Updating an Aeroflex 7100 Digital Radio Test Set to Windows 7

The Aeroflex 7100 Radio Test Set is a 6 GHz MIMO-capable radio test set primarily used for testing LTE and UMTS signals. It is quite an old unit and originally runs on Windows XP. Internally, most of its components are based on PXI modules, which can essentially be described as the measurement-device version of PCI.
This raised the question: how difficult would it be to update the system from Windows XP to Windows 7?

Since the device uses PCI-based hardware with 32-bit drivers, I decided to install Windows 7 (32-bit). This should make driver installation easier and improve compatibility with the existing hardware.
By searching for each individual deprecated component, such as the Aeroflex 3035C digitizer, I was able to download all the available software packages from Aeroflex (nowadays, in 2026, part of Viavi). A big thumbs up for still hosting the software on their website.
After installing the latest Windows 7 compatible versions of National Instruments IVI drivers and the LabVIEW runtime environment, I started installing the Aeroflex software tools.
Once all installations were completed, most tools appeared to work correctly. However, the integrated combiner was not initialized properly.
This issue was investigated by searching the original Windows XP installation for compatible INF files. Although these files could be found, the device still did not appear in the system after attempting to install them normally.
After further investigation in the Windows registry, I located the relevant INF reference and attempted a manual installation. When right-clicking the INF file and selecting “Install”, an error occurred. The error message indicated that another INF file, named af3A61.inf, was missing from the system.
This file was eventually found in the following directory of the IVI Foundation installation:
IVI Foundation/VISA/WinNT/af306x
After installing this file, the remaining drivers initialized correctly.
With all drivers properly installed, the Aeroflex 7100 now works perfectly under Windows 7 and can be used with a more up-to-date operating system and can be used with a more up to date os.
Maybe sometimes i will replace the internal mainboard with a new one, and try win 10....