unstable... Even some of the hacks Revert8Plus does, such as ConsoleLogonHook to work with the 7 login screen tend to be pretty fucked up and buggy. Those are the kind of hacks you have to put up with, because, well... Revert8Plus is a bit of a hack.

But it barely works. And the fact it works it all is a charm. It's definitely enough for the nostalgia kids that care so much about maining it. And it works fine for a stupid person like myself who just wants to stop looking at the Windows 10 titlebars so damn much. It just works. I'm happy it does, even in it's state.

Because that's just all it needs to be.

And also, please do not install it on Windows 11.