Windows 7 Installing Win7 Ultimate on an ex Win8 Lenovo H530 ?

[pwiklund]

I am about to install a Win7 on a new Lenovo H530 desktop that came with Win 8 pre-installed.
Anyone with experience on some similar downgrade-installation for a Lenovo-desktop - and in particular, which drivers I might need to hunt down new versions of?
Web-sites appear most unhelpful, with lots of contradicting information and missing info on many Intel drivers.

 

[patcooke]

Have you considered dual booting? This will enable you to boot into a working system with Win 8, in particular, this would be useful to maintain your internet connection for downloading the drivers you will need for Win 7 (especially if having installed Win 7 you have no network adapter drivers!). Whatever you do you must ensure that before anything else you burn a set of recovery disks for your Win 8 installation - you may wish to reinstall it one day either from choice or to sell the machine on. It will also get you back up and running if something goes wrong in your downgrade.

 

[pwiklund]

Thanks for the suggestions.. think I will stay to the clean re-branding of it, and I have no feling for how well (bad?) it will work to install Win7 on a system already running win8. I have already created a recovery image on a USB device.
What does concern me are such items as chipset drivers and anything that can potentially 'kill' the system.... any experience, anyone?

 

[patcooke]

Check your user manual or the Lenovo website for the full spec of your pc to get details of chipset, and devices, in particular the networking devices to maintain your internet connection after installing Win 7. Search the Lenovo site for Win 7 drivers for each of the devices and for any you cannot find on the Lenovo site search the device manufacturer's site.

 

[pwiklund]

Thank you... very true, but the sites are very little helpful, i.e. looking like a lot of drivers are not listed, even though they are less than 2 years old, which I find strange. OK, I'll get back over the next few days to ask for advice on those that prove elusive.

And no worries with regard to network access, I have a second computer fro which I can hunt and download until the network adapters are working.

On a quite different matter - how do I proceed with e.g. a chip-set driver for Win7 that is only available as a self-extractive exe-file (that installs the driver without any questions). What I need is probably the drivers unpacked on a flash-drive, but is there a good way to get them out of the exe-file without installing them - which I do not want at this point.

 

[patcooke]

The Intel chipset driver package usually comes with a menu from which individual drivers may be selected. Which cipset are you looking at?

 

[pwiklund]

Hello again, sorry for the delay, was out of town.

When I check the System Devices tab in the Device Manager, I get a bit confused exactly which device(s) that show the correct to investigate when determining the current chipset driver...

The Win8 installation displays:
>"Intel(R) Series 8/C220 PCI Express Root Port"
>"Intel(R) Series 8/C220 SMBus Controller"
>"Intel(R) H81 LPC Controller"
all entries displaying as running an Intel drivers version 9.4.0.1011.

Then, there is the driver for the disk system
>"Intel(R) Series 8/C220 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller",
running an Intel-driver version 12.0.0.1082 - of which I can find no information at all anywhere?
Any suggestion which one I should load for the Win7 installation?

 

[Ralph Bromley]

You may not need the driver actually, drivers are kind of moot these days when most OS's tend to pull in drivers after installation.
Thats how my Windows 7 install went at least, the only thing extra I added was the realtek software for my speakers as I found the sound equalizer on 7 very sub par.
I suggest just updating 7, if it preforms smoothly after updates then no need for drivers (unless its a high end graphics card or something)

 

[pwiklund]

Thanks - I have collected a few drivers on the net, so I hope to get a chance to do the install during the weekend.

 

[Ralph Bromley]

Thanks - I have collected a few drivers on the net, so I hope to get a chance to do the install during the weekend.

Just let us know how the install goes and what things are like after your first few updates.

 

[pwiklund]

Thank you all - just wanted to give a quick update... after having solved the challenge with how to set "legacy boot", it went quite well, up and running since a few days on W7.
It was a hassle to apply all the updates from Windows Update though - my first attempt to install 158 updates in one go nearly destroyed the installation (several blue-screens during boot-up afterwards), and restore appeared just semi-successful. However, at this point, no problems seem to exist - and applying the updates in small packets of 5-6 at a time went ok afterwards.
Just remains to see if the installation is in some way damaged deep down...

 

[patcooke]

I'd also get a copy of something macrium reflect to make an image of the new install every so often (like when you done so much work you'd be less than pleased if it all went belly up!

 

[Saltgrass]

. after having solved the challenge with how to set "legacy boot",

Just in case it comes up, you don't have to use Legacy boot with Windows 7. I think of it as three different levels, Legacy, UEFI and Secure Boot UEFI. Windows 7 will install and run fine as Legacy or UEFI, but will not boot on a system with the bios set to use the Windows 8 type Secure Boot.