VBox not supported on Win7/8.1 anymore?

[eljuanchoguzman]

Greetings.

Just need to know or confirm if from this version of VBox (7.1.0) only runs on Win10 and last versions, since there's no note telling the end-of-support of Win7/8/8.1, although the user guide says Win11/10/Srv2025/Srv2022.

Scenario: Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 (x64) with all Windows Updates installed. Once VBox 7.1.0 is installed, an 0xc0000005 error is shown when tried to open, but VBox 7.0.20 runs normally.

Thanks for the replies.

[hwertz]

I'll just note the last VirtualBox series that had support for Windows 7 was 6.0; 6.1 (in 2019) dropped Windows 7 host support as a supported configuration. It's just, their meaning of "unsupported" isn't "definitely doesn't work", and they don't artificially block it from running (like Slack, Zoom, etc. that block use of their software on any OS that is out of support). Rather it's "we aren't testing it, and it's best effort if anything breaks". So apparently there weren't too many kernel-driver changes in 6.1 or 7.0 for it to keep working, but there are in 7.1. I would not count on this being fixed since it's been an unsupported configuration for 5 years.

Honestly, I would run a nice Linux distro on there, run Win7 in VirtualBox if you want to keep using Win7 (since running a Windows 7 guest *is* supported) along with whatever other VMs you are running in VirtualBox.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

We don't test on Windows versions which are past end of support and we remove them from the supported OS list. They might still work for quite a while but eventually we'll unavoidably make a change which breaks the packages on old Windows versions. Without knowing, and even if someone tells us we will likely not care because the effort is too big to set up a test system, reproduce and fix the issue - in an environment which is isolated from any networks.

If someone provides us with a plausibly looking patch to fix the issue we may accept it.