I got an interesting question from Joan about the free upgrade to Windows 10. She’s not the first person to ask this question. “Windows 10 has been available for my computer for 4 days now. I’d love to try it, but I’m afraid it might be difficult to use. If I find that I’m having too many problems, will I be able to switch back? I’m on Windows 7 now.”
First of all, Joan, if you are using Windows 7, I think you’ll find Windows 10 to be pretty easy to understand and use. I’d suggest clicking that little windows icon in the corner of your screen to reserve your upgrade and then running the compatibility checker to see how well Windows 10 will get along with the programs and devices you currently use on your computer. You can find instructions for that by clicking here.
That might go a long way toward letting you know about potential problems.
Now as far as rolling back to a previous version of Windows. In the technical preview of Windows 10, rollback is there as an option. It’s unlikely that will be found in the final version. The idea is to get everyone on the same page running the same operating system, much like Apple does with OS X and iOS. It’s easier to troubleshoot, easier to secure operating systems, and easier for developers of programs and apps.
Windows 8.1 computers create a restoration partition, so it might be fairly easy to do on that system. For Windows 7, I’m afraid you’d have to just reinstall your Windows 7 operating system. In either case, you should have all of your important files backed up anyway on an external drive or in the cloud or even better, a disk image backup.
Going into using a new OS thinking about reverting to the previous one is a lot like getting married thinking you can always just get a divorce. It tends not make you put your whole heart into it. So maybe it’s not a bad idea that there’s some effort involved in giving up on a new OS.
~ Cynthia
My plan is to make an image of my win 7 drive 3 days before win 10 is ready for upgrading my win 7. Then I am going to pull out the hard drive and store it and install 2 500MB SSD drives and install the win 7 image on one of them and install win 10 on the other and have the computer setup for a duel boot and I can choose what I want to run until I either like or dont like win 10. I am able to run 6 Drives on my computer not counting the DVD that has its own data connection.
I would suggest to anybody… do not upgrade to Windows 10 until the last minute. I did and wound up going back having to reinstall Windows 8.1 and sure glad I had my back ups! Windows 10 likes to sort your files by dates you photos by dates. I had them sorted as I wished. I could not locate anywhere my own presorted files. It is a lot slower than Windows 8.1 which I found slower than XP. Windows 10 will not allow you to do what you want only what it wants. I do NOT want everything in the cloud!!!
Karen: You have multiple options in Windows 10 as to how to sort your files. By date if just one of them. You don’t need to keep anything in the cloud with Windows 10, if you don’t choose to. What is it that you wanted to do with Windows 10 that it wouldn’t allow you to do?