How to bring back the old Windows 7 calculator in Windows 10?

Question

My main gripe with the newer UWP Windows 10 calculator is that sometimes, there is a noticeable delay before it starts up. Otherwise, I don't really have any problems with it.

So, is there a way to bring back the old Windows 7 calculator on Windows 10? I know that in the case of Windows Photo Viewer, it was still there, just hidden away. So, is there perhaps something similar for the old calc.exe?

Answer 1

Requirements: Need a valid genuine Windows 7 license to download ISO file. Alternatively, download the Windows 7 Virtual Machine. For this case I choose IE11 on Win 7 with VirtualBox image. You may choose other Virtual images. The downloaded file name is IE11.Win7.VirtualBox.zip which may change for other images. The file size is 5GB approximately.

Steps: For the Virtual Machine method, download that ZIP file (mentioned above) and 7ZIP tool and place those in same folder. Open the ZIP file with 7ZIP and extract the OVA file aka. Open Virtualization Format Archive. Open the OVA file with 7ZIP and extract the VMDK file aka. Virtual Machine Disk Format. This may take some time depending upon hardware. The files hierarchy will be like as follows:

IE11.Win7.VirtualBox.zip
|
+-- IE11 - Win7.ova
    |
    +-- IE11 - Win7-disk001.vmdk

For ISO method, open the ISO file with 7ZIP. Go to sources folder and open install.wim file.

Windows7.ISO
|
+-- sources
    |
    +-- install.wim

After opening the INSTALL.WIM file or VMDK file from respective methods, go to Windows → System32 folder. Extract the two files: 1. calc.exe 2. en-US\calc.exe.mui in your Windows 10 machine.

install.wim or Win7.vmdk
|
+-- Windows
    |
    +-- System32
        |
        +-- calc.exe
        |
        +-- en-US
            |
            +-- calc.exe.mui

Extract those files in any folder you want. Also make sure after extraction, the folder tree in Windows 10 must be like this:

C:\path\to\your\folder
|
+-- calc.exe
|
+-- en-US
    |
    +-- calc.exe.mui

en-US may change if your locale is different than English, for example ja-JP means Japanese, ko-KR means Korean etc. Run Calculator with double clicking on calc.exe. Sometimes it shows 'Windows isn't genuine'. Ignore it.

Answer 2

If you have a running windows 7 installation you can just copy the the following files:

c:\windows\system32\calc.exe
c:\windows\system32\en-US\calc.exe.mui  

(the sub folder does depends on your localization e.g. 'de-DE' for Germany)

You can copy it to any place just recreate the sub folder and fill the mui file there so that the hierachy is recreated that also Biswapriyo shows at the end of his post.

C:\path\to\your\folder
|
+-- calc.exe
|
+-- en-US
    |
    +-- calc.exe.mui