How to install Visual Studio 2013 Community Update 4 or 5 for Windows 7

Question

This is similar to Install Visual Studio 2013 on Windows 7

But there are a few key differences:

1. I'd like to install the community edition of Visual Studio 2013, not the express edition.
2. This is a specific question for Update 5. A while back I was able to download Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 for Windows Desktop and it worked fine. But despite a lot of searching, I was only able to find a Windows [8 or 10] installer for Update 5.

LATE EDIT: the computer I'm referring to in point #2 that worked with visual studio 2013 update 3 is not the computer I'm working on now, it turns out that the computer I'm on now didn't have SP1 installed on it.

At first I thought they merged the installers for windows and windows desktop like they did for VS 2015, but when the download finally finished (much to my disappointment) it presented me with a message saying that it was not compatible with windows 7. I wasn't able to find any official news from microsoft saying they were dropping desktop support for update 5, either.

I think this was a problem with update 4, too.

Has anybody successfully installed Visual Studio 2013 Community Update 5 on Windows 7, using a fresh install?

If not, does anybody know where I can still get an iso for VS 2013 Community Update 3?

It seems like everything that used to be a requirements page for VS2013 redirects to a download page for VS2015 now. I'm not having much luck with archive.org, either.

I found this page about VS 2013 compatibility but it does not say anything about the community edition. https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-2013-compatibility-vs.aspx

Answer 1

I found the problem, when I installed the OS on this machine I didn't realize that I had a Vanilla Windows 7 disk, instead of one that came with Service Pack 1 pre-installed.

I was comparing my experience with 2013 on a different computer that had SP1 already installed, that's why I thought it was due to update 4 & 5, sorry for the mixup!

It appears that Visual Studio 2013 requires Windows 7 SP1 and higher. When I installed SP1 the Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 installer worked as expected. Visual Studio 2013 did not stop working on Windows 7 after update 3. Also, there's a single iso for all OSes now (as opposed to having one for Windows 8+ and one for Windows 7 in Update 3).

It might be worth noting that Microsoft's Visual Studio 2015 compatibility page shows support for "Windows 7", farther down the page in a footnote it says that it requires "the latest service pack for all operating systems". Unfortunately, I just noticed that footnote now.

https://www.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-2015-compatibility-vs