Downgrade to Windows 7

[Gaytan1991]

I purchased a laptop with windows 10 and I am not to fond of Windows 10. Is there any Way for me to downgrade to Windows 7 on this laptop and are there drivers for this system?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Gaytan1991

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

Sorry, but I don't have very good news for you ...

Laptops especially contain specialized hardware for which, for full functionality, specialized drivers are required -- and these come ONLY from the OEM, in this case, HP. Your PC came preinstalled with Windows 10. If you remove or overwrite the original Win10 on your PC with Win 7, you are going to encounter serious problems as there are no HP Win7 drivers for the new hardware that comes with new machines.

MS supplies drivers that provide only basic functionality. This means that some of the hardware functionality is likely NOT to work if you force a downgrade. That includes functions like the touchpad, WiFi, switchable graphics, USB ports -- to name the functions commonly reported here.

That said, someone else might come along and point you to Win7 drivers for other model laptops that that will work with yours -- but if that does not happen, you will then be stuck with a PC with limited functionality as HP is not writing Win7 drivers for their new Win10 PCs.

However ... if you want to experiment, the before you do that, at least take the time to make an image backup of your current setup so you have something to restore FROM if the downgrade goes badly.

I personally prefer to use third-party Recovery solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.

Good Luck