Solved Is it possible to use a different Explorer.exe? Say, 10's?

[MrMii Win 7]

I won't lie, I like Windows 7's window animations for minimizing, maximizing, etc. But even though my copy of 10 doesn't function cry, I can still grab files off of the partition. If I were to replace Windows 7's Explorer.exe with the one stored within 10, would I be able to get 10's animations? Or is this just a recipe for disaster? I've replaced system files before, but never messed with Explorer.

 

[Layback Bear]

I have never tried to do such a thing but I thinking because you are mixing two different system it would not be a smart thing to do.

 

[LMiller7]

The chances of that working are very small. You can't normally mix and match Windows components from different versions and attempting to do so could result in an an unbootable system or other unpredictable problems. Also understand that there is far more to explorer than just explorer.exe. There are many DLLs involved which are designed to work together. Because Windows 10 explorer is a part of Windows there was no consideration of making it compatible with older versions of Windows. Most likely it relies on features not available in older version of Windows.

 

[Alejandro85]

Most likely explorer doesn't provide the animations at all, those are probably baked at a much lower level, where the rendering of the basic UI components is done, maybe in the kernel itself. I won't count on copying those at all.
Even copying explorer itself is unlikely to yield good results. While it's just a normal program that runs on top of the OS muck like everything else, it also serves as the main shell in the standard Windows versions, providing the desktop. Messing with it can cause some exotic unexpected problems. I certainly don't want to test on a working system.
A virtual machine seems a nice playground for those things though just to satisfy curiosity.