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Downgrading from Win8 to Win7 Home Premium
Hi y'all, my first post here. I'm a novice - can get into trouble without getting out.
The lovely wife had an old Dell machine that came with WinXP. We bought an upgrade pack at retail to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 Home Premium. Lovely wife has a new machine with Windows 8. We want to downgrade back to Windows 7 Home Premium using that same retail software we bought last year.
A call to Microsoft reveals that, yes, the upgrade software can be used for the downgrade (sanity check - are they right?) but that the product key can be used on only one machine at one time. The Microsoft support was trying to get me to buy an additional Windows 7 product key, but I think I can transfer it from one machine to the other. My main questions are around order of operations:
I found this forum on how to release the product key on the presently-installed environment. Product Key Number - Uninstall and Deactivate in Windows
Question #1: Will that contact the Microsoft activation server so that I can then re-use the product key?
Question #2: Will releasing the product key on the old machine immediately render the OS inoperable?
The hoped-for order of operations would be this, can I do it?
1. Install Windows 7 on new machine.
2. Release product key on old machine.
3. Activate product key on new machine.
4. Transfer old files (pictures, documents, music, etc.) from old machine to new.
But if releasing the product key will render the old OS inoperable, we'll have to do it in a different order.
Thanks for your time and help walking me through the best way to do this.
KB