 What if I told you there exists a version of Windows that you can't find anywhere on Microsoft's website? One that won't track your online activities, one that's optimized for speed and reliability, and that performs better than Windows 7 or Windows 10? Well, follow me down the rabbit hole, and I'll meet you on the other side. The Masterkeys Pro keyboard lineup from Cooler Master is available in three sizes each, in white or RGB flavors. Check them out at the link below. Now, Microsoft's official reasoning for not releasing Windows 9 was that 789. But we know better. Meet Windows 9, an unofficial custom-built OS based on Windows 8.1 Embedded Industry Pro of all things that applies this extensive list of tweaks to look and feel like Windows 7. Because it's an embedded OS intended for use in payment terminals, digital signage, or other industrial applications, 8.1 Industry Pro lacks telemetry and tracking and is considerably leaner than your standard copy of 8.1 with fewer services running by default. Despite its looks, it's still Windows 8.1 under the hood, which, by the way, is a good thing. You get newer features like SMB3, DISM recovery tools, better memory management, the newer file copy dialog and task manager, Secure Boot, and perhaps most importantly to enthusiasts, native support for USB3. So that shiny new Z270 board will be able to install Windows 9 without worrying about slipstreaming drivers for those of us who keep our optical drives in a bin rather than in our box. Well, that all sounds great, Linus. What's the catch? Well, first of all, you're trusting some dude on the internet who's providing you a modded version of Windows. And second, it's virtually impossible to get a legit license for Windows 8.1 Embedded Industry Pro since it's only sold as part of an embedded system. That means that you're probably going to be limited to a trial install, which obviously isn't ideal. So what can we do about it? We're going to make our own. So we're going to take one part, legitimate, widely available OS, add two parts, modification and tweaks, and boom! Windows 9.5. While it's not going to replicate Windows 9 exactly, it's going to bring us pretty close, and we are able to use Windows 10 to do it. So we start with a fresh install of Windows 10, only the updates and benchmark tools that we'll need for later. First order of business, make Windows 10 look the part. This was not trivial, but with the help of a few free tools and resources, we made it work. The first of these was a Windows 7-styled theme for Windows 10 by DeviantArt user Segaripadipadipadop... Okay, I don't know. Next, we installed AeroGlass, a free tool that does what it says on the tin. Ooh, shiny. We followed that with Classic Shell, a well-known alternative start menu and theme utility, which, with a few tweaks to its settings and a couple of community-provided textures, gives us our Windows 7 start button, start menu, and taskbar... mostly. Then we still needed 7 Plus Taskbar Tweaker to make our show desktop button look right, and then while we're at it, Old New Explorer does a great job of restoring the Windows 7-style Explorer look. Finally, UX-style Community Edition unlocks the theme we installed earlier to complete the look. All it took from there were a couple of registry tweaks, et voila, Windows 7. Of course, Windows 9 is more than just a pretty face. It also disables Windows Phone Home functionality, some services, and some other miscellaneous nonsense. So we followed their lead and disabled the same items. Now, while we can't guarantee that our Windows 9.5 has all of the tweaks Windows 9 does, the key ones are all in there. You can find the full details of the registry and telemetry tweaks in the blog post on our forum linked below. So how do we know we've succeeded? Well, we used our RGB test bench and three separate Kingston KC400 1TB SSDs. Each one was secure erased, then loaded with Windows 7, Windows 9, and Windows 10 so we could perform the best possible apples-to-apples comparison. Then we ran our tests multiple times on each Windows and our own 9.5 mod. The results honestly weren't quite what we were expecting. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, we can see that compared to Windows 7, Windows 9 scored almost identically on average, while Windows 10 and 9.5 were basically identical too. Okay, moving on to Deus Ex Mankind Divided, we can see that Windows 9 actually flunked the test. Yeah, no matter what we did, Square Enix's DRM triggered every time on 9, but otherwise our results were basically the same. Cities Skylines showed off better CPU performance in 10 and 9.5 with a tangible boost of 5 to 6 frames per second, likely down to support for Intel's SpeedShift technology on our Kaby Lake platform, and then rounding out our gaming tests, Crysis 3 brings us back to basically a wash across the OSes tested today. This is starting to feel like a workshop video. Next, we tested system performance, starting with a networked file transfer over 10 gigabit LAN. This one was actually pretty surprising because Windows 7 held its own against our newer operating systems in spite of SMB 3.0, even when testing with groups of smaller and mixed size files. PCMark, however, tells a very different story. Windows 7 was blown away by all our other operating systems with 9 sandwiched in the middle. Interestingly, that trend continued through our final Atto I.O. benchmark, where Windows 7 was handily beaten by everything else. The Windows 10 edge over 9 wasn't something we'd expected to see going into these tests today, but there it is. So then is it worth tracking down the Unicorn license for 8.1 embedded or navigating the labyrinthine depths of DeviantArt? The short answer by the numbers is no. Even Windows 9 didn't perform as well as we expected it to. The long answer, though, has a lot in common with our Does $1,000 Windows Perform Better? the video we did back in late January. The difference between editions of Windows just doesn't seem to matter much even across generations. While there are some cases where drivers or support for hardware features like Speed Shift can make or break a certain workload, it really just boils down to user experience, privacy, features, and support. And that is where mods like Windows 9 or 9.5 shine. But what do you guys think? Did you expect the numbers we got? Are you gonna run Windows 9 or go to the effort of making your own 9.5? Let us know in the comments down below. Crunchyroll was created by a bunch of anime fans who needed somewhere to go and get their anime fix. And then they were like, Oh yeah, I guess other people probably want this too. So you can sign up. They offer the most current episodes of shows straight from Japan like Dragon Ball Super and Twin Star Exorcist and all of the content on their site is professionally subtitled. Our link gives you a whole month of free anime, completely ad-free, and if you enjoy the many benefits of a premium membership like 1080p streaming, new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream to any device like your phone, tablet, or game console, you can continue your premium membership for just seven bucks a month. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and sign up today. Thanks for watching guys. Dislike or like, make sure you get subscribed, and maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. 9.5, what is that? Okay, maybe don't worry too much about that. Also down there though is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and a link to our community forum, which you should totally join. So that pretty much wraps it up. Go watch another one of our videos. This is the most awkward outro ever.