Windows 7 desktop and start menu on Windows 8 - beta 5 31/08/2012
Long story short, i made a wrapper to Windows 7 explorer.exe to run on Windows 8. You can try it now in order to have native Windows 7 desktop experience, without immersive shell bits enabled, saving RAM. New Windows Explorer features like ribbon and file copying are present.
You need to have Windows 8 RP or RTM (32-bit or 64-bit) installed. It should work in Server 2012 too.
Installation: grab c:\windows\explorer.exe and c:\windows\en-us\explorer.exe.mui from windows 7 system or installation CD (with latest beta 7-zip from sources\install.wim).
It must be same bitness and same language (or en-US) version. You can use Server 2008 R2 too.
Extract them to directory like "c:\explorer7". Extact attached archive to that directory too. It should look like this:
Launch patchex7.exe. It will patch windows 7 explorer.exe. Then choose "7" to set it as default shell in registry, terminate current explorer.exe and log you off.
After log-on you should see Windows 7 desktop.
To uninstall, launch patchex7.exe again, choose "8" to reset shell to default explorer.exe in registry. Do this if you're upgrading patcher too.
