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Question Can I force a windows 10 installation for an old laptop?

B

boing

Senior member
I have an old 2008 Inspiron that I still use for light tasks and had to do a clean install of windows due to corruption issues. Problem is it had windows 10 but it installed windows 11 in the upgrade and straight out of the box with nothing else running it's using 2Gb of its 3Gb RAM....

Can I force it to install windows 10? I have an old 2022 installation usb drive but will the computer just ignore that and upgrade anyway? The recent upgrade came after I used the re installation option in Settings>Updates>Recovery
 
I would install Windows 10 32-bit on it if I absolutely had to have Windows on it. My rule of thumb back in the day was that if the PC can't handle more than 4GB RAM, it should get the 32-bit version of Windows, which is a bit less memory intensive than the 64-bit version. You would have to do a clean install though. I have no idea whether you can do an in-place upgrade of Win11 with Win10, I would have thought that setup would throw an error.

If Windows isn't an absolute necessity, I would install Linux on it. Linux Mint is pretty user friendly and works pretty well. Most importantly, it doesn't randomly decide to consume tonnes of CPU and RAM for what will be ages on that old thing; I remember running Windows 8.1 on my parents' Core 2 Duo ~2007 laptop, it used to spend hours installing a cumulative update despite having sufficient RAM and a decent SSD. Linux Mint is a lot leaner and doesn't randomly decide to turn your computer into a storage heater, that's just aside from the fact that Win10 is nearly at the end of its supported life.
 
Yeah I've looked at Linux but I'm not a tech expert, I'm 'layman savvy' and the options for linux blew my brains out.
 
boing said:
Yeah I've looked at Linux but I'm not a tech expert, I'm 'layman savvy' and the options for linux blew my brains out.
Click to expand...

The windows 11 system will not allow a downgrade Win 11 to Win 10 upgrade.

Boot from the Windows 10 install media.
When it gets to the partitioning screen delete all the partitions on the system drive.
Complete Windows 10 installation.
 
boing said:
Yeah I've looked at Linux but I'm not a tech expert, I'm 'layman savvy' and the options for linux blew my brains out.
Click to expand...

Try installing some VM software on your main PC, do a test install of Linux Mint in that and let us know if any questions it's asking have you puzzled?
 
OK, I'm going to go and do more reading on linux and come back with whatever's confusing me, it does make more sense than going with an OS that'll be out of date by the end of the year.
 
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