My aunt and uncle accidently bought Windows 8 for my grandma. My Grandma tends to get intimidated by new things, how do I downgrade to windows 7? I think my gram can handle windows 7, since up until recently she was using Windows XP. I may just put start8 on there and make some tweeks, but I think windows 7 would be better for her.

edit: crap, screwed up on the title I meant to Win7

Don't you just... install it? Or do you mean something more philosophical?

Teach her how to use the Win key or whatever its called (the key between Ctrl and Alt) to change interfaces. Once you're in the desktop and never press this key, you should be using a system that looks A LOT like WIndows 7.

You can disable the "Metro" theme or whatever it is called this days.

For start button there are already tons of solutions (like mini programs that add these "feature").

Basically win8 = win7 without the "Metro" style + some additional improvements

No, I mean my uncle bought her a laptop that had Windows 8 on it, but she does not like anything new. Especially concerning technology Sweet, I'll do that the next time I go over. Where do I go to disable it?

That is unfortunate, but I guess I got to work with the hand that was dealt. Only my uncle has the receipt

Well, except that in many cases the default applications used for many things (viewing pictures etc.) are some Metro-style apps that jump away from the legacy desktop mode. It is quite silly actually, but of course you can change the defaults applications if they start bugging too much.

Anyway to the OP, teach her to consider the Metro Start screen as the replacement of the Win7 Start menu, and move the desktop tile to be the top leftmost one so that he can always get there from the start screen by just pressing enter.

And if she ever gets lost in the depths of the Metro UI by accidentally clicking on any of the other tiles, keep just pressing the Windows key to get back to the start screen.

And set up power button push to shut down the machine, so she never has to try to find the hidden shutdown icon anywhere if she feels she wants to shut it down "completely".

The default "shutdown" in Windows 8 is actually some kind of fake shutdown, more like hibernate mode. That's how Windows 8 gets its much vaunted "fast boot up times". If you disable that fake shutdown to be a proper shutdown from the depths of the power options (disable "fast boot up"), the boot up times are similar to Win7. I needed to do that because with the "fast boot up" I couldn't get to BIOS setup after powering up the machine, and there also seems to be a bug in Win8 which can cause corruption to Win7 partition, if you are running Win7 and Win8 side by side while using the default fast boot up. With only Win8, it doesn't matter.

Wait, how come? Isn't the BIOS and pre-OS environment independent of the installed OSes?

Or are you on your G75? ASUS have a fast booting utility (or something along that line), IIRC, maybe that one is causing issues?

At least an ASUS rep stated in the ASUS forums that MS is not delivering Win7 anymore to OEMs, which I take it to mean that all new preloaded Windows PCs come from now on only with Win8.

I think in this case it may be more straightforward to just bite the bullet and learn to cope with Win8. The ASUS forums are full of stories people with preloaded Win8 having trouble downgrading it to Win7, it seems a bit complicated sometimes. For me it is easier because in my case Win7 was the preloaded OS, I could even download a Win7 Home Premium ISO from Microsoft and install from it using my existing Win7 key, in order to avoid all the preloaded ASUS crap on their default Win7 installation. For now I'm running Win7 and Win8 side by side, mostly for testing purposes, and keeping Win7 as plan B for now.

Windows 8's fast start-up does not affect the BIOS hotkey; are you sure you're pressing the right one? This varies widely between vendors; possibilities include Esc, Delete, F1, F2, etc. As Elenarie mentioned some vendors also have their own fast boot functionality (separate from Windows' own) which could be deliberately skipping the BIOS interaction delay.

I don't think it is any utility since I don't think I have installed such on my Win8 installation, and even if I have, I had the problem from the moment I installed Win8 (before installing any ASUS stuff on it). Anyway, it may well be an ASUS (G75) issue, utility or not. Many G75 users reported not being able to access the BIOS setup for some reason (no matter how much they pressed F2 during boot) when they powered up their Win8 machine.

When I was inspecting another problem apparently also related to the fast boot up, I happened to notice that when I disabled the fast boot-up from the power (button) options in control panel, the problem went away and I have no problem accessing the BIOS setup anymore. I also presume that if you use "restart" (and not "shutdown" => power up), that will also allow you to access the BIOS. I presume in restart the machine is completely powered down, regardless of the current "fast boot-up" setting.

So since disabling "fast boot up" seemed to fix two problems for me (inability to access BIOS setup on boot up, and a separate Win7 partition getting corrupted), I've disabled it for good. I don't mind a little longer boot up time.

At that time, I was using the (then) latest G75VW BIOS, 221 (to which I had updated from the original 207). Afterwards ASUS also released BIOS 222, I've installed it too.

Anyway, with Win7, I didn't have any issues getting to BIOS, with BIOS v207 nor v221. But with Win8, I suddenly couldn't get to BIOS setup anymore (except when using "restart" instead of shutdown + power up). But when I disabled the fast boot-up option, the problem disappeared completely.

The other fixed problem I mentioned (my dual boot Win7 partition getting corrupted) was probably related to this (they are discussing about the Win8 preview, but it seems to be still applicable to released Win8):

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/W8ITProPreRel/thread/1be71590-1f43-4525-a341-26bdbccdb9df

where one (MS employee?) said this: And that indeed fixed it for me, I haven't detected corruption on the Win7 partition anymore (after I disabled fast boot-up in Win8, ie. enabling complete shutdown).

All I care is that now it is working for me, even though the root cause at least for the BIOS setup problem is still a mystery. I have longer Win8 boot up times now, so what? Watching those rotating dots a bit longer is kinda soothing. :)

What the hell, then why are they calling it a shutdown instead of hybrinate if that is what it really is? Thanks for the heads up about this, another thing I got to tinker with. Although that part shouldn't affect Gram any since all she does is surf the web, play solitaire, and check her mail.