KiCad 7 on Windows 7

Software
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I know that KiCad 6/7 is not supported on Windows 7.
But there are situations when somebody has Win7 and cannot or don’t want to migrate to Win10/11.
That is my case.

So, I managed KiCad 7 (version 7.0.5 to be precise) to work on Win7. I repeat, I know it is not supported and maybe some things wont work (I did not find such thing so far).

If somebody wants/needs to run KiCad 7 on Windows 7, this is how:

  1. install KiCad 7 on machine with Windows 10
  2. copy installed directory (usually C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0) to machine with Windows 7
  3. download Python 3.9.16 (compiled for Win7) from GitHub - adang1345/PythonWin7: Python 3.9 to 3.11 installers that support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 file python-3.9.16-embed-amd64.zip
  4. unpack it and copy file “api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll” to kicad directory (usually C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0)

Now you can run KiCad 7. It gives warning that operating system is not supported, but KiCad runs fine despite that.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Installing and running v7 on Windows 7

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