Old thread, but for information. I use Davinci Resolve 16 on a Win7 PC How is that possible? With a Sandbox (Sandboxie) When installing, the sandbox denies Resolve's driver installation, leaving only the native features of Resolve. Disadvantage: I think I can only open mp4 videos. It can not save h265 videos, even the h264 format is not fully usable when encoding. Anyway, I just save DNxHR or ChineForm in the mov container and then convert that to h264 later. But everything else works perfectly, graphics card is recognized and thus full CUDA or OpenCL support.

I also use Sandboxie and Win7 and have always wanted to try DaVinci but never tried because of all the posts mentioning problems. Now I'm tempted. Any special Sandboxie settings you used?

Just wanted to update this. I, too, am a Win7 user and also found that DaVinci Resolve became "broken" on my system after v.14.2. But I found this thread (some years later) and was enthused to try it. I grabbed the most recent Resolve (16.2.3) and Sandboxie (now released as freewqre) and gave it a go. First, I tried installing Resolve using SandBoxie. That didn't even allowed Resolve to finish installing. Wiped that clean and tried again, this time installing Resolve and then using Sandboxie to run it. That didn't work either. So I got rid of both. Then, not wanting to give up, did more searching and came across this YouTube video - "How to run DaVinci Resolve on Windows 7 and 8? The procedure entry point DeleteCrytical... error" (). A few users had other problems (too weak hardware, too old video drivers and/or .DLL files), but for most it worked ... me included! It's so simple. Just install Resolve. You must be online while doing this to allow Resolve to grab additional parts from Blackmagic Design. After installation, when you run it, you'll get an error message "Resolve.exe Entry Point Not Found -- The procedure enty point DeleteCriticalSection could not be located in the dynamic link library api-ms-win-core-syngh-l1-2-0.dll" and it will not run. The YouTube video tells you to find "opencl.dll" in the Resolve folder and rename it to "openncl.dll" (adding another "n" so the program will not find it). Run Resolve again and this time it will run (no error messages). That's it! Then it works! The Blackmagic Design programmers really need a flogging for not fixing such a nonsensical code error, which prevents untold numbers of potential users from getting hooked on their software. Then again it is buggy software -- meaning you can't do anything you want. You must "learn" what it can do, and do only that. Anything else produces wrong results, or it crashes. (For "free" we can't complain too loudly, I guess.) *rolleyes*

Yeah IMO it's entirely unreasonable to expect a vendor like BlackMagic Design to support Windows 7 for something like a modern NLE. Do you expect them to support XP still? Professional content creation should be happening on modern, supported systems - if nothing else for security reasons. Bleeding edge Windows 10 release? No. The latest known stable and widely released version? Yes. Feel free to keep using the old version, but you're on your own. You really can't fault BMD for deprecating support for such an old OS. It costs money to support old OSs due to QA requirements and probably a lot of crufty code to maintain. They decided it was no longer worth spending those resources, and that was a good decision.

@Cary Knoop: Apropos "stuck in the past" ... this thread was started in 2018. In the meantime, the relevant person was able to spare enough money to afford a new PC. No more reason for blaming the poor.

The only real threat to an OS comes from internet. The good old practice required that such systems, used for professional work, NEVER be in contact with internet (or infected media).