Laptop - Downgrading Win 8 to Win 7

[Justin]

So a friend has kindly allowed me to look at their laptop, how nice are they? They want it off Windows 8 and onto Windows 7. I thought this might be a relatively straight forward procedure but from a little research appears to be fraught with possible issues. I thought a complete format and fresh install would be OK.

Anyone experience of this? Wonder if problems are specific to certain laptops?

[pisquee]

You may need to set the BIOS to "Legacy" to be able to reinstall as Win 7 - had to do this on a shiny new computer we got as our printers don't have drivers for 8 - took a bit of digging around to find the setting in the BIOS to turn it into an old style BIOS.

[Justin]

Thanks Tim, I did read something about the BIOS so that makes sense

[Angloman]

Best was is to buy Start.exe for £4.99 which makes it look and feel like win7 but still underneath running win 8.Most laptops are now win 8 but being in the trade win 10 is about 3 weeks away from launch lol so the problems start again. The worst machines are HP and Lenovo for downgrading to win 7 as no drivers have be created, most manufacture's have not produced drivers for the machines on win 7.Do a driver check on any machine before downgrading and you will see what I mean. Also the license with the machine is a trade win 8 supplied by Microsoft ,and then you have to buy win 7 which in some cases makes the laptop not good to put on win 7 due to cost

hope this helps all