How to safely downgrade to W7 (From W8) on Aspire V5

JoeyDon

Hey there,

 

I hope you'll be able to help me out with this little annoying situation I'm in.

 

I'm not very satisfied with Windows 8 at the moment, I loved Windows 7, but Windows 8 just doesn't rock my boat at the moment, and until Microsoft addreses a few of the issues some of the users seem to be complaining about I would like to keep using Windows 7 (Pro). I've bought an Aspire V5-573G, and I'm not so worried about the drivers. I did some searching and seemed to be able to conjure Windows 7 64-bit versions of most of the drivers from the manufactorers.

 

But, it's not quite like "back in the day" (Which for me is the 2000's) where you got a neat DVD with a cd-key and you could just swap around the OS as you wanted, and to be honest I'm worried I'm going to mess it up and lose my Windows 8 installation files. I'm not that dissatisfied with Windows 8, and I would like to return to it when Microsoft fixes the issues that annoys me, but I'm afraid if I remove the partition with Windows 8 installed, I might not be able to make use of the reset partitions in the future.

My initial plan is to set UEFI to legacy (I read that in a thread here), and boot from the USB to the W7 install. Choose a custom install and format the partition with Windows 8 installed (C: ) and create a partition to install Windows 7 on. Is this safe? Or will this somehow ruin the three recovery partitions (They are: 400MB, 300MB and 16,5GB)?

 

I am aware there is a function in Acer's eRecovery program where one can turn a 16GB (or more) USB drive into a repair drive, but buying a 16GB USB drive to have lying around for months doesn't seem like the most logical solution if there's also ~17GB of partitions in the laptop.

 

To wrap my questions up:

 

How do I safely install Windows 7 Pro from a USB without removing the partitions that holds the Windows 8 Factory Resets?

 

And how would I go about removing Windows 7 and reinstalling Windows 8 sometime in the future?

 

 

(I already noted the license key from Windows 8 in the system screen)

 

For future readers:

- You can make the USB with WinToFlash and an original Windows DVD or image file.

 

I think I remembered everything. Sorry for the long post, I just really don't want to jump the gun on this. I did that once before and it was a mess of broken partitions.

kansayvue

Joey, from my experience if you didn't make a backup of the recovery than you should. A 16g flash drive is workable on it. Once that is completed you can install window 7 on it. When installing window 7, you can install it without deleting the recovery partition. Just delete the main patition of window 8 and window 7 will install over it. You will not loose the recovery partition if you only install on the ain partition.(look for the most space available space partition). Once that is done you should be running the window 7 on the main partition and not to worry about the recovery being delete. If you ever wanted to go back to window 8, boot to the erecovery from bios and re-install window 8.

 

Other option

 

Being more secure is to install another new 2.5 hard drive and install window 7 to it. This is the most secure method if your afraid to install over the partition of the orginal hard drive.