A collection of bits and pieces of information that may be useful if you're trying to live with an operating system that's as old as this, had this much impact, was abandoned by its creators, although is still supported by a bunch of vendors. It's a hell of a roller coaster.
The information on page can be useful to both Windows 7, its many editions, and the server edition, Windows Server 2008 R2.
An operating system lives and dies on its software selection, so it's important that we can install nice things on our OS. Although many applications supported Windows 7 up until a while ago, some still do, you may need specific versions or workarounds in order to fully enjoy your experience.
PuTTY is great for connecting to UNIX servers using SSH and generating keys, but its color scheme for the terminal is simply horrible. To make things more homely a kind user created a bunch of color schemes for PuTTY, including the lovely Tomorrow Night, which can be applied with the following registry file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\Default%20Settings] "Colour0"="197,200,198" "Colour1"="234,234,234" "Colour2"="29,31,33" "Colour3"="0,0,0" "Colour4"="197,200,198" "Colour5"="197,200,198" "Colour6"="29,31,33" "Colour7"="0,0,0" "Colour8"="204,102,102" "Colour9"="213,78,83" "Colour10"="181,189,104" "Colour11"="185,202,74" "Colour12"="240,198,116" "Colour13"="231,197,71" "Colour14"="129,162,190" "Colour15"="122,166,218" "Colour16"="178,148,187" "Colour17"="195,151,216" "Colour18"="138,190,183" "Colour19"="112,192,177" "Colour20"="192,200,198" "Colour21"="234,234,234"
Having a half decent set of UNIX tools is always a must, at least for me, in this era of computers, pre-WSL days, the go-to solution for having a proper command-line environment, apart from trying to use PowerShell, was to install Cygwin. If you're running a 64-bit version of Windows 7 you can install Cygwin 3.4.10, as per the official website, and use the Cygwin Time Machine.
If you're running a 32-bit version of Windows 7 as per sizeof(cat)'s amazing knowledge base you should use version 2.923 together with the Cygwin Time Machine. Since there are a couple of things that need to be done in order for the setup to work I've created the following batch file to execute the setup program properly and with a single double-click:
setup-2.923.x86.exe --no-verify --no-warn-deprecated-windows --only-site --site http://ctm.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa/2022/11/23/063457
Bash is cool and all, but let's be honest, these days fish makes life a lot easier. According to someone on Super User you can easily change the default shell that Cygwin starts up with by setting the Windows SHELL environment variable to the UNIX path of the shell you desire.