What are the Windows 7 recommended system requirements?

1 GB RAM, 16 GB memory and 1Gh processor Source

Why? W7 is a now obsolete operating system. Yes, people still use it on their machines, but in this fay and age why would you be thinking of putting it on a machine as a new installation?

And I believe that @flutherother is wrong – 16gb memory is FAR too high

I think he means “16 gb HARD DRIVE space” not memory

The current system requirements are “Upgrade to Windows 10.”

16 GB hard drive space is correct. I like Windows 7 and will use it for as long as I can.

1GB RAM is lowballing it. In my experience Windows 7 runs well on 4GB, anything less slows it down a lot.

@elbanditoroso Because it’s not actually obsolete, and preferable in many ways to the more annoying versions 8–10, since they don’t have the annoying “your computer OS UI is a phone UI” design, nor the same level of forced intrusive BS, nor the mandatory install schedule, nor the annoying attempts to make it hard to dual-boot with another OS, etc.

@Call_Me_Jay Yeah 16GB RAM is more than it needs (though the other software can enjoy that much or more) – I agree I would want 4 GB RAM. The first answer lists 16 GM “memory” but I think they must be thinking of hard drive space. I don’t know what the minimum is there.

your computer OS UI is a phone UI

Windows 10 does not do that if you have a keyboard.

A lot of the wailing I see about Windows 10 is actually wailing about Windows 8 from people who have never used 10.

I don’t know what the minimum is there
The first answer has a link where Microsoft spells it out. 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit) and 16 GB available hard disk.

your computer OS UI is a phone UI

Windows 10 does not do that if you have a keyboard.

A lot of the wailing I see about Windows 10 is actually wailing about Windows 8 from people who have never used 10.

@Call_Me_Jay Yeah it does! Giant ugly multi-colored rectangles of terror with “recommended” apps and nonsense like “Weather” and “Tuesday” – e.g. this

@Zaku your picture is from 2014. Before Windows 10 was released.

Thanks for proving my point. You’re moaning about an imaginary problem

@Call_Me_Jay Proves nothing and I’ve spent many more painful, aggravating hours than I wish I had working with Windows 10, trying to help people I know who against their desires ended up buying new machines with Windows 10 on them because MS won’t sell a non-phone-UI version. It counts as my definition of a phone-oriented UI. i.e. There are major sections of it where no matter how high-res your monitor is, it goes full-screen and shows you large annoying displays and wants you to learn icons and swiping / gesture-oriented UI instead of civilized lists of options described with words selected by mouse pointer (or when there are lists of words, it tends to be on a giant scale (so you could read it on a tiny screen, but which gobbles up your screen space and keeps you from seeing other things).

I like Win7 – it is rock solid and doesn’t have crap apps floating around. Win10 is fairly reliable now. I have learned to ignore the crap apps that are all over the place.

@Zaku You showed a screenshot from a beta version of Windows 10. It does not default to the Metro tablet interface like that if the machine has a keyboard. It does not go to full screen. I don’t even know how to get into the Metro interface. I haven’t seen it for years.

WIndows 10 has an interface for keyboards which is not much different from Windows 7.

This is Windows 10 on a 1920×1200 monitor.

@Call_Me_Jay On the Windows 10 laptop I’m most familiar with (whose native resolution may be about the size of the lower-left part of your screenshot), which was before the new “Windows 10 Start Menu” update, to get to the list of programs and OS functions, you seemed (?) to need to use that interface shown in the lower-left of your screenshot, which would take over the entire screen, most of which (as in your shot) is filled with giant rectangles of color and icons in some perverse automatic order and including random stuff like in your screenshot such as “DOLBY” and “X BOX” and “Weather” or four icons in one square of who knows what, chosen and arranged who knows how, which can be “swiped” left and right as if it were a phone (except clumsily with a mouse if you’re not on a touch-sensitive screen or don’t want fingerprints on your monitor). To me, that is a phone-type user-interface. And it’s a “here’s what we and our sponsors think you should see for options” interface, not an “pick what you want to see” interface, nor a “here’s an intelligent respectful hierachical UI for exploring everything on your computer” interface.