After W10 upgrade revert to W8.1 on UEFI machine

Tabvla said:

Alphanumeric and DavidY, thanks for your replies.

I support computers that run a number of flavours of both W7 and W8.1, including some with "with Bing". I have never given "with Bing" much thought as there does not seem to be any discernable difference between the "with Bing" or the "without Bing" flavours. Many very capable business desktop PC's run the "with Bing" OS and I am almost certain that (except for the default browser) that the code is identical to the core.

What I will need to understand before August is whether there will be any practical "hands-on" difference when upgrading a W8.1 and a W8.1 with Bing. Prior to starting this Thread I had not given that any thought - so the point raised by David is a valid one, something that I at least need to be aware of even if I don't quite grasp the implications.

Referring back to Post #4 by Alphanumeric. Personally I hate the "factory reinstall" idea and have never used it on my personal computers - I have always used a System Image, either using the Windows utility (the one available from File History) or a 3rd-party, such as Seagate Disk Wizard (Acronis). However, you can never persuade everyone to do this and I know that many users will do a factory reinstall every time Windows is feeling a little unwell - this is especially the case with users who use NAT or the Cloud for data storage.

After the W10 upgrade it is going to be interesting to see what happens the first time a user hits that little "Factory Refresh" button on the keyboard.....

T.

Like Tabvla I also throughly dislike the one click reinstall and I am reasonably dilgent in making system backups / images. My laptops have a similiar partitioning to that shown by you above and as result I have about 16.5 GB of space used up for something I never use. Is it possible either before / after installing W10 to reformat / reallocate this space to my other partitions? I have Windows, Data 1 and Data 2 partions that I have set-up using Paragon Hard Disk Manager. If so are there certain files that must be copied to Windows partition first? I am an experienced "computer user" but I am reluctant to interfer with operating system as I gave up on systems after Windows replaced Dos / CPM.

I raised this question with a major OEM manufacturer and their answer was not very reassuring.

According to them, they have asked Microsoft a very similar question to the one that I asked in Post #1 of this Thread. After repeated requests to MS, they have still not had an answer.

Surely when coding the W10 installer Microsoft must have asked the question "What if it goes wrong and the User needs to reinstall the previous OS - W7 or W8/8.1 on a system that uses the UEFI firmware interface...?

If a major OEM manufacturer cannot get an answer from Microsoft then the only conclusion that one can make is that MS don't have an answer as yet...... with 6 weeks to go that is not very reassuring...

T.