Go Back to Windows 7 or 8.1
Don’t like Windows 10? As long as you’ve upgraded within the last month, you can Uninstall Windows 10 and downgrade your PC back to its original Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 Operating system. You can always upgrade to Windows 10 again later.
Even if it’s been more than a month, you should be able to reinstall the version of Windows that came with your PC using fresh installation media and its product key.
Go Back to Windows 7 or 8.1
If you’ve upgraded a PC to Windows 10 — not performed a clean install — you’ll have an easy option that lets you revert to the last version of Windows. To access this, open the Start menu and select Settings. Click the “Update & security” icon and select “Recovery.”
You should see a “Go back to Windows 7″ or “Go back to Windows 8.1″ option. Click the Get started button to get rid of your Windows 10 install and restore your previous Windows install. Microsoft will ask you why you want to go back.
If it’s been over a month — or if you’ve run the DIsk cleanup tool and removed the “Previous Windows installations” files or deleted the C:\Windows.old folder by hand — you’ll no longer see this option. Windows 10 appears to automatically remove the old Windows installation files after a month to free-up space.
Obviously, storing every single file from your old Windows installation takes a lot of space. If you open the Disk Cleanup application, you’ll see just how much space it uses. Click the Start button, type “Disk cleanup” to search for it, launch it, and click the “Clean up system files” button.
Find ‘Previous Windows installation(s)” in the list, and you’ll see just how much space it’s consuming on your hard drive. If you’re sure you don’t want to go back to your previous version of Windows, use Disk Cleanup tool to remove those files and immediately free up space.
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