bring win7 support back

[MyTDT-Mysoft]

theres 0 reason to not support that...
and i'm tired of fixing everyone else incompetence...

[Ayase-252]

Support for Win7 has been removed in Node.js v14.

... The msi installer is still blocked on Windows 7 but the 7z/zip and/or exe downloads are not if an environment variable is set.

While it seems possible to be installed in Win 7. See #35430 (comment). but function is not guaranteed to work, use at your own risk

[MyTDT-Mysoft]

yes i did that... but while node.exe itself it works... the emscripten that install node still detect a faillure when installing related to lack of that... even if i set the environment variable... so i will inspect further to see "how" it fails to detect a successfull install of node.

[Trott]

Windows 7 is end-of-life. Microsoft doesn't support it anymore (short of extended support contracts, I imagine), and Node.js has a (very sensible, IMO) policy about supporting end-of-life operating systems:

Node.js does not support a platform version if a vendor has expired support for it. In other words, Node.js does not support running on End-of-Life (EoL) platforms.

You're welcome to try to get Node.js running on Windows 7, and some folks might even try to help you out if you get stuck. (I'd recommend opening issues in But it is not a good use of our limited largely-volunteer resources to try to commit to supporting EoL operating systems.

I'm going to close this because I think the chances of us bringing back support for Windows 7 is negligible. But I'll ping @nodejs/build and @nodejs/platform-windows just in case anyone on those teams disagrees.

[Psychosynthesis]

Add Windows support to the 14 branch of the node!

Because of this limitation, half of the projects cannot be supported if the developer's computer has a seven.

As far as I can tell, this is essentially just a whim of the developers - "let's stop supporting this junk", despite the fact that people continue to use it, and there are no killerfits here, which could be expected in the 14th version due to the termination of support.

---

I duplicate my post also in this thread: #35430

Sorry if this looks intrusive, but because of this, I am now facing a situation in which I, apparently, have to install a virtual machine to run a new Windows under it, simply because I cannot (and do not want to) update the OS for a thousand reasons, but for work I need Win and NodeJS not lower than 14th, аnd this is real ridiculous situation. Therefore, I want the developers to pay attention to the problem. Thanks.