General Chat

A neighbour is having problems downloading windows 8.1....is anyone else having problems with this.
He has a toshiba laptop (new) and can't use windows 8....he's tried all sorts to get rid of it and download W7....no go so now trying 8.1


jude

If he wants to revert to W7 from W8 then he needs to reformat really.

What problems has he encountered?

He says no he has'nt tried that and is abit worried to try. Dual boot did'nt work either. He tried a partition so he can have W7 on one and the 8 on the other part. But what ever he tries won;t work. Its as if Toshiba overide everything he tries:((

He has a dongle. He is trying to download W8.1 from the puter, can't afford the disc.

He does'nt like the W8 and just wants to get rid or add 8.1 or 7....gawd l hope l'm making sense??

Downloaded windows 8.1 some while back seems OK to me.
But, I am not a great lover of Apps, they seem to take ages to load up and do the business. :-(

Thanks Brian...he does'nt like the apps either, but can get rid of them. Its starts to download 8.1 then stops after about 2 to 4 hrs, then a window pop up says "something happened, windows 8.1 can't be installed" ...grrrr

Brian - that is the fault of the computer rather than the OS.

Jude - what has he done to get rid of W8?

Before upgrading from W8 to W8.1 he MUST perform a Windows Update.

There are quite a number of issues if he wants to install W7 - either standalone or dual boot - particularly potentially voiding the warranty. There are a number of other considerations such as a possible need to Disable Secure boot in BIOS.

He must download W8.1 through Windows Store.

Does it display any error codes?

Hi Errol, have given up idea of complete reinstall and dual boot not possible, so have not removed W8 but attempting to upgrade to W8.1. Progress bar shows it is loading but continues to stop indicating W8.1 wasn't installed, retry fails.

That was neighbour posting.

edited

As eRRolSheep says he needs to update first, as it happens my new baby is a Toshiba took no time at all to upgrade to 8.1 .

Must say I am not a big fan of 8 but like anything new you need to play with it to learn the way to do things.

Unlike most old computers where the supplier would bundle in Works free, you now cannot open old formats like word without buying Office (£100) or downloading aftermarket software from the net.

Thanks Mayfield:)

jude

A little PS to the above.
I did buy a Lenovo first and that would not download updates, I had two sessions with support, turning off things deleting bits told to download something else from a site and general mucking about, so I sent the darn thing back and told them I did not expect to mess about with a brand new machine like that!

To be fair I got a refund without any trouble.

Thanks Mayfield

Neighbour has had 4 laptops, 2 of which were Acer both had a fault. The others Dell and this Toshiba have the problems with this W8

jude

Mayfield - you could always use Wordpad. To find it, press the Windows key and type "wordpad".

Acers are pretty good, reliable machines - I rarely have to repair them.

I won't comment on Dell !

Toshiba make excellent solid machines.

Have all W8 updates been performed?

l'm off to work now...will look back later...

jude

yes errol all updates done

You do need to be logged in as Administrator.

Try calling up a Command prompt and typing "net stop wuauserv" followed by Enter and then try again.

Wordpad is very basic and still will not open docs created with word, I tried it you just get scribble, there is also notepad but that's about as much good as a chocolate fire guard :-)

Depends what format the Word document is in and you can convert between formats.

It will open a .docx file no problem.