Downgrade from Win 8 to Win 7

dabolina

I just bought an Acer Aspire AT3-605-UR22 and want to have win7 on it rathre than win8.  I've got win 7 loaded on it now but am missing drivers for critical things like motherboard (possibly), graphics card, ethernet controller (not working at all) and the USB controller, even though it shows up in device manager as working, does not work at all so I'm bouncing thriough screens with a serial keyboard only.

 

Acer support was very little help (although they did eventually point me here).  It looks like the motherboard is Acer proprietary, so seems like they should have been able to help with at least that.  I should be able to find win7 drivers for the other things (built in to the MB) but they weren't able to help me out with how this machine is put together.

 

Anyone have experience with this or have any ideas for getting internet, graphics and USB going on this thing?  Is it possible they provide hardware that is incompatible with win7? (that was another question they strangely couldn't answer or point me toward anyone who could).

 

Thanks in advance.

Juzzo

Device manager in the computer management window would be where I started. (provided the drivers were unavailable through acer)

You will probably have to re-install win8 to get anywhere though.

Through the device manager, you can get the details for the components used on the MB (properties), and download them to a USB for after the Win7 install.

This is the short instruction, assuming this sets off a lightbulb, shoot any further questions you have at me.


Personally, after some initial hate, I really like Win8 and would suggest you give it a shot. Just stick the desktop link on the upper left of that silly metro section and you just need to hit enter once loaded to go right to good-old desktop.

dabolina

Couldn't get the recovery disks to restore it to factory condition. Kept getting a msg about booting in legacy BIOS mode. It's UEFI hardware so best i could get to that is to disable SecureBoot and set CSM to always on. No luck. Support suggested I use 3rd party software to repartition and reformat the HD. Did that but same problem. We have the Win 7 disk so just tried to get that installed. Booting to that consistently hung up with a need for CD/DVD drivers, even tho it would get to that point loading from the DVD. I couldnt find drivers for that model so we couldnt get 7 going either. Acer doesnt maintain drivers for Win7 support. They suggested sending it back for replacement, but we decided to send it back to the reseller for a return and go for a more reliable brand with more mainstream hardware. I wish I'd done some things differently. Thanks for the good advice. I wish I could have at least gotten back to that point.