Windows 7 rollback to Vista?

I find myself in the extremely dissapointing position of having to dump W7 in favor of Vista. I hate doing it because I really like 7 and really hate Vista, but W7 isn't reading my numeric keypad as a numeric keypad (it's just sending the numbers as though the keystrokes are coming from the qwerty board) which means I can't play my favorite game.

I can't find anything on how to rollback an upgrade from Vista without losing everything (full reinstall of the original). Now, if that's the only way, then why did W7 keep vista around in the first place? Makes no sense, yes? Or am I wrong and Vista is just gone?

Thanks.

Robin

I would think it would work just as it did with Vista,
Have you tried setting/unsetting the numlock on the keyboard?
Any control panel / hardware options for the numpad?

I'd hate to think they changed something so as not to allow you to use it the way you need too. There has to be something ...dunno.

Good Luck

Sorry about the no sysinfo. Gateway, 2.3Ghz QuadCore processor, 1TB HDD (vast acres of free space), 3G RAM.

The numlock does nothing, but I'm not really asking for help on that issue here. Nor am I ready to dual boot. I just am looking to get rid of W7 (looking to, not wanting to) and go back to plain-old Vista. When W7 comes out for retail I'm sure there will be new drivers for the board and I'll be able to deal with it then. It's not like I'd be able to pay less for it for having the RC. Thanks anyway for the advice.

So no one knows how to roll back to Vista? Maybe you can't... Weird.

Thanks again.

Robin

PS: The worst part is that other than not being able to use my keyboard properly, the game I play runs noticeably better under W7.

Winterset said:

Sorry about the no sysinfo. Gateway, 2.3Ghz QuadCore processor, 1TB HDD (vast acres of free space), 3G RAM.

The numlock does nothing, but I'm not really asking for help on that issue here. Nor am I ready to dual boot. I just am looking to get rid of W7 (looking to, not wanting to) and go back to plain-old Vista. When W7 comes out for retail I'm sure there will be new drivers for the board and I'll be able to deal with it then. It's not like I'd be able to pay less for it for having the RC. Thanks anyway for the advice.

So no one knows how to roll back to Vista? Maybe you can't... Weird.

Thanks again.

Robin

PS: The worst part is that other than not being able to use my keyboard properly, the game I play runs noticeably better under W7.

PS: Which is why I'd prefer to solve the numeric pad problem, rather than giving up and going back to vista. Also, you keep saying, "looking to, not wanting to." It sounds like you want to keep Win7, so I wouldn't give up just yet on finding a solution.

The sad part is, you have that huge hard drive and you didn't set up a dual boot. It would have been minutes to delete Win7 from its own partition and fix the boot loader.

If you installed Win7 as an upgrade from Vista, who knows, that might have caused the problem. Its always best to do a clean install.

You might have to chalk this up to a learning experience. Never do an upgrade with a Release Candidate. Always install a fresh new copy on its own partition. Also, it should be on a "test" rig. Meaning if you only have one PC with all your personal important files, then its best to not use that to test a release candidate operating system unless you know what your getting into. It's a Release Candidate, and it warned about installing as an upgrade over a "mission critical" machine.
Sorry for the bad news, but after a web search, it does not look like you can simply go back to vista without doing a clean restore. Backup all you important stuff and start over I'm afraid.

Good Luck

Some systems have the ability to unlock via the BIOS setting, and since you mention games... sometimes you might have to unlock sticky keys.
some keyboards and system have different unlock sets.

The numlock does nothing, but I'm not really asking for help on that issue here.

thats the problem and I have seen this on many different systems back to Win95.

@OEM -- You're right in that I majorly didn't want to give up on W7. Fortunately, while I wasn't able to fix the problem I was able to find a work-around. Not nearly as smooth as it was, but well worth it to keep W7, so no more nightmare Vista for me! Yay us.

And yeah, major learning experience. I will most certainly be keeping that in mind if/when I ever try to do another RC eval.

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. Very kind of you.

Winterset said:

@OEM -- You're right in that I majorly didn't want to give up on W7. Fortunately, while I wasn't able to fix the problem I was able to find a work-around. Not nearly as smooth as it was, but well worth it to keep W7, so no more nightmare Vista for me! Yay us.

And yeah, major learning experience. I will most certainly be keeping that in mind if/when I ever try to do another RC eval.

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. Very kind of you.

Hi Winterset,

Thats great, glad to see you found something that makes it at least usable. Keep after it and you might find the perfect solution as it was in vista. Did you try taking a look in your bios and doing what Snuffy suggested?

Also, please keep in mind, when the final version of Windows 7 comes out, users will not be able to activate or update from there RC version. If you buy a retail box version of Win7 when it releases, users will not be able to just change the key or upgrade from the release candidate to the retail. A clean install will have to be preformed. Starting (I believe) March 1, all Win7 RC's will turn off automatically every 2 hours. No way around it. Then come June, it will be deactivated. So please keep in mind, you will not be able to keep your Win7 OS active and will have to reinstall at some point.

Winterset said:

I can't find anything on how to rollback an upgrade from Vista without losing everything (full reinstall of the original). Now, if that's the only way, then why did W7 keep vista around in the first place? Makes no sense, yes? Or am I wrong and Vista is just gone?

It didn't keep it around. Vista is gone.

You need to backup your data, format the partition and reinstall Vista. If you have no backup system in place, then I would create a temporary partition and move your important data there while you format/reinstall.

Note that this is not a true backup solution as when your hard drive fails you will lose all your data.

Winterset said:

@OEM -- You're right in that I majorly didn't want to give up on W7. Fortunately, while I wasn't able to fix the problem I was able to find a work-around. Not nearly as smooth as it was, but well worth it to keep W7, so no more nightmare Vista for me! Yay us.

And yeah, major learning experience. I will most certainly be keeping that in mind if/when I ever try to do another RC eval.

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. Very kind of you.

When all else fails, get the next (older in date) Higher version (7106), or the latest version. (v.7127 is out), and working better than 7100 RC.