New build for W7

I have built a couple of tower PCs over the years and always load them with W7 because I like how it works and I don't really care about all the perceived "issues" that people warn about. Just recently my wife's Asus laptop has been having charging problems. A common problem with the model is that the charging socket breaks off the motherboard. I have replaced it once already but it is now giving trouble again. If I rest the laptop on edge to apply pressure on the plug it will make contact and the charge light illuminates. The problem is that it never takes on a full charge even after being left on charge over night. I am thinking that whatever controls the charge is now faulty and I am lost. I have already bought a new battery and charger. A replacement motherboard is no longer available. Time for a complete change.
My question. There are lots of older Asus laptops for sale on ebay, etc. but mostly have been "updated" with a fresh install of W10. If I buy one I will need to wipe the W10 and install W7. I am told W7 will only work with certain processors. Is there a list of which ones are compatible somewhere on the net? Our needs are very modest. We don't need zillions of GHz processor speed so pretty much any early version of an Intel i3 would do but I think some will work and others won't. Any ideas?

About eBay, there are sellers that do sell just the motherboard. Use the picclick website for research... Though, I see you're in the UK so may not be suited for your location. I'm not sure.

On the subject of Windows 7 and CPU compatibility. I wrote this: Help an AMD guy figure out what Intel build to put together for Win7

It's not so much CPU compatibility, it's more about motherboard driver compatibility with Windows 7. Without that your SOL for sure.

I just put together a computer for my parents that's pretty nice and not very power hungry (18 some watts on the Amp meter). It's a small Dell micro Optiplex 7040 D10U. I bought it bare bones on eBay for around $50 ( 46 Euros) I think it was. I used my old socket 1151 based i5 6600K CPU, a 256GB Crucial NVMe drive and I bought the RAM on eBay as well. I thought I was buying two 4GB sticks for a total of 8GB which is what the eBay Ad listed. When I got the RAM in the mail, to my surprise it was two sticks of 8GBs a piece! So now they have 16GBs. LOL! More than enough for them just surfing the Internet and printing. At any rate, this computer is Windows 7 and 10 compatible with the available Dell motherboard drivers at their support website for this model. So you might be interested in that. Instead of Windows 7 I stuck something called Tiny10 on it which is what I'm running now. Tiny10 is a striped down version of 10 without all the absolute bullcrap. As someone who absolutely HATES 10 and especially 11 (which came from hell's half acre), I'm thoroughly impressed so far with Tiny10 and what the creator striped out. I can use Steam in Tiny10 and despite lots of crap cut out of it like the Microsoft Store, the need for a TPM or a Microsoft account and whatnot, it's now my everyday driver. It may not be for everyone though. But, if you're looking to "update" and need 10, check out Tiny10. Yes, it'll need a product key, but it's unfortunately Enterprise LTSC. Tiny10 (version 1809, 2209 and 2303) : NTDEV : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

For Tiny10 you'll need to install your favorite archive handler. I use and recommend 7zip for archive files handling. IrfanView for picture viewing and VLC or what ever for audio/video. If someone is absolutely into the Microsoft Store stuff, then use something called Chocolatey instead...

SIW2 said:

up to intel 7th gen officially supports win7.
the major oem like dell and hp have win7 installation/recovery media for up to 7th gen
quite easy to run win7 on intel 8/9th gen ( at least on desktop pc ). The advantage of 8th gen is it also officially supports win11 and the cpu power and efficiency is noticeably improved over the previous generations.
on the other hand, if you just want something very cheap that is adequate for most things, even a 3rd gen would do at a pinch. But if is a laptop I would suggest at least an i5 because laptop i3 are puny .

Many thanks. Clear and concise as always. I was a little worried that I might have a bit of bother finding boards or processors that would be compatible with W7.

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Update:
I managed to find a replacement laptop on eBay. The same model up and running for not a lot of cash. It comes with a fresh install of W10 so all I need to do is flush that out and replace it with W7 and the Simplix Update pack. It is a slightly better machine than our original in that it has an i5 2410M processor. Fingers crossed it will be OK.