Post by Ed CryerI have a Windows 8 Pro that I bought many years ago and never used.
There are two DVDs, one 32-bit, one 64-bit, and a Windows 8 Product Key
on a card.
Now, I don't want Win8, but I do want Win7.
Can anybody figure a path from what I have to Win7?
Ed
Only an OEM Business class machine that ships with Pro,
came with downgrade rights. And the support was not all
that obvious either. You would never see "a DVD sitting
on the web site", to make it easy for a customer to
do such a transition.
If there is a way to take Retail Boxed materials
and do the same thing, I've not heard of it.
I would keep the product in its pouch until hardware
comes along that needs an OS. I have Win8.1 on this box,
and it functions as a maintenance OS occasionally.
(I do backups to a 4TB GPT partitioned disk from Win8.1.)
My copy at $39.95 was a great deal, because I managed
to get the free Media Center upgrade, just a few days
before the cutoff date. You had to be a Ninja back
at product launch, to make this purchase really worthwhile.
Now, I can move my tuner card over here, if that
becomes a plan. I have two tuner cards, one Media
Center compatible, the other not, and this (maintenance)
OS would run the compatible card if I brought it over.
Also, the Win10 (not sitting on a disk at the moment)
that uses this OS as qualifying material, will receive
the DVD Player from the Microsoft Store for free. If
you bootstrapped Media Center free upgrade into your
$39.95 OS, when installing Win10 on top, the Win10
machine is allowed the appropriate MPEG codecs for
native DVD playback.
I bought two copies of Win8, but wasn't Ninja enough
to raise them both to Media Center. The second copy
was a few days past the cutoff date.
The OS still has its uses. Running a PVR in the
living room, if you had Media Center, might be one
usage.
Paul