Can I downgrade from Win7 to Vista or XP?

Lordbob75 said:

I would agree, but he asked about downgrading.

If it is a hardware problem, yet the OP still downgrades, it won't solve the issue.

I know what you mean, but if you went to a mechanic to get your oil changed, and he/she noticed that your car was leaking other fluids....you'd want the more serious issue taken care of too, wouldn't you? An OS that works fine and then suddenly starts freezing and stuttering can most often be traced to failing hardware. Solve that problem, and you solve the issue.

Now that I can agree on. There have been a few good questions posted, so hopefully the OP can tell us what was swapped.

No hardware has been swapped yet. As I said, all was just great until things started becoming problematic. I thought it might be a cooling issue with the CPU, but temps were always OK. I reinstalled with new thermal paste anyway, and still have the problem.

IF it's hardware, I'm thinking something mainboard must be wrong. I already had to replace an identical Asrock P55mpro board with this one within a week after purchase. After my experience thusfar, I will never touch their boards again. I've read about some people having issues with I5 chips and memory timings on Asus/Asrock boards, but I can't figure out why my board would suddenly begin having issues if it was just fine... am wondering if my Gskill Ram is going bad? Tested that, and it was fine once, but one time Windows put up a little flag in the bottom right corner and said there was possibly a Ram problem. That only happened once, though. It would also have to be BOTH 2GB (2x2gb config) sticks going bad, because I've tried both of them individually in different slots, and freezes still happened. Oh, and I did get a bluescreen during an overnight Ram test, but I can't be sure it was the Ram that caused the bluescreen? Hard to know! My problem has never caused bluescreens.


I'm going to install an old OEM version of XP and see what happens. If it's hardware, the problem will likely persist, I'm assuming.

Specifically, what happens to me is the OS will boot fine, but randomly soft-freeze (meaning the mouse still works, but IE, Firefox, or other programs will lock). The mouse still moves around, and I can half-launch programs, but they will freeze until everything unlocks at once. I can even CTRL-ALT-DELETE, but it won't list the processes until it unfreezes. Sometimes just doing that makes it unfreeze, but not always. It will often snap out of this freeze after 10 seconds to a a minute. Lately it hasn't been coming out of it always. Also have experienced some shutdown issues lately -- that's a new one that appeared recently. This happens moreso when I am using Windows Live Mail or Flash websites, for example.

Yeah, I'm clear of known viruses. I used to run MS Security Essentials, but double-checked by uninstalling and installing Kaspersky to see if it found anything. Malwarebytes came up clean, as well.

Based on what is happening, it could be Ram, a mainboard problem, or just about anything, I'd think.

Oh, and the problem does seem to possibly happen more after I leave the machine on for a long time... could be heat-related, but don't know how. I've got great airflow, a freshly-seated Coolermaster heatsink, etc. The room temperature has been 25 to 27 degrees celsius as of late. I've been running CoreTemp and no core has ever gotten over 50 degrees celcius at full load. Usually they're just below 40.

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How To Downgrade From Windows 7 To XP (Step-by-Step)


How To Downgrade From Windows 7 To Vista (Step-by-Step Guide)

pcs3657 said:

Hi See these links you will not have to worry after wards:

I'm quite sure the OP would still have to worry if it is a hardware issue.

Back on topic, the likely causes for freezing are over-heating, bad memory, failing PSU, or a failing motherboard. The memory is very easy to test, and the PSU is easy to swap out, so I'd start with those two.