When purchasing a computer with a certain version of the operating system, users often do not want to use it, preferring one of the previous ones or a newer one. Consider installing Windows 7 on a laptop with version 8 or 10 preinstalled.
Naturally, before starting the installation, you will need to create a backup copy of all necessary personal files on a flash drive, external hard drive or other convenient way. During the installation process, absolutely all data will be deleted from the hard drive.
Also, before starting the installation, it is better to remove all “non-native” peripherals. The procedure must be performed with the hardware in its original configuration.
Installation, in general, occurs as standard. However, there are two key points: enabling the ability to boot from external media and changing the hard drive partition type. Let's look at each of the stages in more detail.
How to install Windows 7 on an HP laptop
Greetings, my dear readers. The other day they brought me an interesting laptop: an HP 255 G2 with Windows 8.1 pre-installed (as it should be now), but its owner did not want to retrain and tearfully asked to install the usual seven. As they say: the master is the master, and it was decided to demolish Windows 8.1, which came with the kit, and install Windows 7. However, everything turned out to be not as simple as I thought at first glance!
How to install Windows 7 on an HP laptop in pictures
So how can we install Windows 7 on an HP 255 G2 laptop, even if the standard delete or f2 does not allow us to get into the usual BIOS of the laptop? (which puzzled me quite a bit). It was then that I remembered a clever phrase: if all else fails, then finally read the instructions!
The instructions included were very sparse: it showed how to insert the battery and what to press to turn it on... well, and a couple of pages on how to use Windows 8.1. As you can imagine, such reading was of little use to me and I had to go to the official website for answers, and I found them!
This is the information... to get into the BIOS! To set the boot device, we need to press first [ESC] and then [F10] , after which you will be taken to the BIOS, where you can make settings.
How to install Windows 7 on an HP laptop
Since new HP laptops (almost all) have UEFI (a kind of modern alternative to BIOS) instead of the usual BIOS, there are some subtleties here (UEFI is the topic of a separate article, so we won’t consider it here, we’ll just figure out how to load seven on laptop) ... By the way, quality control was checked by my faithful cat, who never left his laptop for a minute
