Downgrade of Operating System

[Naptonian]

The M01 F0021 na has Windows 10 as the default Operating System. Is it possible to install Windows 7 Professional on the Desktop, please?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Looking at the specs your PC has, installing W7 would not be possible.

[Naptonian]

Paul: Thank you for your quick response. Is the reason due to an incompatibility of the design of the Motherboard Firmware with respect to Windows 7 [i.e., in the BIOS chip set] or something else?

The reason for this rather strange requirement is the person I am trying to help with a downgrade is because he just can't get on with W10, despite me explaining that W7 is now at 'the end of life', and I agreed to try it out. Luckily, before I tried to do it, I decided to ask on the forum to see if it was do'able

Regards,

Naptonian

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

There are several reasons you can't install W7 on there.

There are no W7 drivers for most of the hardware it has (graphics, etc.).

When you go to install W7, the KB and mouse will freeze because W7 doesn't have the USB drivers needed for the modern 3.0/3.1 ports.  So you can't even get that far.

You can try it but I know there won't be any graphics drivers.

If in the chance you were able to figure out how to get the AMD USB drivers into your W7 installation media, and somehow got W7 on there, I suppose you could buy a compatible graphics card that has W7 driver support to get around that issue.

It would be a project for someone far beyond my capabilities to help anyone with.

I could help with drivers post installation, but could not help with getting W7 installed.

[Naptonian]

Paul:

Again, many thanks for your considered & detail response. I have spoken to my friend and persuaded him that a downgrade is not a good path to try and that he needs to bight the bullet and let W10 take the strain. I suspect he will need more support from me to gain the confidence required [he is still using Office 97 for his main Access Database......].  So, I can now continue with getting his nice new HP machine into a from that it can be handed back to him shortly, rather than take on all of the risks of struggling to try making it work on Windows 7. 

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Anytime.

Glad to have been of assistance.

I haven't tested Office 1997 on W10 but hopefully, it will work.

I've got Office 2007 on a couple of mine--works fine, and Office XP will work (Excel, PowerPoint and Word), but not Outlook.

My wife was running a hockey stats program she used while keeping score for high school ice hockey games that was written on Access 2.0, and that worked on W10.