Windows 10: Going back to windows 8.1

Hi all,

I bought this crappy tablet from an obscure Chinese website that had windows 8.1 installed. I updated it to windows 10 but now it doesn't work right with windows 10 and I suppose is because the lack of drivers. I would like to go back to 8.1 but I don't have the option in the recovery settings and every time I restore the system it comes back to windows 10. I have to mention that when I did the upgrade to 10 I had trouble doing it due to lack of space on he ssd (16 Gb of which only 5 were available ) so I mounted a 32 Gb mini sd card. I think at some point during the upgrade I chose to download win 10 to the sd card but don't remember exactly what I did. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks

:)

 

Go back to 8.1

I tried to go back to Windows 8.1 after installing Windows 10, however; I received an error message saying We're sorry but you can't go back. The files we need to take you back to previous version were removed from this pc. Any suggestions.

 

Going back to 8.1

You can go back to your previous version of Windows if you want to within 30 days of upgrading to Windows 10.

Revert back to previous version option would be present under settings>update and Recovery.

If you are over a 30 day limit, you would have to do a clean Install of windows 8.1

Hope it helps.Do reply back for further query.

 

If you don't have the revert option in Windows 10 and you did not make a backup image of the Windows 8.1 with Bing or exported the drivers before you upgraded, you are now pretty much out of luck. You'll have to scrounge on the internet for uploaded drivers or image files.

I have the 8.1 with Bing image file and exported drivers for Nextbook tablets, and my Nextbook tablet runs great on Windows 10, after some work manually loading drivers and making one registry tweak.

I know this is closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, but :

Important precautions to take before upgrading to Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

 

Thanks for your reply. I looked again on the SD card that was on the tablet when I did the upgrade and it looks like windows saved the drivers there so I updated all of them. Now I have mostly everything working with the exception of the touchscreen which is very flimsy. I touch one part of the screen and it reacts on a different area. I tried calibrating it but that didn't help. The driver is a SileadTouch and the device is called kmdf hid minidriver for touch i2c. Any ideas?

Thank you

 

Go to Device Manager, under System Devices, right click on each I2C Controller and update the device driver by searching the internet automatically for it. You will have to do each I2C controller individually, but you do not have to restart the tablet in between them. Also upgrade each GPIO controller. Not sure if that will solve your problem, but I know my tablet had updated device drivers for all of those controllers.

 

I had problems with auto-rotate on my Dell Venue Pro 8 that was fixed by updating the two sensor drivers automatically.

 

Download the Windows installation media and burn the ISO file to a disc or copy it to a USB drive using Microsoft’s Windows USB/DVD download tool. You can then boot from it and reinstall Windows 8.1 fresh, telling it to overwrite the Windows 10 system already on your hard drive. Be sure you have backup copies of all your important files from your Windows 10 PC first.

 

One additional precaution is to make a barebones win 8.1 recovery drive AS WELL as Macrium Reflect Free image (only image tool I have found that reliably backs up tablets but crap can happen with any tool).

8.1 ---> control panel, recovery, create recovery drive and click to copy recovery partition.

 

Will not work on a Bing tablet as it cannot activate, and probably not have the extra special drivers usually needed for tablets.

Would also leave little room on 16 GB drive as the 8.1+Bing OS is a special compressed format.

Frankly 16 GB drives are not really suitable for Windows 10.