10 back to 7 problems

[zigzag03]

Had a friend decide to update 7hp to 10 (was bored I guess) and it didn't fly, hung at the "welcome screen". Tried to go back to 7, needed the product key. Finally found that using Produkey, worked well enough. Now is looking for bios license, think we have it but don't know what to do with it. I havn't personally laid eyes on this yet and am trying to offer "remote" support. Anyone got any thoughts on how to handle this? Thanks.

 

[vailr]

Giving Win10 another try, would be my advice.
First: make a drive backup copy onto an external USB drive.
Fresh install using a bootable USB thumb drive, and then completely delete all existing partitions.
Download the .iso file from Microsoft:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
Use the free tool "Rufus" to create the USB thumb drive; size 8 Gb or larger.
The existing Windows 7 is probably using the MBR drive format, so use that option within the Rufus software.
The Windows 10 installation process will create 4 or 5 new partitions.
Click the "I don't have a product key" option during installation.
After Win10 has been installed, the product key from the bios should auto-enable activation.

 

[zigzag03]

Thank you this is the route I will advise. Clearly friend should never have embarked on the upgrade path casually, and I would have advised against it completely, but I will pass this along and report results. Thanks again.