KiCad 7.0.9 Install On Windows 7 Easy!

[The Doktor]

Here is all you need to get KiCad 7 running on Windows 7x64. Please note that 32 bit KiCad doesn't seem to exist, despite the name of the installer. Don't run "patch_all.bat" a second time (don't patch patched files), it seems to render the patched files unrunnable if you do, but won't hurt anything else on the computer. Just extract the installer again if you accidently do that.

Open the batch file in notepad or other text editor if you want to see what it does, or look up my older posts about KiCad 7 on Win7.

PATCH IS ONLY FOR KICAD 7.0.9!

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1.   Extract the files from the KiCad installer with 7-zip. You can run it from anywhere, but the default location is C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0. If you put it anywhere else you may not be able to open file simply by clicking on them.

2.   Go to the root folder of your KiCad 7 install, this is the folder from step 1. This is the folder where will you see bin, etc, lib, share, and maybe other folders. Extract kicad_7.09_patch_all.zip directly into this folder, you should see 11 new files. Run the "patch_all.bat" file, it will will move and patch files as needed, then clean up the unneedded files from the patcher. Now go in bin and open Kicad.exe. If it opens, all is good. If it complains about a missing Library, proceed to step 3.

3.   (If Kicad asks for missing library) You will find a file named "VC_redist.x64.exe" in your KiCad root directory, this is the installer for the needed VC++ library. Open this file and just keep clicking okay until it is finished. KiCad should Now open and run just fine, but each time you open it you will get a message about unsupported operating system.



That is about all there is to it, you now have a KiCad 7.09 installation which will run on Windows 7 exactly as it does on Windows 10. One bug, the I haven't got the freerouting plugin working on Win7, may be possible with some effort, I haven't tried yet.

With this patch, you should not get any warning about unsupported operating system, if you do you did something wrong.

If you need assistance with this, feel free to DM me, I'm on eevblog every day, but don't always check this subforum.


Ed

[eTobey]

I was thinking about using autohotkey, to close such windows as they appear. This way no exes are modfied and it should work with other versions too!

[killingtime]

Just tried this on Win7x64 SP1 and KiCad crashes on opening the schematic editor.

https://i.ibb.co/ws35mNs/Untitled.jpg

The .bat script ran fine as I put a pause in at the end so I could look at the script output. Script ran as a standard user.
Extracted using the latest 7zip. An older 7zip caused many decompression errors.
Just to be clear, all the etc, bin folders are beneath C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0\

Anyone else get this error?

[retiredfeline]

I'm confused about the purpose of this thread. Does the one-click installer not work? Have you filed a bug report here? https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues

This is an officially unsupported patch to install on W7 which is not a supported platform so reports to the KiCad developers on GitLab will be rejected.

[The Doktor]

Just tried this on Win7x64 SP1 and KiCad crashes on opening the schematic editor.

https://i.ibb.co/ws35mNs/Untitled.jpg

The .bat script ran fine as I put a pause in at the end so I could look at the script output. Script ran as a standard user.
Extracted using the latest 7zip. An older 7zip caused many decompression errors.
Just to be clear, all the etc, bin folders are beneath C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0\

Anyone else get this error?

How many times did you run the patcher? I got a similar result when I tried patching files that were already patched, just to see what would happen.

Yes, your path is correct. Besides, if you don't patch the files, and extract the api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll file to the bin directory it will run just fine. The patches just prevent the "unsupported file system" error from appearing on each launch. Once you click OK the warning closes and all is fine.

What are your system specs? Does the PCB editor open? I do have an older notebook with a really poor GPU, it can run the PCB editor just fine, but not the schematic editor, this is in both Win7 and 10. Can't remember if it reported insufficient GPU or just crashed.

[killingtime]

>>How many times did you run the patcher?
Just once.

>>What are your system specs?
Win7x64 SP1. i5-3230m 12GB RAM

I'll re-install the OS and see if that fixes it. If no one else is seeing this then it might be my system. I'll report back when I'm done.

[The Doktor]

It's not likely to be an OS issue, I wouldn't re-install. What video card? That may be the problem. The CPU and memory are decent, but I see it's a mobile processor. I suspect it may be GPU related.

Extract KiCad again and try running the unpatched files, just add api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll to the bin directory and see what happens.

I see the main KiCad running, try all the other patched files and see how they do. I'll be keeping an eye on the thread.

[eTobey]

Installed the vc redist???

[killingtime]

>>Installed the vc redist???

Yes. OS re-installation cured the problem. It was something to do with my system.

[The Doktor]

killingtime, I'm glad you got everything working okay. If you have any suggestions on how I may be able to improve my package, I've always happy to listen. I am a big fan of both KiCad and Windows 7, And and very happy in doing my part to help them live together. I'm certainly hoping this will continue even after version 8 comes out next year.

There is one thing I forgot to mention in my setup directions. As you probably notice when running Windows 7, the chrome browser always starts up with a message about the operating system no longer being supported. I found this annoying, so I found a setting to get rid of it, and added it to the registry file. Here is the line: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome]
"SuppressUnsupportedOSWarning"=dword:00000001
It is not any kind of pack that I developed, it is just a setting which prevents that message from being displayed on every startup.This has one side effect, which I will mention here so you do not get alarmed.When you go into the settings for Chrome, you will see a message at the top "Your browser is managed by your organization". Apparently Chrome considers this setting to be some form of management. The first time I saw this on mine, I thought that I had somehow been infected, took me a while to figure out what was causing it. I mention it here so you don't go through the same problem yourself

[Lacibácsi]

Hello Doktor !

Can You please release the patch for the current Kicad 8.0.1 version ?

Thanks a lot.

[The Doktor]

I'd love to, but there is a small problem. While the main program, the PCB editor, and all the accessories work just fine, the schematic editor does not. If you try to load eeschema.exe directly it gives an error related to the file _eeschema.dll. If you try to run it from the main program, you don't get a message but it just hangs forever. When I get the time, I plan to see if I can compile that DLL so that it will run in Windows 7, but it may be a while before I even get a chance to try, and I may fail.

I do have version 7.0.11, which I believe is probably going to be the last release of kiCAD 7, working quite well if you would like me to post it.

[pandy]

I do have version 7.0.11, which I believe is probably going to be the last release of kiCAD 7, working quite well if you would like me to post it.

Sure - this thread is about going opposite to something called "planned obsolescence". I never get open source developers following agenda of companies like Microsoft - IMHO this is contradictory to open source philosophy - I you have working solution for 7.0.11 then please post it.

[bateau020]

I never get open source developers following agenda of companies like Microsoft - IMHO this is contradictory to open source philosophy

It is not so easy unfortunately. What I'm about to say has probably been told before, but please people, do not keep on using an expired OS for the wrong reasons.

About Microsoft making Win7 obsolete: yes, maybe that is planned obsolescence. And I agree that planned obsolescence is not good.
But for developers (be it open source or not) there are 2 problems with that:

1) you are not necessarily doing people a favor by helping them keep on using an insecure OS. Most people do not have the skills and tools to keep a machine with an expired OS safe. So it can be seen as a gentle push in the right direction to incentivise people to upgrade their OS.

2) APIs and SDKs change. Having to maintain several versions is effort and cost. Also for open source devs.

In my job I often have to deal with enterprise systems with old OS's (be it Win/Linux/Unix/whatever). They often tell me that they kept them active for economical reasons. But now suddenly they have to deal with raised maintenance costs (HW availability, SW availability, tooling for securing, interoperability limitations), legal issues (try explaining that GDPR auditor that you really needed that Win XP system to run your user database), and just greatly increased risks. Once the sh*t hits the fan on such an old system, it suddenly becomes an emergency. And emergencies cost money. A lot of money. At the moment you don't want it. So no, there is NO purely economical reason to keep expired systems.

You may of course decide to keep them for other than purely economical reasons. Good for you. But please do so knowing the consequences and risks.

Yes, I agree sometimes main vendors push planned obsolescence too far, or just make bad design decisions based on short term cost reductions. But it is something we have to live with and adapt to. There are alternatives. Why stay on Win7 when you can also just install a recent Ubuntu? If you really need some old Windows software on that expired OS, do so in a secured environment (ex: VM in proxmox), and know the consequences and risks.

[PlainName]

you are not necessarily doing people a favor by helping them keep on using an insecure OS

Program authors are not the police. Nor are they doctors, psychiatrists, firemen, The State, ... It is not up to them why a user might run a particular OS, not on what hardware it is, nor whether the house has central heating or a coal fire.

APIs and SDKs change

This, and only this, is a valid reason. But even then they shouldn't intentionally block its use. The user should be able to try it and if it works it works, if not it doesn't. The developer should not pre-empt that and stop it even trying.

You may of course decide to keep them for other than purely economical reasons

Economics has nothing to do with it. Simply put, W10 was a pile of ergonomic shit and W11 still is. It has an atrocious user interface. That's it for me: I don't want flat borderless windows overlapping so you can't tell which is which; I don't want buttons that don't look like buttons but just ordinary text; I want to know - without having to try - that the window extends below what I can see and needs scrolling; I want to be able to scroll down, click a button and go to another dialog, then when I close that dialog go back to where I was, not start again at the top of the list and have to scroll all the way down again to get to the button I originally clicked. That's a killer for a settings page when you're trying to set up and change multiple options.

It's just shit. W7 if fine. Actually, W7 is so good that just to do something different Microsoft had to create Metro, and then make it worse than it was to start with.

[SiliconWizard]

Just as a note - that has been said before numerous times though - KiCad's team have deprecated Win 7 not to play the police, but merely because it's dependent on Python which itself has stopped supporting Win 7 for a long while now.
The Python team itself has probably done the same for similar reasons, their dependence on other libraries that stopped supporting it. And so on.

And since supporting every additional OS is a big burden in terms of testing and maintenance, it just becomes kinda obvious when an OS has been deprecated for several years. It sucks, but just the way it is.
Also, they would inevitably get tons of comments from users, just like over here, telling them to quit supporting obsolete OSs as that was a very dangerous thing to do, so that's not playing the police, just avoiding doing something that would only bring them pain, nasty users and no reward.

But since KiCad is open source, you can still try and build it yourself for Win 7. I have actually done exactly this, using MSYS2 for building it, for a couple years. That was possible because MSYS2 itself still supported Win 7, and they shipped a Python build that also supported Win 7. MSYS2 has stopped supporting Win 7 for a year ot two now, and I completely switched to Linux, so I stopped maintaining those builds. But it's possible that it can still be done. I may try again one of these days. I have shared the builds with a few people over these years, but never "publicly". Actually, I was meaning to, and was going to host the builds on FossHub, but they told me that they wouldn't host these unofficial builds unless I got an explicit authorization from the KiCad maintainers. Eventually, I gave up. Just for the history. These were complete builds with no trick involved with MS dlls or whatnot, I had just commented out the nagging popup that said the OS was unsupported, as a convenience.

[PlainName]

KiCad's team have deprecated Win 7 not to play the police, but merely because it's dependent on Python which itself has stopped supporting Win 7 for a long while now

Yes, I accept that, and perhaps should have been clearer in my comment re APIs and SDK changes.

[The Doktor]

Since were in the mood for commenting, I will add a few of my own.

First, why stay with Windows 7? Well I can't say for anybody else, but there are a few reasons for me. The first is that I really like the look of Windows 7 much better than 10 or 11, in fact I believe it was Microsoft's best looking operating system. There was even a guy on some form called bigmuscle Who was releasing a patch to get the Windows 7 Aero interface in Windows 10, Microsoft made sure to break that with every single release. But I can live with the looks of Windows 10, in fact I do on some of my computers. I do not like the way Microsoft is getting to be more like Apple, trying to completely control the user experience. Nor do I like the way they are trying to monitor you everywhere you turn. These are the reasons I stick (mainly) with Windows 7. I don't know how much longer I will be able to do that though. Arduino has not supported Windows 7 for years, but they also don't actively fight against its use. Unfortunately, two or three releases ago it stopped working in Windows 7. They weren't even aware of it until some people posted on Their forum, They just said they don't support it and don't even tested in Windows 7.

KiCad is pretty much the same as Arduino, they stop supporting Windows 7 quite a long time ago. I think version 5 might have been the last that was guaranteed to work in Windows 7. I would be annoyed that these companies no longer support the older OS if they had unlimited resources. Unfortunately, no software developer, whether they are open source or a strictly for-profit company, has unlimited resources. And when resources are limited, I agree that it is much smarter to use those resources to try to make your software work better rather than just trying to keep it working on ten-year old systems. KiCad has certainly been improving, I don't want them to slow that down just so I can run it in Windows 7. There is always this thing called a virtual machine, and it works quite nice. In VMware, if you run in "unity" mode and set it to display without borders, you can have a program in the VM on your regular Windows 7 desktop with a taskbar button which will look and work almost exactly like it was running in Windows 7, except I think the buttons in the upper right corner will still have the Windows 10 appearance. I have done this with both Arduino and KiCad, but haven't really used it much. Arduino has not improved enough in the last few versions to make the newest a much have, and up until version 8 I have had KiCad running quite well in Windows 7.

What will the future bring? Don't really know. I think that getting Arduino latest version working in Windows 7 is probably beyond me. KiCad 8 may still be doable when I have some time. I am not and do not pretend to be a programmer, but the problem with KiCad 8 Operating correctly in Windows 7 seems to be just a single DLL file. It is my suspicion that one of the components are used in the build has changed, and that is what's causing the problem. I am hoping I am clever enough to figure out what that is, and also a way to change it so it works. It is only the _eeschema.dll file which seems to be causing the problem. Other than that, you just add that other Windows DLL that I have been using with all the version 7 releases and it works, but warns you a bout an unsupported operating system on each start. Getting rid of that message is a simple as dispatching a single jump in each executable, there are seven in total. We will see what happens.

I am not looking forward to the future with computers, I dislike Windows 11 even more than 10. They are really pushing hard for you to use a Microsoft account instead of a local account, which I refused to do. They also seem to have a hardware check which will quit it from running on almost every computer I own. I think I saw that there is a workaround for that, but I always question what the consequences are when you force a piece of software to run on hardware that it does not support. Yes, it may seem to work perfectly. But will it after the next update? Will everything truly work correctly? If I can avoid this I surely will. Perhaps it is time I get to know the penguin a little better...

Ed

[PlainName]

Not sure if this might help...

There is an app that adds post-W7 APIs to W7 for selected applications:

https://github.com/vxiiduu/VxKex?tab=readme-ov-file

I gave it a quick test on Rufus: the current download fails to run on W7 but introduing VxKex to it solved that and it now runs fine. The list of known now-working apps includes python...

Unsurprisingly, downloading and/or installing this is likely to trip your AV. All I can say is that the source is available if you want to peruse it or compile from scratch. But I guess if you're that way inclined you'll already have sorted Kicad anyway