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Windows 8.1 Bricked My Laptop
12 years ago
A few months ago, I bought this Samsung laptop (a Samsung ATIV Book 6 680z, to be precise) as a thing I can bring around to do digital art from not-behind-my-desk when the situation calls for it. Hardware-wise, it has all the things I've been looking for in a laptop: A nice high-res, high-density screen with vibrant and true colors, a moderately-beefy CPU and GPU, a nice roomy hard drive, and Windows so I can run Sai and the version of Photoshop I own.
Unfortunately, that's Windows 8. Windows 8 and I were content to ignore each other as much as possible, so long as it didn't make accessing Sai too much of a hassle. But when I heard that an upgrade to 8.1 was out and free and might even make the user interface somewhat usable, I rushed into it. And into a black screen. Video drivers for this laptop that worked with Windows 8 are apparently incompatible with 8.1, and no compatible drivers exist yet. The Samsung support page for my model of laptop is missing, and talking to Samsung support directly has proven to be somehow less productive than talking to my cat.
So. My options at this point are:
1. Wait, and hope that they come out with drivers sometime soon, and also hope that that I can find them when they do.
B. Try to downgrade back to Windows 8 and hope things generally fix themselves.
or III, reformat, install reliable old Windows 7.
I'm heavily leaning to option III here. But a big worry I have is that drivers for this particular laptop won't be available. Does anyone here have experience with something like this? What are my chances? I'd swap out the HD to try it, but the only screw-panel I see on the laptop is for memory; to swap out the HD, it looks like I'd have to take apart the whole thing. :[
And, as a side note, can I just say that god damn cunt sucking bastard son of a shit whore, Windows 8 is the most painful, most obfuscated, most poorly thought-out operating system I've ever used, EVER. And I've used VAX/VMS! It takes the biggest, out-of-its-way steps just to stop you from doing things that should be simple. And while this is bad in just regular use, it is exponentially worse when you're chasing down an actual problem. Example: safe mode. I had to get into safe mode to disable the old incompatible video drivers, so I could see what's on the screen again. In any other Windows, getting into safe mode is a two-step process: Hold down F8 when you boot, and then select "safe mode" from the menu that pops up. Not exactly an obvious process, but simple enough once you know. In windows 8 (and 8.1), here's what it takes:
- Hold F8 as the computer boots, but only if it didn't shut down properly; otherwise, it's Shift+F8.
- Wait while Windows 8 does a bunch of self-diagnostics.
- Once the computer has analyzed itself and failed to find anything wrong, it prompts you to restart. Hit "Advanced Options" instead.
- It asks you if you want to boot, power off, or troubleshoot. Hit "Troubleshoot".
- It asks you if you want to refresh the OS, reset the OS, or see advanced options. Hit "Advanced Options".
- More esoteric OS repair options are presented. Hit "Startup Settings".
- Now you get a page that tells you that you'll get advanced boot options on reboot. Hit "Reboot".
- After the reboot, you finally get to the boot menu where you can choose to enter Safe Mode.
Who thinks this way? What kind of twisted mind does it take to conceive of a hell like that?! It's like an operating system designed by a person that's only ever heard about computers, but has never seen or used one. It's like an operating system where they thought they were taking all the sharp edges off to attract luddites who find Apple iOS intimidating and complex, but ended up burying anything of any use or value under five menus of things nobody would ever want.
So yes! Backtracking from Win8 to Win7 on a modern laptop. Can it be done?
Unfortunately, that's Windows 8. Windows 8 and I were content to ignore each other as much as possible, so long as it didn't make accessing Sai too much of a hassle. But when I heard that an upgrade to 8.1 was out and free and might even make the user interface somewhat usable, I rushed into it. And into a black screen. Video drivers for this laptop that worked with Windows 8 are apparently incompatible with 8.1, and no compatible drivers exist yet. The Samsung support page for my model of laptop is missing, and talking to Samsung support directly has proven to be somehow less productive than talking to my cat.
So. My options at this point are:
1. Wait, and hope that they come out with drivers sometime soon, and also hope that that I can find them when they do.
B. Try to downgrade back to Windows 8 and hope things generally fix themselves.
or III, reformat, install reliable old Windows 7.
I'm heavily leaning to option III here. But a big worry I have is that drivers for this particular laptop won't be available. Does anyone here have experience with something like this? What are my chances? I'd swap out the HD to try it, but the only screw-panel I see on the laptop is for memory; to swap out the HD, it looks like I'd have to take apart the whole thing. :[
And, as a side note, can I just say that god damn cunt sucking bastard son of a shit whore, Windows 8 is the most painful, most obfuscated, most poorly thought-out operating system I've ever used, EVER. And I've used VAX/VMS! It takes the biggest, out-of-its-way steps just to stop you from doing things that should be simple. And while this is bad in just regular use, it is exponentially worse when you're chasing down an actual problem. Example: safe mode. I had to get into safe mode to disable the old incompatible video drivers, so I could see what's on the screen again. In any other Windows, getting into safe mode is a two-step process: Hold down F8 when you boot, and then select "safe mode" from the menu that pops up. Not exactly an obvious process, but simple enough once you know. In windows 8 (and 8.1), here's what it takes:
- Hold F8 as the computer boots, but only if it didn't shut down properly; otherwise, it's Shift+F8.
- Wait while Windows 8 does a bunch of self-diagnostics.
- Once the computer has analyzed itself and failed to find anything wrong, it prompts you to restart. Hit "Advanced Options" instead.
- It asks you if you want to boot, power off, or troubleshoot. Hit "Troubleshoot".
- It asks you if you want to refresh the OS, reset the OS, or see advanced options. Hit "Advanced Options".
- More esoteric OS repair options are presented. Hit "Startup Settings".
- Now you get a page that tells you that you'll get advanced boot options on reboot. Hit "Reboot".
- After the reboot, you finally get to the boot menu where you can choose to enter Safe Mode.
Who thinks this way? What kind of twisted mind does it take to conceive of a hell like that?! It's like an operating system designed by a person that's only ever heard about computers, but has never seen or used one. It's like an operating system where they thought they were taking all the sharp edges off to attract luddites who find Apple iOS intimidating and complex, but ended up burying anything of any use or value under five menus of things nobody would ever want.
So yes! Backtracking from Win8 to Win7 on a modern laptop. Can it be done?
But seriously though, I'd just bite the bullet and downgrade to Win 7, I hope you can rescue your files though D:
Also, you've used VAX/VMS? And I thought I was old.
but after this~ -w-
think i'll switch back to pro 7
sucks about yer situation mate :/ wish I was able to help
thanks for the heads up, it'll save me a bit of green when the time comes
thinking about going with a different brand altogether
http://www.m-techlaptops.com/ShopOn.....?idproduct=813
ahaha, well you can see how tech illiterate I am eh? ^ ^; lol
But of course, we're really talking about high-performance business applications here, such as video editing.
PCs with multi-core processors:
Windows 7 was designed to work with today's multi-core processors. All 32-bit versions of Windows 7 can support up to 32 processor cores, while 64‑bit versions can support up to 256 processor cores.
PCs with multiple processors (CPUs):
Commercial servers, workstations, and other high-end PCs may have more than one physical processor. Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate allow for two physical processors, providing the best performance on these computers. Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium will recognize only one physical processor.
All versions of Widnows Home only supported 1 processor, all versions of Windows Pro support 2 processors, the difference here is the added support for enforcing these limits* based on cores (2000 and XP seem to do this) which are logical processors, or based on physical processors (VMWare tries to avoid this confusion by using the term "sockets"). Im not sure about XP but I can say from Vista on it goes by the number of physical processors. Therefore if your using Windows 7 Home with a 4 core processor, its going to be faster than with 2x 4 core processors, because it will ignore the second socket in the latter case.
* These are not actual limits from an architectural standpoint but software licensing limits.
(RAM was cheap when we built our rigs last year. Boards support 32 GB. I'm at 16 GB, flatmate's at 32 GB just to outdo me.)
While it may not matter to most people, if someone runs applications that can use that obscene amount of RAM, then Home Premium may not be the best option for them.
You are right, however. :P We just have to wait for the software development cycle to catch up before 8GB+ matters the way it should.
8.1 fixed a few of my problems with the OS and I'd actually say it's a fairly nice upgrade from 7 in many respects, but not worth paying extra for if you're good on your current version. But one thing I would never recommend is paying just to downgrade from 8/8.1. Unless you run into a major issue like this (honestly it's the first time I've heard of problems of this sort) you're better off sticking with what comes on the hardware.
too late now, so I'll just shut up.
Swipe from the right (or use the mouse to bring up the right panel), and go to Settings>Restart. DO NOT CLICK YET.
Hold down your LEFT shift button, and THEN click Restart. You'll bring up the menu with those various options to reset and whatnot. If I remember correctly, you just need to go to Troubleshooting>Reset My Computer and that's it.
And my best friend, a masters degree in computer tech and international business says windows has a habit of realeasing a good operating system every "other" time. So I say use windows 7 till windows 9 comes out, but don't be an early adopter.
The next OS they're developing under the name "Windows Blue." Windows blew? It sure did.
Next will be Windows Red: It's gonna make you see red!
Here's hoping for Windows Leaf Green!
Yeah, the reboot Trek movies are very dumbed down action-oriented movies, but I think they stand well on action-movie merits (even if they get the science very very wrong). But the TNG movies were kinda like that too, always trying to make Picard into some sort of action hero. Those didn't exactly work for me either. But hey, at least we're giving JJ Abrams equal opportunity to shit on the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises alike. Can't wait for that. >_>
The Trek fan in me was burned out by actually watching through the series again on netflix recently. TNG held up surprisingly well, but DS9 was good on the arcing plot eps and just awful on almost all the character eps, and Voyager... jesus. I LIKED Voyager as a kid, but man I am >slogging< through it. It's so bad. It's hard to keep going. I burned through all of TNG in like a month or so (last big downtime I took from art), but I've been stuck on the last season of voyager for weeks now. It feels like work. XD But I want to get through ALL of Star Trek, dammit! XC
The Abrams Trek movies were fun movies, good action flicks, and for what passes as sci-fi these days, they're at least par. They're terrible Star Trek, though. Just terrible. The mindless fun part of my brain was enjoying them, but the trek nerd in there was just writhing in pain. WHY was Bones just fucking around with a dead tribble?! WHY?! "Hey Chekhov, why do you have that gun?" "I dunno, I guess I'll have to shoot someone with it later."
I agree with you that Wars was much more about fantasy and action with a sci-fi coating, so I'm actually thinking Abrams could give us something good there. He'd have to try hard to do any worse than Lucas.
I can only agree on all points. I remember Voyager being pretty hard to watch back when it aired, and I can only imagine age hasn't improved it. Are you going to even attempt rewatching Enterprise, or does that not exist for you? Babylon 5 is still fun to rewatch, but its early computer CGI doesn't hold up nearly as well as TNG's mostly model-based effects do.
An annoying trend in movies/tv that irks me is where you have some baddie who can do the "I've planned out everything that's going to happen five hundred steps in advance and anticipated exactly what everybody will do, just because I'm super smart" thing. The second Abrams Trek had that going on bigtime. Come on. Even dull people aren't that predictable, and you're dealing with fucking Captain Kirk with an extra rebel streak.
The Prequels, well, George's weaknesses as a director were amplified by the lazy total green-screen production he chose. The actors have nothing to emote against, the director never has to move his ass out of the one studio, and everybody just gets complacent. Putting someone else in the director's chair will do wonders, much like it did wonders for Empire and Jedi. If Abrams just builds some sets and goes to locations, he'll already be miles ahead.
I once developed a Windows 8 app and it was the same convoluted bullshit. It made me hate programming, and I've been working as one for 10 years. In contrast, making apps for earlier versions of Windows was child's play, and developing an Android app (never having touched it before) was a snap.
Also, what is it with Win8 and launching separate apps from the Metro interface and the traditional Window's interface? Did they ever integrate the two?
(Still using Windows 7 here.)
Sad to hear 8.1 did your graphics driver in. It gave me some real grief too, when it disabled my Autohotkey toolbar on my ATIV Tab 7. Until I got some help fixing the problem, I was hopeless and pretty much unable to do art at all. It was scary; that thing has been my life ever since I got it. I'm not sure what it is about the update, but between removing Avast and resetting some of my settings, it seems to have done more harm than good.
I hate that Metro apps always run full-screen. The name of the product is Windows! How can it be called Windows if things don't run in a window?
I hate the charms menu. It's absolutely non-intuitive that system-critical controls are hidden off beyond the edges of the screen.
I hate its lack of customization. Guppy tried using a Win8 box as a media center for a while, and there was absolutely no way to make the text on the metro tiles large enough to be read on the TV from the seats across the room.
I hate its closed development attitude. To program for Windows, you don't need anybody's permission, and you can publish programs any way you want. To program for Metro, you need to register for it with a Microsoft account, and can only publish through their store.
I hate its UI flow. Every useful thing I'm used to is either all tucked away under ten layers of bullshit, or gone completely. For example, let's say you want to turn your computer off, but your physical power button is set to hibernate. On a Win7 box, it's Start > Shut Down. To turn off a Win8 box, it's Start > User > Log Out > Splash Screen > Power Symbol > Shut Down.
Whenever I use it, it just feels like it's actively working against me no matter what I'm trying to do.
So, the little unintuitive bits I just learned and managed my way around. I rightfully ignored apps, because there's simply no way they could possibly be better than decades of desktop-centric program development. And the interface I learned my way around and it turned out to be fairly accessible after a while.
I guess it's to each their own.. W8 annoyed me here and there, but never more so than most OS' have. Apple has gotten away with the closed development thing (and a LOT more stuff I can't stand in iOS which I really don't want to start ranting about x3) for a long time now, and most versions of Windows have had their own little annoyances that bothered me just as much. I guess I'm just pretty easy-going when it comes to the little things. I've had to deal with so much over the years (VISTAAAA) that I've developed a thick skin to those things in a lot of cases. As long as it doesn't legitimately slow me down in a noticeable way, I just weigh the good and the bad as I see them. In that sense, I found I like the new features more than I hate the strange dual UI and design choices.
A couple tips on shutdown: Vanilla W8 has a speedier but still obtuse method of getting to shut down. Open the charms bar and hit settings, and there's a power button near the bottom. On 8.1 they added shutdown and sleep and all those features to the Start context menu I pointed out, which is also now available on tablets because they were decent enough to actually add in a Start button again. it's possible with a little Power User Elbow Grease to make a shortcut to shut down or go to sleep as an icon in the Start menu or on your desktop if you want, but that's not really something I've cared enough to try.
I barely notice the difference, myself.
I use 8 just like I used 7 and the ones before it. I ignore apps entirely and I'm fine.
No but seriously screw apps. That's my biggest fault with MS. They seriously thought that touch-enabled 'apps' developed in a limited system could ever possibly be more useful than decades of mouse/keyboard-centric desktop program development? I hate that they even try to get you to look at them when you're running 8 on a non-touch device. Even on my tablet they're useless compared to desktop program equivalents. Which is why I'm glad that nothing really changed about the desktop, except for the new features they added.
2. Why would he want to install an os that is over ten years old onto modern hardware? That's like building a new computer, and expecting to power everything from a 486.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wind.....ofsupport.aspx
Also, activation is not set to be discontinued anytime soon either.
Only problem is everyone's favorite digital art tools don't necessarily play nice with Linux (yet, and YMMV), so you'll probably still want Win7 for that guarantee. But that said Mint has behaved very well with me for multiple machines and improved my experience with them greatly for general-use or server purposes. It's just that when I want to work on music or visuals, well, I have to come back to a for-profit OS. Ye Olde Poo.
I feel lucky that i'm not tied to Windows right now. On the other hand, I'm not super happy being tied to Apple's bullshit, either. I hope with time the Open Source way of things will produce vibrant and reliable art applications, but that's not where the laws of economic physics are going to flow, for the moment.
MS pulled the current release of 8.1 because for some people it was corrupting boot files and completely bricking their computers.
Unfortunately, laptop drivers are hard to get for different OS versions; the easiest way to get them is the manufacturer website (which you tried already) followed by the websites of the individual chip makers. (eg: NVidia or AMD or Intel for the video card and motehrboard, soundblaster for the sound card,a nd so on)
Windows 7 might have workable default drivers and updates available through windows updates, too.
If you can get in to the device manager, you(or someone you trust and is tech savy) can find out what the components and drivers versions are and get all the windows 7 versions before trying the reinstall of 7.
and they have forums with modified drivers that might work too. http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/
howvever if you know what GPU you have, you can try one of nvidia's or ati's beta drivers.
If you have an intel intergrated card, then i dont really know unless you check on their page itself.
*Assuming ESXi, because thats the only VMWare that does bare metal.
Balmer is a corporate guy. At least Gates was a programmer and a scientist.
Oh and I do volunteer work teaching elderly and otherwise inexperienced people how to use a PC. A good interface is easy to explain in simplified layman's terms, trying to explain the convoluted, jarring and contradictory designs of Win 8 has been hell.
It's too bad MS desperately wants to be Apple, but is only interested in copying the absolute worst parts of Apple products.
Normally, I can locate a teardown for nearly any machine I want to pull apart.
I eventually found a video that disassembles another ATIV unit from Samsung. The entire bottom appears to come off with a bit of effort and screw removal, as well as plastic hooks that hold things in place.
If your model is similar to the ATIV Book 8, this video might at least get you started: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnM7DcgQcDk
As for driver installation?
If the hardware can be identified, a driver can usually be found.
It usually requires a fair bit of PCI\VEN_&DEV_ (or USB\VID_&PID_) retrieval from the Device Manager after an OS installation, so that the hardware can be identified and drivers located.
It's the stuff I used to specialize in for the last six and a half years, though for a different OEM.
Hope this helps.
The only real improvement made with Win8.1 is that you can now boot to the desktop instead of having to suffer Metro first, and the Start Button has been re-instated, but will only take you to Metro and not the usual Start Menu.
Just about every laptop manufacturer I know of only releases video drivers for the OS that came with the laptop. If you update the OS, you're out of luck. I find it amusing (in a painful kind of way) that HP was urging someone I know to upgrade their laptop to Win8... except that HP doesn't make Win8 video drivers for that laptop and Win8 was (and still is) totally useless.
The problem is further aggravated by AMD's stance on mobile drivers. Their official drivers will only with with plug-in video cards. For mobile chipsets, AMD won't support squat and forces the OEM manufacturer to provide drivers.
As for me, I'm still using XP on my workstation and I have Win7 on my laptop and gaming rig (yes, I have three computers). I'm going to cry when I can't use XP anymore. Win7 is annoying, and Win8 is just plain torture.
First of all, like OSX, Win7 now uses a composited graphics system using 3D acceleration. Normally this is a good thing, but Win7 seems to lock the refresh rate at 30 Hz no matter how powerful your system is. As a result, Window updates are much more sluggish and everything from my desktop games to my video utilities run much slower and with a lot of dropped frames. Even a 5-year-old computer running XP is way faster and smoother than my new, massively powerful PC. It's a limitation of the new windowing system, and simply throwing faster hardware at the problem won't fix it. Sure, if you run the system in full-screen mode, everything is fast and smooth, but in windowed mode, everything is really, really slow (and switching to Basic Mode doesn't help).
Second, I don't like the way they redesigned the file requester, both eliminating the drive listing and the default base folder, and making network folders more important than local folders in the links list. It's completely non-configurable. It's insanely sluggish, due to all the network code overhead even when working with local folders. Despite all the changes, they still haven't added the ability to search in the file requester or the ability to set quick links to commonly used folders. It's near useless for actually requesting files.
Third, I HATE the pinned taskbar. The icons are too large, you can't customize anything, it's completely application-centric (the opposite of Explorer.exe), and folder tabs are always grouped. You also can't pin folders or make shortcuts. It's a complete 180 degree design of the previous taskbar that worked just fine for almost 20 years.
Fourth, why the hell did they get rid of the Explorer column categories? ClassicShell will put them back, but still, this was a completely idiotic design change.
I never use the Start Menu, so Classic View really does nothing to help me. I find it really annoying that all those customization tools, like ClassicShell, focus almost exclusively on the Start Menu. It's the new desktop and taskbar that drive me nuts.
I just find it a little odd that a complex OS has so little design flexibility. It cost billions of dollars and decades of development to make Win7 what it is, but all the changes I want could be fixed in a week by company interns. Why does MS have such a bug up their butt about letting people do things the way it was since Win95? It survived that long specifically because it was a good design.
And it's actually 60Hz, not 30.
File requester? You mean Windows Explorer? I'm not noticing any actual changes other than that there's now a URL bar at the top which even memorizes a list of your favorite places within your file system. But that could be because I've got everything set to Windows Classic.
You can customize *A LOT* about the taskbar. Just do right-click on it, and go "Properties". Folder tabs have been grouped at least since XP, probably already since Windows95, as I don't even know it any other way. You can pin folders to the taskbar just fine: Go the explorer symbol in your taskbar, but don't use *LEFT*-click! Use right-click and wait for a second or two, then you'll get a selection of the folders you've last accessed, and when you're moving the mouse up to them, on the right there's the smybol you need to click to pin the particular folder to the taskbar.
WTF are column categories?
So what do you use instead of the start menu? Desktop? Nothing changed there. Task manager? Nothing changed there either.
The monitor refresh rate is usually 60 Hz, but that's now how often the compositing system actually draws to the video card's frame buffer. The monitor's refresh rate has nothing to do with this. Some video games can run faster than 200 FPS, but that's a waste because the monitor can only refresh at 60 Hz. Well, reverse this situation, and have a game run at 15 FPS. If the game is running at 15 Hz, and your monitor is running at 60 Hz, is the game going to run "fast" and run with "reduced dropped-frames"? Obviously, you don't understand what compositing is.
By the file requester, I'm referring to the interface that opens when you try to open or save a file in an application, or hit Ctrl-O.
I have an issue with the "second or two" delay when using the explorer symbol on the taskbar, and, like many things in Win7, the context lists tend to shuffle. What good are shortcuts that change location all the time, forcing you to hunt for the one you want? I want things to stay in the same damn place I put them.
Column categories are what you see when you're in Explorer and you've set the view to show file details. The column categories are things like Name, Size, Type, Last Modified, and so on. You used to be able to click on a category and sort files by those categories. Now you need a 3rd-party tool to restore all the functionality. I frequently need to sort files by filetype without using a filter. It completely baffles me why MS thought it was a good idea to remove that feature.
I don't use the Start Menu because I used QuickLaunch. You can add QuickLaunch to Win7, but as usual, it doesn't work the same. I believe I also had problems with using multiple launch instances, which causes a problem with some of my dev tools. In general, Win7 doesn't like to launch multiple instances of an application even if an app is specifically designed to work that way.
Uh, Task Manager has changed, too, but only slightly. I don't use it since I have Process Explorer instead.
Problems I NEVER had with SAI are popping up ever since I upgraded and at one point didn't even let me save a file I was working on, nor make new files. Win8.1 ended up fucking up more things than they fixed just to put in a fucking start button, which just takes you to the fucking start screen anyway, what you could do with the start button on the keyboard in the first place.
Windows 8.1 is worthless, but what I have seen. If everything is working fine now, just leave it be.
The new rule of windows is upgrade the OS on the 2nd release of OS, for the one right after a good OS is an ME version.
I have the same problem: the shiny new laptop I wanted didn't have the option to have Windows Heaven instead of Windows Hate. So I took what was available. Evidently it's not just beggars, but customers, that can't be choosers these days.
There are some processors and boards that 8.1 does NOT operate with. Your system may be one of them.
Both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 both require:
* Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2
Windows 8.1 adds the following requirement:
* To install a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit PC, your processor needs to support CMPXCHG16b, PrefetchW, and LAHF/SAHF
Open Outlook.
Click Address Book.
Search for the DL, open it.
Hit Modify Members...
Hit Add...
Search for the person, hit the Add button.
Hit OK.
Hit OK.
Hit Apply.
I think theres less clicking in ADUC, but like anyone uses that for modifying DLs.
You may need to disable SecureBoot, but this is about the same for any OS install with UEFI.
I'm using a Samsung ATIV 700T (the surface pro competitor), and just upgraded to 8.1. No problems so far. For once.
There may be a restore partition on your system to return to Windows 8, but I don't know if that's something that needs to be set up by the user.
Unfortunately that's the extent of my knowledge. This sucker's only a casual bedroom tablet/digital sketchpad, my main work computer's a Mac.
I Myself is sticking with win7 as far as I can.
My suggestion however is if you downgrade to 7, make sure it can handle more then 16 MB of ram or you may end up getting limited on that part as well.
I will not start arguing what operating system is better sense they are only a tool to use and abuse and it up to you to decide what tool is better for you.
In the end I hope you solve your issue in a way your satisfied with! ^^
Friom:
- Rico THe ottha!
You might be surprised in what drivers are supported under 7. I had visit as a standard install on my old laptop and I downgraded it to windows XP and all the drivers were available so I was surprised.
Try windows 7 on your machine, if it isn't working anyway it's worth a shot. Personally tried 8 and 8.1 and this is just not an OS that you can do real work in. Too much screwing around, and if you use the touch screen the way they intended you are going to look like Mickey Mouse in a well known scene of Fantasia.
Something I don't think anyone has mentioned, is rumor has it (and only rumor) The beta version of Windows 9 will be coming out some time in February, and they are bringing back the Aero interface (like windows 7) with some enhancements to make it work with their App store.
What this means is anybody's guess, but I don't think the interface could get much worse at this point.
Windows 8 is OK for tablets and phones where you don't have a keyboard and mouse, but for regular everyday computer work, it's a test of your patience IMO.
I did manage, in my poking around, to find a built-in factory reset option, so I used that and now the laptop is now back to stock Windows 8, which at least shows up on the screen. So for now, I'll put all my usual drawing apps on the desktop and try my best to ignore Metro whenever I can. Maybe I'll try some of those 3rd party apps that make it behave more Windows 7-y.