Deploying an 802.11n USB WLAN driver on Windows 7 32-bit is feasible with known chipsets (RT3070, RTL8188CU) and careful driver signature bypass. Throughput up to 100 Mbps is attainable, limited primarily by CPU and legacy NDIS overhead. Future work should evaluate backporting modern 802.11ac drivers using generic NDIS 6.30 shims – though unlikely to be stable.
Isolate the Windows 7 machine on a VLAN with no internet access; use only for local data acquisition.
Windows 7 32-bit via the following boot-time method: