Your computer was working just fine. It suited you well enough. Then one day you turned it on because you had to do something and disaster struck! Your computer had upgraded itself to Windows 10 even though you had told it many times you didn’t want it to! Now key software applications, like maybe your QuickBooks, no longer work!
I’ll skip the moral discussion about upgrading someone’s computer without them clearly asking for the upgrade. It is happening. I get the calls.
Windows 10 is basically great. However, there are times and reasons and best ways to upgrade. Just finding it when you turn on your computer ain’t it, Microsoft.
You don’t need to undo the upgrade. However, if you want to because you aren’t ready, it is easy. One caveat to that:
You can undo an automatic Windows 10 upgrade IF you do it within 30 days from the upgrade. After that, it isn’t easy.
Here are the steps:
- Click on the Windows icon in the far lower left corner of your screen. It is It looks like four little white squares that are slightly skewed.
- A menu pops up from that icon, which is, of course, the new Start Menu. About 3 choices up is “Settings” and you need to click on that.
- A window pops up with your Settings choices. The last one is “Updates & security”. Click on that.
- More choices appear in the window. Choose “Recovery”.
- It should give you the option to Go Back to Windows 7 or 8.1. The option will be whatever your old system was. As you can see, this screenshot is from a computer recently upgraded from 8.1.
I can’t imagine any reason to go back to 8.1 but Windows 7 can be worth going back.
As soon as you click the Get Started button, it will walk you through the process which mostly requires patience and something else to do. And an occasional click of OK or whatever. It’s pretty automatic from this point forward but it does take a while.
That is it!
Please remember that July 29, 2016 is the last day to upgrade a Win7 or Win8 computer to Win10 for free.