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Question

rolling back 8.1 to 8

Jul 15, 2014 8:53PM PDT

I have had so much trouble with Windows 8.1 that I have decided to go back to 8 now I have not got a recovery partition on my disc and I didn't make a recovery disc when I had W8 installed, as this will be the fourth installation this year due to W8.1(takes time to get through that its crap) I wondered if any of you have any tips to somehow save as much of the detail as possible so as to make the process as painless as possible, I know I am going to have to reformat the c drive but as I have had a policy of saving any data onto external drives that part will be okay, I have checked the web for help and it appears that it is not possible to just roll back.
the reason for all this is that many programs will just not install and I have paid money to Microsoft to trawl though my computer to prove it, so any advice would be helpful

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Often times
Jul 15, 2014 11:07PM PDT

Often times when people post things like this it's the opposite in that they think upgrading to a new version of Windows will somehow magically fix underlying problems, but same as if you go in the other direction, depending on the problem it might make matters even worse. I see you've made a large number of posts, so if you could just provide a brief summary of the key issues, it might be easier to pick out a pattern. Unless we're talking about a driver issue or one of those exceedingly rare instances of a truly incompatible program, changing from one OS revision to another is not likely going to solve your problem(s).

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rolling back
Jul 16, 2014 7:43AM PDT

if you like to read my post carefully you will see that a Microsoft engineer told me that both the programs that I was trying to install were not compatible with 8.1 so we discussed ways of converting back to 8 so I do not need to provide any more detail, I can tell you I have now reinstalled W8 (which wasn't without its problems) and I can also inform you that both the offending programs have now installed.

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Which programs
Jul 16, 2014 9:42AM PDT

Which programs? I ask mostly out of curiosity, because these must be the obscure of the obscure that some change in Windows 8.1 over 8.0 made them work. I'm still more inclined to think there were other underlying issues that would have been resolved had you simply reinstalled 8.1, but I'll withhold final comment until I see the name(s) of the program(s).

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Other program's
Jul 16, 2014 5:40PM PDT

The program's in question were Banktree a home finance program & Draftsight a cad program From Dassault systems

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If you're up for it
Jul 16, 2014 11:05PM PDT

If you're up for it, install something like VirtualBox on your system and then install Windows 8 and the 8.1 update on it. Don't try and activate it or anything, it's just for testing purposes.

Once you have a clean install of 8.1 in this VM, try installing those two programs in the VM and my guess is they will install and run just fine. While there's at least a remote possibility, I struggle to come up with a single reason why a program installer would work on Windows 8 but not 8.1 unless both programs are using the same installer program and it's some very outdated version, which would be an amazing coincidence. It seems almost infinitely more plausible that there's more to this story than you've told, which isn't meant as an indictment of you -- as it might be something you're completely unaware of and are not deliberately withholding -- just a statement of fact.