Since you mentioned windows 7 specifically, some of the suggestions
aren't really appropriate. I don't believe msys2 supports windows 7
anymore.
I'm also not the biggest fan of msys2, I think it brings in way too much
complexity for what it is. It's useful if you would like to obtain some
hard to build deps like Qt, or require the tooling necessary to run
autotools configure scripts. But most programmers (especially beginners)
don't really have a need for this.
My suggestion is w64devkit. It is a single zip to extract, and it can
work as far back as windows xp.
https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit/releases/latest
Simply download and extract the latest zip here, and start the
"w64devkit.exe" contained. It starts a shell with gcc & friends already
present in your PATH, and you can begin compiling code in under 5
minutes.
