Coming back to Unity after a long sleep. (Win 7)

Hello everyone!

I have left the dev scene for some years, but I'm back at it!

My plan is to do some Sunday home dev of some simple Android app that I can test on my phone.
I have a 9 years old laptop running Win7 so I'm not sure which version of Unity I should run.

- I read somewhere that the support for Win 7 stopped earlier this year (can't find the link again I'm sorry).
But the last version is saying it support win7 SP1.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/system-requirements.html

Can you please help me understand which version is best for me?


- I don't have a lot of free GB on my C:\ (System), with less than 7GB.
I have a logical partition D:\ (Data) with around 20Gb of free space.
Would 20 Gb be ok for Unity core + Android support?


As for my 9 years old computer specs, it's quite decent for running Unity on a humble project :
- Intel Core i7-2630QM
- 8 GB DDR3
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M (1.5 Go GDDR5 - DX 11)


Thank to anyone helping me going back to the Devz ^^

Fabzil

 

I run latest Unity on win7 just fine.

However. You disk space is rather low. You really need clear up space, or invest in additional hard drive. Do you have any budged to spend?

You would be looking at Unity 2018 or 2019 LTS to install.

 

You most likely saw the statement that Microsoft has stopped releasing updates for Windows 7.

 

Unity 2019/2020 with Android support takes up about 6-8GB on my drive. So it's stretching it a little thin, but should be possible.

 

Well, you probably need buy new drive regardless. You want to develop projects on old and probably relatively slow hardware. That is a risk of drive getting busted eventually. You want to reduce the risk, as much as possible from the start.

 

Hell yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Thx for the support people!

So in theory I would go for a 2019 LTS install with Android support and I would be looking at 8Gb of install on D:\

As for buying new hardware, let me just say lololol if I had the $ I would not dev on a 9 years old laptop

 

So I downloaded Unity 2019 LTS and in the list I asked for the Unity core and the Android Support.

Download was fine, quite fast
I was able to specify the location for the downloaded installer, and also for the Unity Editor. Perfect

Unfortunatly when the installer installed VS, I was not offered to select on which drive to install, and thus it was installed on C:\
Not cool. I now have less than 1Gb of free space on my system partition.

Is it possible to uninstall VS manually yet properly, and then re-install it on D:\ ?

 

I don't think you can install VS in other place than OS partition.
It installs number of dll files, which also Win 7 depends on.

What are seizes of your partitions?

You may be worth considering pendrive at least.
And of course remote revision control and data storing for your projects.

 

- Did a bit of research and indeed, it's impossible to install VS on another drive than system, because of .dll
What is possible is to tell the installer to move the very few files that can indeed be on another drive, but most of the install will still be on the C:\
Some poor soul who tried this said that around 10% of the files can be install elsewhere, but the 90% will be on C:\


- About my drives, C:\ system is 100 Gb and my E:\ Data is 310 Gb (a 500Gb drive that is).

Mind you that in 2011 that was plenty good. But nowadays its insane. Counte-Strike GO is a 25Gb install lol.

I was forced to clean up both my system and my Data in order to make it work. In some way this is good practise. I moved CS-Go to Data (25Gb!), I deleted a redondant Windows Image Backup (32Gb!).

I now have a system with VS and ~26Gb free space (quite healthy for a 9 years old laptop) and data with ~23Gb free space.

- Finally I do intend to make back-ups on my external hard drive, but for now It's more about coming back to dev and fiddling around with the new technology, instead of starting my life-changing millions dollars app

 

By the way this hardware should have no trouble running Windows 10. I have a slightly weaker laptop (i5-2520M w/ 8GB RAM) from that time period and it's able to run it just fine.

 

But what would be the point installing win 10? Unless Unity can not handle win 7 anymore.
I don't have good experience with win 10 on modern laptops owned by my family members.
And we need consider here 9 years old hardware.

 

If it's a concern about performance then that's even more of a reason to choose Windows 10 as it's slightly more efficient with the hardware than Windows 7. If it's a concern about drivers it's been my experience across many devices that Windows 7 and newer drivers work just fine for Windows 10. On occasion even Vista's drivers work.

 

Getting security updates, mostly. Since it's is no longer getting patches by MS, having a Win7 machine connected to the internet is going to become more and more of a security risk.

I would guess your relatives' "modern laptops" are actually crappy laptops. Companies still make and sell tons of sub $500 terrible laptops with 4GB or less of RAM, today's equivalent of Intel's Celeron CPUs, and worse yet: the slowest hard drives one can find. Those would probably struggle with Windows 7 even more, as I had to deal with my fair share of horribly slow Windows 7 laptops 10 years ago (and don't get me started on the netbooks).

There are some changes in Windows 10 which make it more responsive than 7:

1) Fast boot: Windows 10 can save the kernel state to disk (like a partial hibernation) and restore it when booting, skipping large portions of the boot sequence. Windows 10 will also makes it easier to control what programs run at startup, and tries to build a cache to reduce the time it takes to get a usable desktop.

2) Memory compression: a feature that Linux and Mac OS have had for years, finally on a Microsoft OS. Memory pages that become suitable for being paged out are now compressed in RAM, and decompressed if they get accessed again. This reduces the number of times memory pages need to be written to and read from disk (a major cause of slowness on PCs with 4GB or less of RAM). If pages do need to be moved to disk they are written in their compressed state, which reduces the time needed to write/read them. The compression algorithm is fast and the CPU usage is often negligible.

3) XPRESS file compression: if you have a fast CPU but is stuck with a normal HDD (or worse, a 5400RPM HDD) this can boost application loading times significantly. It's also perfect for the OP, who's struggling with low disk space. Unlike the old Windows disk compression, which was slow and single-threaded, this one has very fast decompression and is multi-threaded.
However, it's not automatic: you have to manually compress files via command line, unlike the old NTFS compression which was "online". It's targeted at compressing executables and dlls, and can be used to compress the Windows install itself, so it's great for trimming down large programs like Visual Studio. Just open an admin command prompt, hop into the offending folder, and type "compact /C /S /EXE". There are other compression options, trading off speed for extra savings, but even the default is likely to give you a 2:1 compression, which means your system will take a bit under half the time to read these files from the HDD.
You can also compress the OS itself, by using the /CompactOs option. This is great for those with small SSDs.



There is also one feature in Windows 10 (actually, I think ) that is rarely mentioned, but which makes it using Windows 7 unbearable for me: being able to scroll out-of-focus windows and lists without having to click on them first. For me this was a huge productivity gain. It was something anyone who ever used a Mac would instantly miss when going back to Windows, and made me rely on 3rd party programs to replicate the functionality until 10 came along.

Something else that struck me when I had to deal with a Win 7 PC a while ago was how much better the task manager has become.

 

Well that is common and silly excuse. User must be doing don't know what. To get into security issues this days.

For the first, modern browsers stops users from accessing dodgy sites. Then user got options of installing security software. There are good free, as well as paid one. Most user issues are by accessing and trusting spam and scam emails. No modern OS can prevent user from opening them, other than educating.

Well it is not, even older laptop which has been retired had more than 8 GB with SSD. But that is irrelevant if is low or high end. Issues does ocasionqlly happen.

But this is not a thread to discuss that matter.
I am happy it worked for you guys.

Where is the attitude "if ain't broken, dont try fix it"?

Well if you are advanced user of win OS, there are better task manager tools, than built in. Worth to look for them.

Also, there may big differences between home and profecional editions, which user should be awere of.

Question is, if OP would need to pay for OS upgrade. Looks like this may not be an option in this case, due to insufficient budged.

 

There's a term for that attitude: rose tinted glasses.

Let's just say the number of times I had to do "maintenance" on relatives' PC reduced drastically post Windows 8.1. Yes, Windows 7 was the first "good" Windows, but it doesn't mean we had to stop there. And most of those "free" 3rd party "security software" are often the cause behind terrible performance and bugs whenever I do have to look at some PC.

(Also, you could say we are technically on "Windows 12/13" by now, since Microsoft changed the way they do OS updates).

But yeah, if the OP missed the period where they could freely got a Windows 10 upgrade license, it's a moot point. Keep riding on it until new software stops working on it, I guess. At least it's not an old Mac, where updating the OS it's impossible.

I'm happy I have not yet developed that irrational fear of new things and change at my 40s' doorstep.

 

No. This isn't even remotely accurate. There are numerous unpatched exploits in Windows that require no action on the part of the user to infect the system. All you would have to do is be connected to the Internet. Windows 10 isn't perfect either but it's at least shipping with features to help prevent infection like Windows Defender.

Just as an example here is an exploit that allows anyone to remotely log on to a Windows machine without proper credentials. Being relatively new Windows 7 will have no security patches to address it but Windows 10 is already able to detect it and a patch will likely be released soon seeing as this is considered a maximum level threat.

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_in/what-is/zerologon.html
https://www.microsoft.com/security/...-detected-by-microsoft-defender-for-identity/

Windows 10 license keys can be purchased for around $20.

 

@Ryiah if I understood articles correctly, the vulnerability applies to servers and remote access to machines.
But that as far I could gather, skimming briefly through. I could missed some point.
However, I am sure, this is something which average Joe is not touching by default.

Another thing is, I expect for that attack to be performed, user / server machine must be on public IP.
How many ISP provides such services by default, I don't know.
But I don't expect average Joe having public IP either.

Obviously, anyone hosting any type of public services with serves, should be responsible for security. And I agree, to keep holding for latest updates and patches in such cases. But that is another large topic on its own.

 

Thx for the heads-up guys !

I actually landed a job that will see me getting paid 50$ an hour! Yee-ha !
Now it's more about doing more than a couple hour a week

As for the install of Unity, everything went smooth until it was time to build on my Android phone, and then I realized how intricate the things has become. I did not use Unity Hub which makes everything less "streamlined" so I just uninstall what I had and just went back to installing everything again with Unity Hub because that what they want us to do.
We'll see.

I will definitly not upgrade my old laptop with Win10, It's much better using my time working and buying a brand new laptop with win10 on it.