windoze 7 upgrade over win 8?

[sammyg2]

Last week the home 'puter finally died. Power supply went teats up.
It was really old and not worth fixin, it still had a floppy drive and no USB ports in front. LOL here's the post from 10 years ago when I bought it:

Yesterday I bought a new computer from fry's.
AMD 1.8+ gh, 40gb HD, LAN, everything except monitor for $179.
I threw in an additional 512 mb ram and installed my CD-RW drive and old HD as a slave, this thing screams compared to what I'm used to.
It came with Lindows but I installed XP pro with no problems.
It has onboard video but I'm going install my AGP 8x card from my old computer.
I know it's built in China, I know it is built from surplus parts, but it works great and it something dies I have a warranty and plenty of spare parts now.

So I went back to frys and picked up a decent i3 for not that much $$$$ that totally smokes the old puter. It's also quiet, the old one sounded like a blow dryer.
Now for the puter wonks out there who might flame cause all I gots is an i3, my son has a state of the art custom built 'spensive gaming i7 with a gozillion of everything, but I don't spend money on myself like that.


Now back to my new puter: it has windoze 8 on it.
I have a win 7 home addition upgrade and am thinking of installing it on the new machine but first I want to play with 8 for a while to verify it is as sucky as i think it is. So far the prognosis is not gud.

So here's the question:
can I "upgrade" win 8 to win 7, or does it require a clean install?
I know goin from XP to 32 bit 7 needed a clean install but don't know if going down from 8 to 7 does.

Gotta figure how much needs to be backed up.

tanks in advance.

[red-beard]

First caveat, I don't have any Windows 8 machines. Our office is setup with Win 7 Pro.

There is a new version of Windows 8 called Windows 8.1: It is supposed to fix quite a few of the interface issues and allow many people to have a desktop more similar to Windows 7. It is a free upgrade.

I would suggest loading Windows 8.1 before downgrading to Win 7. And from a downgrading standpoint, I believe you will need to do a clean install to get Win 7 on a Win 8 machine.

[widebody911]

You would have to do a bare-metal install if you wanted to run Win7. I haven't tried 8.1 yet, and with as much as I hate 8, I would only do so under duress.