[SOLVED] Going from Windows 10 to 8.1

[banditgeneral4]

Hopefully this is the right place. I recently bought an older laptop with Windows 10 but is really really slow. It freezes every couple minutes and takes up to 10 minutes to boot up. I want to downgrade to Windows 8.1 (it was originally released with 7). My question is can I use the ISO creator from Microsoft and product key or do I need to buy a full retail version? I checked the driver site for the pc and it only provides drivers for 7 and 8.

 

[Lutfij]

Make and model of the laptop? An SKU would also help us two fold. In retrospect, yes it's better if you could move to the OS that the laptop originally shipped with but often times you see that laptops later get support for latter OS versions. You can find Win 8.1 from here. Anything older and you will only find malware laced knock offs.

With the latter scenario, you're supposed to update the BIOS, then make sure you've got the latest drivers installed(after the OS is installed onto the laptop). For Windows 10, having an older version of the OS(currently on 2004) or a corrupt OS will result in a slow OS. If the HDD is failing, then no matter what you do, it won't change the fact that the HDD needs replacing. Also often times a badly partitioned HDD will also result in a sluggish performance.

Tat being said, which version of Windows 10 are you on?

 

[sizzling]

Unless your laptop is missing Windows 10 drivers causing it to run poorly/unstable I can’t see any reason for 8.1 to run better. Generally 8.1 & 10 run equally well if supporting drivers are available. Could there be other issues with the laptop, for example overheating or faulty RAM?

 

[Colif]

10 minutes to boot? Could be a physical problem with hdd as that is way too long.

Most win 7 PC should be able to run 10 easy. ANything older than win 7 is a struggle.

 

[USAFRet]

Did you do a full wipe and reinstall of Win 10?
This "slowness" may be an aspect of whatever the prev users had in there.
After that, hardware issues.

Win 8.1 won't be any faster. If you installed it, any performance benefit would be due to the full new install, rather than a diff between 8.1 and 10.

None of my systems, incl a low end 12 year old laptop, are any "slower" on Win 10 than they were on the original 7/8/8.1.

What are the specs of this thing?
Is it possibly running a lot of bloatware at startup? I've seen low and medium grade laptops unusable for an hour after booting up. Multiple "PC Doctor" and malware things stepping all over each other.

 

[banditgeneral4]

Make and model of the laptop? An SKU would also help us two fold. In retrospect, yes it's better if you could move to the OS that the laptop originally shipped with but often times you see that laptops later get support for latter OS versions. You can find Win 8.1 from here. Anything older and you will only find malware laced knock offs.

With the latter scenario, you're supposed to update the BIOS, then make sure you've got the latest drivers installed(after the OS is installed onto the laptop). For Windows 10, having an older version of the OS(currently on 2004) or a corrupt OS will result in a slow OS. If the HDD is failing, then no matter what you do, it won't change the fact that the HDD needs replacing. Also often times a badly partitioned HDD will also result in a sluggish performance.

Tat being said, which version of Windows 10 are you on?

It is a Dell Inspiron. It was released ca 2013. I don't have it in front of me so I don't have the exact model number handy. It is running 10 pro at the moment.

I have a Lenovo that was shipped with 10 and it has the same issues. I have run diagnostics on the drive (Dell) and it passes.

 

[geofelt]

You need to find the cause of your problems first.
Particularly the reason for freezes.
There is no logical reason that windows 8 should perform any better than 10.
Do you have a ssd for windows?
If not, changing to a ssd will be magical.

 

[banditgeneral4]

Thanks all for the helpful advice and suggestions. I'm going to substitute an ssd for the HDD and see if that helps.

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, an SSD will certainly help.

But does not identify the root problem.
10 minutes to boot is far too long, even with an HDD.

Put in the new drive, a clean OS install, and BAM...it boots up quickly.
But the problem and fix was not just changing to the SSD.

 

[banditgeneral4]

Yes, an SSD will certainly help.

But does not identify the root problem.
10 minutes to boot is far too long, even with an HDD.

Put in the new drive, a clean OS install, and BAM...it boots up quickly.
But the problem and fix was not just changing to the SSD.

I'm going to upgrade the memory as well and see if that works. If those don't fix it, I have another computer that could benefit from the SSD so it's not wasted money.

 

[USAFRet]

An SSD is never wasted money...

I have a 2009 era Tosh laptop, 2.2GHz Celeron, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Win 10.
It does not take 10 minutes to boot up.

 

[Colif]

Lets not pretend win 10 is perfect. I helped someone last week who had a ssd and was getting 1 hour boots... if the boot files are messed up it can lead to problems like this.

10 minutes if hdd is on its last legs is possible too. It is why I suggested it.