How Long will Windows 7 Last for ED?

Don't want to know my PC history as in TLDR? Start reading this post past the long line.

I'm playing Horizons and Odyssey on a 10 year old Windows 7 Pro PC to an Acer Predator X34 3440x1440 144Hz curved monitor about 3 feet from my old eyes and it is awesome. Well, this wasn't your basic local store PC as I built it for professional broadcasting audio, video and wedding photography using the full range of Adobe software products and a few custom ones. It was VERY expensive at the time but I was making money in a business and got a tax write off.

Then I retired and atarted playing ED on this PC. My two MSI GeForce GTX 680 N680GTX Twin Frozr 4GB overclocked video cards loved Abobe running in SLI mode but not so much in ED. ED saw only one card and the other was idiling. Then when one died I removered them both and installed a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti feeding that Acer X34 Predator monitor and a more respectible 120 mhz to the monitor everything works great with no lags or dropouts.

Even in some past Community Goals with nt multi-crew Krait Mk II I could have one player in a fighter and a second player firing weapons I installed for them without any glitches or lags but they often get bored and leave.

In the past years ago I have met with Frontier Devs putting a group event together racing around an orbiting station, flying into the tunnels of an outside station and competions landing a Sidewinder with FA off in an orbiting station who can do it better? I miss these Devs but making a living in software all the best to them moving on with their careers.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So how long will Frontier support Windows 7 for Elite Dangerous? Windows 10 was the PC operating system being sold at the time when ED was released in 2014. But with the issues of Windows 8 many corporations were still running previous Windows versions before spending millions to upgrade. That is probably why Microsoft supported Windows 7 for so long and awesome for us game players.

My guess if Frontier monitors the OS system of the PCs logging into ED and the number of them running Windows 7 drops to insignificant numbers (whatever that is) then they are going to move on.

Next you buy Odyssey on the PC you get Horizons 3.8. If you don't purchase Odyssey then you get 4.0 Horizons. Epic and Steam you tell me later how it works out. If Frontier comes up with a major DLC for Christmas in Dec 2023 updating Odyssey than what happens to Horizons? Personally I think if you purchased Horizons and do not want to move on Frontier is going to support you for the life of the game.

Then maybe Frontier says the game is complete still working out bugs over the years they cannot fix and maybe throw us a bone with the Panther Clipper or a Ghost ship another player suggested which was awesome. But in FE2 and FFE where I could land on atmospheric planets including Earth with several major cities I could look around with a camera in the city. Now that we have to SRVs to drive around will I need Windows 11 home to pull this off should ever happen in ED?

Regards

starblade.gif


Fying a Thargoid ship in FE2 landing on an atmospheric planet.. Fly safe...
 
Last edited:
I have old computers I play old games on, with old versions of Windows that are no longer supported. I don't connect them to the internet, if they need some software I can use walknet (usually a USB stick) now that my main PC has Win11 on it & won't let them connect (or connect to them) unless I fiddle around with Win11's security settings (which I prefer to avoid doing).

If you want to stay on win7 for as long as you can I guess eventually there will be some new hardware that may compel you upgrade because maybe you will want that more than you want to keep Win7. Maybe the game will change it's minimum requirements but that's probably some way off, imo it's more likely to be hardware or security that will motivate you first.

Copy your drive so you can go back to it & try upgrading to win10 and/or win11. Even if you decide not to stick with it you'll be better informed for when you face that dilemma of having to upgrade or be left behind.

My favourite OS is still Windows 2000 but times move on 🤷‍♂️


Looking forward to finding out what the next DLC/pDLC will be. If I need to upgrade to be able to play it I will, just as I did for Odyssey.
 

How Long will Windows 7 Last for ED?​

No-one knows. Any change to Elite/Windows7/drivers could break the game on that OS, and Windows 7 isn't supported anymore.
Greetings Commanders,

To continue focus on providing the best experience for the more commonly used systems, we will no longer be testing Windows 7 compatibility for any future Elite Dangerous updates. As a result, we cannot guarantee future updates or compatibility for Windows 7 users.

O7
At some point you should upgrade the OS from 7 to 10.
 
Now that we have to SRVs to drive around will I need Windows 11 home to pull this off?
I get where you are coming from. I have an older version of Windows 10 locked in time, which is highly customized / configured / "tamed" to my liking, and I have zero interest in Windows 11. I'm not so worried about Elite, or most of my games, but I do expect someday that MSFS will require Windows 11. When that happens, I'm more likely to switch to X-Plane than Win 11. Now if Steam itself were to no longer run on my current Win OS, then I'd probably switch to Linux.

And FWIW, the only reason I'm running Win 10 and not Win 7 is because that's what came installed on my laptop.
 
Windows 11 sucks.
Truly.
Yeah you can peel back the crap. Block it from leeching all your data. But not completely. It's rigged as a marketing tool.
But!
Oh boy is it fast.
Switch off all that crap windows stuff like gpu scheduling etc, get the gpu to do the work, not windows. Graphics settings are clearly visible to switch off.
And once you've tweeked the gpus own settings your good to go.
Having to do it all again once you've updated is a bind. Windows way of reinstituting their choices rather than yours.
Don't run win 11 as default. Get inside it and reduce it to an OS.
Quite why we use windows is beyond me. Competitors need to get their £&%# together and give us gamers a true OS not this awful, but fast, mess.
 
I jus don't get why some bright spark hasn't created an OS for one of the largest contingents online.
Gamers.
A stripped down gpu oriented OS exclusively designed specifically for gaming.
It's beyond me why this hasn't happened.
 
I jus don't get why some bright spark hasn't created an OS for one of the largest contingents online.
Gamers.
A stripped down gpu oriented OS exclusively designed specifically for gaming.
It's beyond me why this hasn't happened.
Because creating an OS - or more precisely, getting driver support for all the various bits of hardware the OS might run on - is a really big job, and lots of games and game engines use Windows-specific APIs which you'd also have to duplicate to get those games to work. You'd also need to get some non-game software on it - at least a modern web browser - which could be quite a bit of extra work. And then you'd be marketing it to the relatively small fraction of gamers who play high-performance-requirement games, and really want every little bit of extra performance to the extent that they'll buy and install a niche custom OS for a few percent extra. Lots of people play computer games, definitely ... but if you look through the list of best-selling ones, most of them aren't the sort where they're putting huge stress on hardware in the first place.

There are of course a few alternative approaches to "gamer OS" which have been successful.
1) Consoles. Own and lock down the hardware options, build the OS to optimise around that single case, get gamers to buy it. Works pretty well as a business model, provided you can either also develop enough games yourself (Nintendo) or convince others to (Microsoft, Sony) to make it a plausible option.
2) Tune an existing Linux distribution for gaming purposes, much easier to strip out all of the background stuff you don't need. Relatively easy, the underlying software is free, other people do most of the worrying about drive support ... just two disadvantages: it's hard to make money doing it directly, and even with recent improvements to windows compatibility layers lots of games still won't run on it, though the situation is improving. SteamOS, maybe some other gaming-focused distributions maintained by hobbyists, it's not as if the average Linux distribution has an excessive amount of background stuff going on anyway.
3) Do most of the fancy stuff offsite so the local PC doesn't need to be so high-performance. Works reasonably well for Nvidia, didn't work out for Google but other than selling ads not much does, but network performance is good enough nowadays to make this at least somewhat workable if you can afford a datacentre or two of gaming PCs for it.
 
I jus don't get why some bright spark hasn't created an OS for one of the largest contingents online.
Gamers.
A stripped down gpu oriented OS exclusively designed specifically for gaming.
It's beyond me why this hasn't happened.

They did.


It and the entire concept of Steam Machines were an absolute failure - for 8 years until the Steam Deck became a thing. And by then they had rebuilt the entirety of SteamOS and had to concede that people still want a desktop on their PC consoles.
 
...Copy your drive so you can go back to it & try upgrading to win10 and/or win11. Even if you decide not to stick with it you'll be better informed for when you face that dilemma of having to upgrade or be left behind...
Actually an excellent idea. When I purchased Windows 7 Pro it included a copy of Windows 10 which was just about to be released. I still have the link! Wouldn't if be funny if Microsoft still honored it? Heck maybe it is time once again for a dual OS PC build with Windows 7 and 10. decided upon startup. I did one for DOS 6.22 (for all the earlier Elite games) and Windows 98. Then I would be setup for a Windows 11 update.
 
...but I do expect someday that MSFS will require Windows 11. When that happens, I'm more likely to switch to X-Plane than Win 11...
Meanwhile X-Plane 12 no longer supports Windows 7 so I have the latest greatest version of X-Plane 11. Even then XP 11 didn't like all the fleet of aircraft and scenery I purchased over the years in XP 10. I wonder how aviation schools using the commercial XP 10 version felt about that.
 
Windows 11 sucks.
Truly...

As I see it windows 10 was all about automating computer tasks so when a user who has no clue about using a computer can just ask Windows 10 and the software will take care of it. After interfacing enough Windows 10 develops a profile with the user making it easier to use. In the background it requires gathering personal information on the user. Windows 11 will probably take this to a higher advanced level. This can be good or bad. In the fall of 2022 with the world situations you decide.

I'm just totally guessing no actual research never using anything past Windows 7. Amazon our world wide online store that can deliver anything to our front door using these algorithms have made it an art form tracking us. I buy batteries for something that I bought on Amazon. Six months later they know that I need batteries and send me a reminder!

So will Frontier use Windows 11 reminding me that a new paint job is out per the ship I have been flying for the last month? Maybe I could buy it on Amazon.

Regards
 
As I see it windows 10 was all about automating computer tasks so when a user who has no clue about using a computer can just ask Windows 10 and the software will take care of it. After interfacing enough Windows 10 develops a profile with the user making it easier to use.
Not even close. Telemetry data is (supposedly) analysed to inform developers on how their product is used so they can use that to inform design decisions. Nothing is automatically personalised to the individual. Except maybe anything using Microsoft's ad service.
 
Just use the latest OS and virtualise when you need to use older...

But other than that, this looks like a thread I should probably not get involved in. :D
 
Windows 7 is no longer supported. Full stop. It was end of life two years ago.

Since it's not supported by Microsoft and hasn't been for two years now, it cannot be properly supported by Frontier. That it still works is just luck that nothing has changed that much since then.

Play it till it stops working is all you can do. Frankly, why anybody would still be using Windows 7 is completely beyond me.
 
Back
Top Bottom