So I have this Acer laptop that came pre-installed with win7, no disk but got the product key sticker, and I also bought win8 when it was on sale and installed it. I liked using 8 but I get annoying problems every so often like wifi not working and need to reset my computer, and when it comes out of sleep it would wake for a second go back to sleep and wake up another 5 seconds later. Now it boots to a black screen at least 25% of the time and I gotta do a hard reset. I'm over it, maybe this lappy can't handle windows8?
Anyway I'm dowloading an ISO file from digital river as we speak,. I've been seeing a lot of horror stories not being able to downgrade back to 7 from 8 so I thought I'd ask here if anyone knows if the OEM windows home premium ISO will be unlocked with my Acer product key? And it windows will even allow an clean install of 7 from 8.
I also made a back up recovery disk the day I bought the laptop but I have serious doubts it will reinstall the os.
I'm also curious if I do go back to 7 with no problems if I can still install 8 on a new machine in the future?
you should still be able to use the windows 8 install again later. You may run into trouble loading windows 7 back onto the laptop because windows 8 uses a different partition type than windows 7. You will want to format the drive clean before doing the install.
in essence windows loader is windows cracker for authenticating that allows you to bypass registration with a key. aka windows bootleggers best friend. :) number of windows version's purchased 2 number that will be payed for in future 0.
Then use a Linux ISO on USB or CDROM to basically get into a disk partition program like GParted
Then use GPARTED to nuke your hard drive partitions and totally clean all of them out until it shows your hard drive as 'Unpartitioned', apply changes.
Then find another ISO that allows you to perfom a secure wipe, 'google it' there is a bunch of them out there that can do this, It is good to securely wipe your disk after removing partitions for a new install so that during the wipe any crappy old data that may have been slowing your system down or causing errors or viruses gets completely removed, typically a fast wipe will overwrite your disk with 000 binary, a DoD wipe will take much longer anywhere between 7 hours for DoD Short or 22 hours for DoD Long on a hard drive that runs at 5400rpm and is around 250 to 500gb.
Remember simply re-formatting your hard drive wont clean it out completely, re-formats will simply move data to an unused section of your drive and the old data may still be recoverable, so in order to do a fresh installation you should really aim to sanitise your drive completely before installing anything new.
Once your laptop disk is nice and clean and unpartitioned proceed with the new installation of windows 7 and its respective drivers, make sure you get the right type of drivers from Acer. Then your laptop should work as normal again,
Or if you havent got a version of windows 7 thats legally obtained then use linux, Ubuntu will work on just about anything and provides a decent desktop environment, for all your basic needs.