Downgrading to Windows 7 - Driver Hunt

Sometimes, you truly need to take a step back in order to move forward. This is especially true in the Microsoft Windows hierarchy where Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 often don't last long on devices and are soon replaced by the more intuitive and stable Windows 7. But sometimes going backwards is not so simple.

I assisted someone in the purchase of a laptop recently and also had to downgrade the operating system. The laptop in question is an Acer Aspire V3-472G. I encountered several challenges with this specific laptop and one of which is yet to be resolved.

Part 1. Bios access and configuration

The simple task of access in the BIOS was a struggle due to the fact that Acer uses "F2" as an access key as opposed to the often used "Del" or "F1". Furthermore, by default the boot menu accessed through the "F12" key is disabled. So just to be able to boot from the USB CD Rom, I needed to change the bios from UFEI to Legacy, then set the USB CD to enabled and then remove security settings in BIOS.

Part 2. OS Install

This was the easiest part. The OS (Windows 7 Professional) installed with no hiccups so this was smooth. As expected, none of the device drivers worked out of the box, other than the sound. So this brings us to the 3rd and most tedious part, the Driver Hunt...

Part 3. Driver Hunt

As mentioned above, none of the drivers came pre-installed although my ISO of Windows 7 had Service Pack 1 pre-installed. Step one was to get the network driver so that I could update and register Windows 7. So I proceeded to the product page for the Acer Aspire V3-472G to get a list of devices in order to download the ones for Windows 7. Of course Acer only supplies drivers for Windows 8.1 so it was off to the various vendor sites.

The network driver from Realtek was easy to download and install so I was online within a few minutes and ran Windows Update. I was hoping that it would auto update some of the drivers for me but no such luck. The video chipset drivers from Intel and NVIDIA were easy to get  and install as well. And that was it for the easy part...

The Intel chipset and sata drivers were a struggle to obtain and I had to resolve to an extracted inf file from another vendor. But at least I got them to work.

So this is what I had left to accomplish; set up the USB 3.0 hub to work at full capacity (the port works but not at full efficiency) and, most importantly the wifi would not work. So I downloaded the driver directly from the vendor, Atheros Broadcom which was Windows 7 certified. After spending several hours on this issue, I decided to use a Linksys USB wifi adapter as a temporary work around.

Sometimes, in order to move forward, a step back is necessary.