A Sad Goodbye to Windows 10

Earlier in the week I woke up W10 and to my shock a blue page appeared telling me an error 0xc000021a had occoured the system gather data then restarted. Another blue page appeared informing me of Stop Code WDF violation. Next the system attempted to repaired itself but failed. After 2 plus hours on the phone with truly nice Microsoft Help Desk representatives no solution was found. Luckily,I could my interrupt my HP Pavilion HPE h8-1214 during bootup and go to the HP Start Up Menu. From here I was able to restore the desktop to its original Windows 7 system. All data was lost. The external drive I was using for backup had not been backing up from W10. After W7 was up and running the tech gave me a MS address with code to download W10. Three attempts to download W10 froze at 99%. This morning I recontacted MS. After providing model information I was told that although W10 had ran on my PC for some time it actually was not compatible. Seems it did not have the correct drivers. He detailed how the MS compatibility test was gravely misleading. Contacting HP proved they would not even talk to me about my older Pavilion HPE. In that regard I am send HP an email. I've decided to make a fresh start with Windows 7. W7 had always performed well so this is a no brainer. I'm not going to buy a new PC or laptop just to run W10.

I'm quietly hoping one of you can tell how to resurrect W10 but since I am a novice and all of my data is lost anyway so a still good PC with W7 is better than nothing.

lp

Hello, Check here to see if your PC is approved by HP
HP products tested with Windows 10 | HP® Customer Support

(note - you may need to find the equivalent page for your model/region)

If not, there's no guarantee that some update or upgrade of Win 10 will not stop your PC working properly. Further, running older devices on later OS's can lead to heat management problems due to low level ACPI driver compatibility. (E.g. my old laptop ran hot in Safe Mode).

Does Win 10 offer you real advantages? If so and you wish to take the risk:
1. Create yourself a bootable Win 10 medium
Windows 10 ISO Download - Windows 10 Forums

2. Clean install it. (Better than upgrading).
Windows 10 - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums

Win 10 will activate automatically.

Now, here's how to keep your data and have a second chance of restoring your PC when things go wrong. I recommend this several times a day- we all recommend disk imaging very strongly. Sadly some only realise they need it after a bad experience.

Creating disk images lets you restore Windows and all your disks and partitions to a previous working state, quickly and probably without technical help.

You can recover from:
- a failed disk drive (restore to a new one)
- ransomware (which encrypts your disk)
- user error
- unrecoverable problems from failed updates to problem programs
- unbootable PC (hardware faults aside)

Images also act as a full backup- you can extract files too.

You can even use images to help you move more easily and quickly to a new PC.

Imaging can even help you sleep at night knowing you have a second chance.

Many here recommend Macrium Reflect (free) as a good robust solution and more reliable than some others. It’s
- more feature rich
- more flexible
- more reliable
than Windows Backup and Restore system images.

It's well supported with videos, help and a responsive forum.

There are other such programs, free/commercial, some with simpler interfaces, but Macrium R is one of the most robust and reliable.

How long does it take?
SSD+ USB3 - maybe 15 mins for the first system image, less thereafter
HDD + USB2 - maybe 40-50 mins
That’s with little personal data, few programs installed.
- of course, depends how much you have on C:
(You can and should image all your partitions and disks)

Once you've created your first image, keep it updated with e.g. differential imaging- which images just changes from the first image, more quickly, and creates a smaller image file.