Following on with the Windows 10 tutorials, I’ve made a (surprising quick) video tutorial on how to revert to your previous version of Windows (7, 8 or 8.1) from Windows 10. Since no more steps are needed aside from what’s explained in the video, I will simply post a transcript of the video beneath it.
As a side note that I did not take in to account as was asked after I had done the video, you do not need to worry about reinstalling drivers for your hardware as long as it’s the same hardware you had before you upgraded to Windows 10 since they are part of the backup used to revert to the state your computer was before the upgrade.
How to go back to a previous version of Windows from Windows 10
Video transcript
Hello Everyone, this is That IT Guy and following the series of Windows 10 articles, today I’m going to show you how to revert to your previous version of Windows if you want or need to.
Before we start remember to back up everything as while in theory we will not need to, it’s always important to back up everything before an operating system change.
The first thing we’ll need to do is click on start followed by settings. Once there we can click on Update & Security where we can click on recovery. Remember this option will only be there if you updated to Windows 10 from a previous Windows version no longer than 30 days ago.
Once in Recovery you’ll see an option that says “Go back to Windows 7” or 8 if that’s what you had. For the purpose of this video, I upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 but the process is exactly the same for either. Note that when I say Windows 8, I also mean Windows 8.1
Once we click on Get Started we’ll be greeted with a screen that contains a quick survey, we can choose whichever option we feel is right and choose to Tell Microsoft more. When we’re ready, we can click on Next.
The process will then start and will automatically restart the computer. For the purpose of this tutorial, the video has been altered to go faster but the process can take anything from 10 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how much you have done in Windows 10 such as installing programs or creating files. While files will be kept, programs you have installed will be gone as the process is reverting our computer to how it was before we updated.
Once the process has finished we will be greeted with a quick sense of nostalgia by seeing our desktop before we upgraded to Windows 10. While personally I think Microsoft has done and continues to do an excellent job with Windows 10, I do understand it will not be for every user just yet due to incompatibilities with either hardware or, specially, specific software that users require on a daily basis. I’d be very interesting to know what your reasons for reverting to your previous version of Windows are so please do leave a comment. That’s all from me, as always you can keep up to date by subscribing here and on the website, scrapebyitguy.com. That IT guy out.
