Windows 7
So today I blew the dust off my old gaming rig from around 2012 and re-installed Windows 7 Home Premium on it.
Why? I just wanted to take a trip down memory lane with it. I had spent many evenings playing WoW on it from about the fall of 2012 - spring 2016. Basically most of Mists of Pandaria and first patch or so of Warlords of Draenor. Played some Skyrim and Fallout 4 on it as well.
It was equipped with an AMD FX-6300 6-core processor, 16GB of DDR3 G.Skill RAM, a 500GB Samsung SSD (from back when SSDs were both expensive and super fast compared to traditional platter drives.) For a graphics card it originally had an EVGA GTX 780, but I had pulled and sold that a few years ago. So I pulled an AMD Radeon RX 480 I had laying around and put that in there. It was all enclosed in an NZXT tower and powered by an EVGA 650W power supply. This thing was a beast back in 2012.
I was surprised, given its age, how fast it ran with Windows 7. I mean, I guess I didn’t expect it to be slow. But it booted within seconds and was snappy to run. Even running a browser such as r3dfox on it (https://github.com/Eclipse-Community/r3dfox) which is a modern fork of Firefox altered to run on Windows Vista and 7, ran very well. I could watch YouTube, peruse eBay, and generally browse with no noticeable latency.
It’s really unfortunate that I can’t run Windows 11 on the machine, and even something like Bazzite, while it runs OK, is noticeably slower than Windows 7. If I could, I’d just run Windows 7 on the ol' rig and be done with Windows “upgrades” that do nothing but add bloat and AI features I never asked for nor wanted (we won’t get into that. Not today, anyway.)
OK, so maybe I’m a little bias. I remember running Windows 7 from the RC back in the fall of 2009 to about spring of 2016 when I shelved the aforementioned rig and replaced it with a newer one running Windows 10. During that time, I got a girlfriend, bought a house, and almost got married. I moved back out on my own after a while, picked up WoW, made a lot of good friends and had a lot of good times raiding and PVPing. So Windows 7 and that rig in particular are sort of tied to a period in my life that was pretty good.
Objectively speaking, though, Windows 7 is unfortunately not really supported anymore. You can’t really run a modern browser on it (unless you want to run Supermium or r3dfox), it’s not being patched by Microsoft anymore, so it’s probably chock full of security vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited, and it lacks some modern features, such as the easier window tiling that came with more modern Windows, default drive encryption, and support for modern NVME drives and USB 3.0.
That aside, I still think Windows 7 was the best version of Windows Microsoft ever made. The aero glass and general aesthetic was beautiful. It was snappy, simple, and still respected you as the end user. No forcing AI on you, or trying to get you to sign up for OneDrive. It harkens back to a simpler time when Microsoft still treated you as the owner of your PC and Windows was there just to make it useable (and I’d argue, the case of Windows 7 with its looks and sounds, even pleasurable to use.)
I mostly run Linux these days, as I’ve been turned off to Windows 11 by forced updates, Copilot, and the potential for Recall to rear its ugly head again. But I do occasionally think back to Windows 7 and remember it fondly.
On Nostalgia
Ahh nostalgia. The bittersweet longing for good times and enjoyable places past.
Sometimes it even manifests as a want to revisit places you’ve never been to or experienced! As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more aware of nostalgia for times past beginning to creep into my every day life. The memories of Christmas mornings past opening Super Nintendo games. The memories of fiddling around with our first computer to figure out how it works and to get games to play on it (mostly Sim City 2000.) Those days in high school just hanging out with friends during lunch or between classes, bs'ing with each other and causing trouble (not too much, really!) Those summer days that seemed to go on forever.
The issue with nostalgia is that while it feels good to recall the pleasantries of the past, if given too much space in your mind, it can easily take over. You may begin to surround yourself with things past in an attempt to relive those moments or to immerse yourself in the world you had so many years ago.
Nostalgia is, I believe, the primary driver behind the infamous "midlife crisis" so many people around my age go through. They buy cars they wanted but couldn’t afford in high school, they buy the toys, or gaming systems and games, or other things they wanted but couldn’t afford. Perhaps they will contact friends on Facebook with whom they haven’t spoken in 20 years. Some even go so far as to purchase their childhood home, hoping that when they walk through that front door their life will magically return to what it was decades ago. I believe these are all attempts to help them relive or recapture some of their bygone youth.
To dwell on the past is to steal from the future.
Nostalgia isn’t necessarily a self-destructive phenomenon (though it can be a costly one.) It only becomes a problem when, like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, you let it prevent you from not only being in the present, but shaping your future. The aforementioned quote is one I replay to myself often whenever I feel nostalgia beginning to cause me to dwell too much on the past, or to make decisions based on that nostalgia (like starting a Super Nintendo game collection or buying that 1994 Camaro Z28.) If you dwell on the past too much, you let the past dictate your actions and you attempt to shape your present and your future to be like your past instead of enjoying what you have now, or changing your life to have what you really need or want.
Nostalgia can be a nice place to visit. A reminder of who you are and where you came from. Remembering old friendships, family, and places, can be subtly sweet. But, like a drug, if taken too much it can be addicting and take over your mind and influence your behavior. It can ultimately make you unhappy when that new car, or that old game you used to love, just isn’t the same as you remember it being. When old places you visit have been changed in a way you don’t agree with, or don’t even exist at all anymore. One can visit nostalgia, but to attempt to manifest that nostalgia into the real world, where change is happening constantly, is asking for disappointment. It’s expecting your childhood memories to remain in stasis in reality forever, and that is simply not going to happen in most cases.
So, the next time you begin to dwell on nostalgia, and you feel like you’re going to make decisions based on that nostalgia knowing those decisions may not be the best, remember this quote: “To dwell on the past is to steal from the future.”
tags: nostalgia