Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Downgrading Windows 8 to Windows 7
Downgrading Windows 8 to Windows 7
Experiences of Downgrading a Windows 8 Sony Vaio SVE1512B1EW Laptop to Windows 7
For this blog I thought Id share my experience of ditching Windows 8 in preference for Windows 7.I have a customer who has been using Windows 7 on various machines quite happily but needed to buy a faster laptop. So off he went to PC World and had a look at the machines on offer. For some reason, he has a thing about only buying Sony kit. All the machines were on sale with Windows 8 pre-installed. He asked the assistant whether any of the Sony laptops could be supplied with Windows 7 but was told that was not possible so he thought hed just buy a machine anyway as maybe this much advertised Windows 8 would be just fine after all.
After playing with the machine he and his wife decided that they really didnt care at all for the whole Metro UI and the the silly tiles which didnt seem appropriate for a non-touch screen device. They just wanted to have the same screen as they were used to with Windows 7 and an always visible start menu. Indeed, if you Google youll find plenty of other unhappy Windows 8 campers out there. My customer then bought a Windows 7 license and asked if I could clear Windows 8 from the machine and install that, instead. I did mention that in doing this it would mean that the machine no longer would be supported by the supplier but they were quite happy to change to Windows 7 and, after all, it was their choice as they owned the hardware now.
Guess where the BIOS is
Firstly, I tried to boot the PC from a Knoppix cd so I could use a partition editor to clear the disk and create a new ntfs partition. However, the machine clearly wasnt going to consider booting from the CD drive when it had an OS on the hard drive. No worries, I thought, Ill change the boot order in the BIOS. The problem was that the Sony machine came without any paper documentation or CDs and try as I might to get into the BIOS screen, with this machine no amount of tapping Function keys (F2...F12) while powering up would allow me to do that. Also, there was no on-screen message about which key to use to enter "Setup" like you get with most other PCs. |
| Hunt the BIOS key |
To be fair I had already tried that key as part of the desperate attempts to get into the BIOS screen but it turns out the machine has to be OFF before you hit that key. Aha, having worked on PCs for decades I didnt see that one coming. Nice one Sony !
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| Assist Button Setup Menu |
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| UEFI V2 supported Secure Boot |
However, fortunately you can disable the Secure Boot feature of UEFI on this particular machine and tell UEFI to use legacy BIOS boot mode instead.
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| Revert to Legacy Boot Mode |
This raises some interesting questions about what if you couldnt turn off this security feature. Presumably then you couldnt just install an OS like Linux on the hardware that youd bought unless the Linux was also signed and the corresponding key was already in the UEFI key store. However, UEFI does have industry support is very likely to stay with us as there are good points about the UEFI spec including support for booting very large drives.
Great, so now I had finally got to the stage of where I could boot from my Linux CD at which point I was able to simply use gparted (which unlike fdisk understands GPT) to remove all the partitions including the GPT used by the UEFI. Next I created an NFTS partition for the whole 760Gb drive ready for Windows 7.
Windows 7 Installation
The install of Windows 7 now went smoothly but as I was sailing in uncharted waters, cautiously decided not to active the license yet during the set-up wizard just in case something else didnt work in which case Id have wasted a license. Not that I could have activated the license over the internet anyway as youll see in a moment.OK, so now I had a booting Windows 7 machine but looking at the status of the system hardware devices could see that Windows 7 wasnt able to provide drivers for a lot of them including USB, wired and wireless networking and other pretty fundemental devices.
No worries, Ill just nip over to the Sony website and download the drivers like I would do for any other machine installs. Wrong! The Sony web site has no downloadable Windows 7 drivers at all for this particular SVE machine. This seemed crazy as Windows 7 is hardly what Id call an ancient OS but an on-line chat with Sony support staff confirmed they dont provide ANY support for Windows 7 for this :
"You may install the Windows 7 operating system but we cant assure the functionality of the Windows 7 Operating System with the computer as the drivers are not available for the same."
So I asked whether they intended providing such drivers and was told:
"We are investigating this area and drivers to see if this is possible."
Then I asked if they could let me know via email and was only told:
"You can get back to us at any time. You can book mark the eSupport link to check for the drivers for Windows 7. "
At this point I was looking at about £500 worth of junk sitting on the desk because Windows 7 is unusable without the networking etc. and because the customer had no intention of continuing the use of Windows 8, didnt make a system recovery disk from which I could revert to. In the same Sony support chat session I was informed that I could purchase the Windows 8 recovery DVD in the UK. I emailed Sony in the UK who replied to say I could certainly do so for £48. In that case we could restore Windows 8 along with the original partition table and UEFI secure boot and return to vendor or sell.
OK, but before giving up on Windows 7 youll have to forgive me for having suspicions that Sony have made some sort of pact with Microsoft to help sell only Windows 8 because of an uphill battle due in part to the bad press surrounding its use on non-touch screen devices. Hang on though, I thought, unless they had radically changed the motherboard there was a good chance of being able use some of the Windows 7 drivers from other similar named E series models on the Sony web site. Worth a try anyway so I downloaded some and burnt to a cd and tried them but only found drivers for some of the system devices and certainly not the networking devices.
Some Detective Work Needed
In Windows Control Panel under System you can use the Device Manager to get the hardware properties of all the current devices. There are two hex values of interest to us corresponding to the name of vendor and then that of a particular device.
You can look them up with the excellent free pcidatabase web site. For instance 0x8086 is the id for Intel (coincidence? no!).
Armed with this information I was able to go directly to chip suppliers websites (RealTek, Intel and Aetheros, etc) download the drivers and now Windows 7 is working just fine with all its devices recognised. To be honest, I was half expecting issues with driver compatibility or an occasional blue screen of death but all appears fine after 2 days of constant use during which Ive installed all the Windows updates and a load of 3rd party stuff. Overall, this is pleasant machine to use now. Of course using the "Assist" button when booted in Windows 7 doesnt do anything now so I suspect that was loaded with functionality by Windows 8. If they had decided to keep Windows 8 the OS provides access to UEFI configuration as well under the Advanced Options of Troubleshooting.
Lessons
Ive learnt a lot from this experience about attempts to lock-in an OS to hardware and about UEFI. Next time Ill probably just so no and say they should just take the machine back to the shop and well find a different PC or ask me first before purchasing.Go to link Download
