Windows 8 build 7777

Windows 8 build 7777 is a build of Windows 8, which was shared by a community member on 27 June 2022.

Branding
The end-user license agreement has been updated and now no longer refers to the operating system as a release candidate build of Windows 7.

Wallpaper
This build replaces the Harmony wallpaper with a blue-green gradient that advises Microsoft employees to not leak the build. There is a difference between this version of the wallpaper and the one from build 7814, which is an asterisk after the word "leak", with the asterisk leading to an additional warning about the legal consequences of sharing the builds outside of Microsoft. The confidential warning was also added to. In this build, the confidential warning is on the wallpaper, whereas in build 7814 a watermark is used instead.

Hyper-V
This is the first available build to add support for running the Hyper-V hypervisor on the Professional and Ultimate SKUs. Interestingly, if the Hyper-V boot fails, messages asking the user to enable virtual machine extensions will be printed directly onto the boot screen instead of being spewed as an Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) log. A similar occurrence can also be visibly observed in build 7779 and 8128.

Internet Explorer 9
Internet Explorer 9 has been updated and now features proper branding along with a preliminary version of the final logo. The new tab page was also redesigned to show popular and suggested sites, with an appearance similar to that of the final version.

Help and Support
Help and Support has been updated with a new layout. However, navigation might fail as the program is "undergoing major reconstruction".

XHCI
Native support for USB 3/XHCI controllers has been added to this build, although it does not function properly and will prevent the build from booting unless the controller is removed from the system.

"Change your look"
While this build does not have a user tile, the link to the "Change your look" option used to configure it in later builds is already present in this build.

Send Feedback
The Send Feedback feature has been removed in this build.

Redpill
This is the first build to introduce the  and   libraries that would later implement parts of the Metro interface, however, both libraries are merely non-functional stubs at this point. The Redpill feature locking mechanism likewise is not implemented either.

Windows Store
This build has an extremely early implementation of the Windows Store, dependent on Microsoft intranet servers. It does not work by default as it queries a Microsoft intranet server for a file by the name of "users.ini" to determine if someone's local user account is permitted to use the Windows Store. As this only existed inside Microsoft for a brief spell in 2010, and nowhere else, it will fail to find the server and exit before displaying anything. However, it is possible to patch this and see an offline screen.

Inside the function that evaluates the user's eligibility to use the Store is a call to the Windows API function, which tries to read a value from an INI file and also takes a default value to be returned if the function fails. By changing the default value (stored as an immediate in the function call code) from 0 to 1, the Store is fooled into believing that the current user account is permitted to use it and it will then proceed to start. It will then immediately try and contact an intranet server and then fail because it does not exist, displaying a "could not connect" message.

This patch also works for build 7779, and can be obtained by changing 0x9D9 from 0x01 to 0x00.

users.ini format

 * Replace user1/user2 with the local user account name of your installation

[users] user1=1 ; permitted to use windows store user2=0 ; not permitted to use windows store (any value that is not 1 fails)