Windows 7 still supported by major anti-virus solution makers as ESU program persists
CheckMag
Avast and AVG run smoothly despite the lack of past-2020 patches as Avira and Panda struggle, a brief test shows. Several up-to-date alternative Web browsers are available for Windows users to choose from, too, enabling the 2009 OS to handle 2025 tasks.Sergey Tarasov 👁 Published
Several major Windows anti-virus software makers fully support Windows 7 as H2 2025 is about to begin, a real-world test conducted yesterday, June 28, 2025 revealed. That's for a good reason; the Windows 7 ESU program is still on, as evidenced by unofficial Windows 7 builds appearing every once in a while with updates/patches released a very short time ago integrated.
One does not have to source and install all of those updates in order to run the latest versions of apps, though. Avast and AVG free AV solutions run perfectly fine on a Windows 7 laptop with the latest updates available to the general consumer installed. In fact, both seem to work even if it's a clean Windows 7 SP1 install with no updates of any kind, which is nothing short of a miracle.
BitDefender's free anti-virus solution gets installed just fine but requires the user to create an account for its features to become usable; it thus wasn't tested to a full extent.
Avira would not run once installed; Panda's free-to-use AV solution failed to install, citing missing Microsoft frameworks. While it did offer to download and install said frameworks, doing so did not seem to help.
Some more software that's getting updates regularly as of June 2025 and is fully Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1-compatible, 32-bit editions included:
- MKVToolNix (unofficial builds): A comprehensive, easy-to-use Matroska media file muxer.
- r3dfox: r3dactedfox by K4sum1 is a Firefox fork with some custom features and custom visual design that's said to work on Windows 7 and Windows Vista machines. Please note that this is the only piece of software mentioned in this article that has not been tested by Notebookcheck editors.
- Transmission: A clean-looking, privacy-respecting torrent client with no ads.
- Supermium: A Chromium fork with features such as forced GDI rendering mode and Ungoogled Chromium mode baked in. Supermium fully supports DRM-heavy websites such as Netflix.
- VLC: The venerable media player that can play back anything.
- XMedia Recode: An all-in-one media converter that's been around for many, many years but gets little spotlight. Can be used for remuxing video files, too.
Source(s)
Own research and testing
