# Win. 10 to win. 7



## Ruby (May 10, 2002)

How hard would it be to do a reformat and then install my windows 7 on this laptop?

Back in the day, I use to reformat my desktop and reinstall but that was before windows 7 even came out.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

Ruby said:


> How hard would it be to do a reformat and then install my windows 7 on this laptop?


Short answer is, it depends. The biggest potential problems are activation, and drivers.

What Windows did the laptop come with when new? Does it have a Windows 7 COA?

And what Windows 7 do you have? (Retail install disk, recovery partition on the laptop's hard drive, recovery DVDs you made when it was new, etc.?)


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## Ruby (May 10, 2002)

Laptop came with windows 8, the 7 disk is an install disk, dot a recovery disk.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

Ruby said:


> Laptop came with windows 8, the 7 disk is an install disk, dot a recovery disk.


Then you'd have to come up with a valid Win7 COA to activate it, or use one of the pirate activation cracks that can be found online. Once you have it working, you'll probably find that you can't get Win7 drivers for some of the machine's hardware.

The Win8 recovery partition is most likely still on the hard disk, but you'll need someone who knows what they're doing to figure out how to get to it. You could try to get to it via Win10's Recovery options, but usually it just wants to reinstall Win10.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Installing Windows 7 is pretty straightforward. The install routine offers to format your hard drive, if you wish. As long as you have the install media just boot to the DVD and you're good to go.


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