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As the name suggests, can I use a Windows 8.1 Pro key to activate my copy of Windows 10 pro?

EDIT: I have "worked around" this problem by using Rufus to create a UEFI-only installation USB. Guess I'll have to rely on having 2 USBs instead of one. Well, not too bad considering I have more than enough USB sticks. Thanks everyone for your input! ___ Dear LTT forumers, I am struggling to create a bootable USB drive for the installation of Win8.1. "Wait a minute, Win8.1 is terrible and receives no support, don't install it!" - Thanks for worrying, but I have reasons which I can not disclose due to an NDA. I need to be able to install W8.1 on both UEFI and Legacy systems. Currently, I am struggling with creating it properly. I have been following this video, but my USB does not boot into UEFI mode, only in legacy. What am I doing wrong? Thanks a lot!

Budget (including currency): Not yet sure, somewhere around $2000 USD Country: United States of America Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Half-Life 2 and related (potentially heavier) games like Garry's Mod or Team Fortress 2, Phantasy Star Online 2, Black Desert Online, many older games, 3d rendering on the CPU (Blender Internal, POV-ray - this is less important) and GPU (Blender Cycles, Cinema 4D), heavy source code editing and compilation (Linux from Scratch, Android ROMs) Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): I need out-of-the-box driver support for Windows 7/8.1 (for gaming and legacy software) and Fedora Linux (for 3d rendering/non-Windows & non-macOS code editing and compilation). I plan to use the three hard drives from my previous build (1x NVMe SSD with 1000GB, 1x NVMe HDD with 1000GB, 1x SATA SSD with 500GB): one for Windows, one for Linux, and one for large volumes of irreplaceable data. I am aware that the latest series of graphics cards is incompatible with Windows 7, so I'm going to use the previous generation of AMD Radeon RX cards (in part due to their RHEL support, making getting drivers for Fedora Linux easier). I have 4k@60, 1440@75p, and 1080@60p monitors available, though I want to play games at 1440p with at least 60 FPS. I am unsure of how much RAM I need these days for the tasks I want to do, but my previous setup from 2019 worked fine with 16GB.

I want to build a PC which will run Windows 7/8.1 without issues, with stable 60FPS performance on most games from 2014 or earlier on high graphics settings. Could anyone recommend components which are compatible with each other, have good performance, and have Windows 7/8.1 driver support? Windows XP support is preferred but not necessary.

Good day guys! I'm a first timer here, so technically my first post. Okay, so I've got me an old HP-1000 AMD E1-1200 with ATI HD 7310 laptop with 2 gigs of ram with OLD HDD which I believe is from, 2010(?). It came with windows 7 out of the box. I use it mainly for office work and unfortunately, got too slow due to various reasons. Last few days, I got an A400 240gb kingston ssd and a 4gb DDR3L sodimm ram, and decided to upgrade it. Of course I'm not expecting monumental improvements, but I want it to be at least more responsive. So i'm choosing an O.S now. 7 - not available anymore. (Can u guys provide a link if you would suggest it) 8.1 - tried it, but didn't stay long. 10 - currently using, still kinda slow. *Even with a fresh install of windows, chrome opens 3 to 4 seconds after you click it. TL;DR. - Need help choosing the optimal O.S for an old AMD E1-1200 with ATI HD 7310 laptop(2010) with 6 gigs of ram and an a400 kingston ssd - where can I get windows 7 ultimate? Thank you!!!

Hey all, Recently built my home media PC and while creating my bootable USB I thought Iˋd install Windows 8.1 to take a look back and revisit the OS. Have been playing with it for a few days and there were some things in 8.1 that I forgot about after years of using windows 10 that just feel so much better. I donˋt have any hopes of Microsoft bringing some of these touches back but here are the few things that I just liked better on 8.1 than Windows 10. But I should mention here that the 8.1 Start menu and Start Search are horrible and makes Win10ˋs implementation look amazing lol In 8.1 the activation prompts are far more aggresive, in 10 you can basically use the OS as normal with a watermark, compared to 8.1's approach, of frequently, often at startup, giving you a blue page just saying activate windows. You can obviously click through to the settings and then X out and pretend it never happened. But the more you do so, in my experience thus far the X goes away and you have to Alt-tab your way out. This happens at least 3-4 times a day of just casually using the OS. I don't want to buy an activation key considering 8.1's long term support is ending in 11 months so, just thought I'd mention it. 1) How Updates are handled (Shocker to no one) While I haven't gotten much updates since my install, other than at the very beginning. The updates were far less obtrusive. They just ran in the backgroud and the settings to change my update preferences were respected and easy to configure in the admitedly kinda janky settings app of Win 8.1. I'd say only in the past year or two has 10 come around in terms of making the updates a little less aggressive and random and out of nowhere. But it's happened for over 5 years that they were aggresive and out of nowhere for seamingly no reason and it does still happen from time to time where I go to boot up my Win10 PC and its just updating where as on 8.1 I have full control on whether that happens or not. 2) File Explorer File explorer in general just has flaws and it is well documented that from time to time it will freeze or be a little janky and chunky feeling. That is totally correct, but comparing File explorer on my Media PC with WAY older hardware VS my personal system with much more modern hardware. It is truly staggering that I found the 8.1 file explorer just more reliable. It just does what I want it to do when I want to do it. And this was tested with adding large hard drives with lots of data on them for an apples to apples comparison. As well as the old school Win7 style icons, those were pretty sweet but I think I like the visual look of 10's file system a little bit better. Also, Windows photo viewer is so quick on 8.1 compared to the Photos app on Win10. 3) Themes While I prefer the look of Win10 overall more than 8.1 and overall I think 10 goes more out of its way to be more customizable in terms of asthetics. There's something super nostalgic about these old themes that we just don't have anymore. I do perfer the stock wallpapers of 8.1 however. But, just a thought. 4) The volume settings are WAY better than the annoying little volume menu we have in 10 That is all I have to say about this, because its true. However I work in audio engineering and I almost never use this menu because all of my sound is controlled and amplified externally but thought I should mention it. 5) Snappier feel on older hardware I'm running 8.1 on my super old rig, becuase I still had some parts laying around and for a home media PC consisting mostly of streaming Netflix and watching Youtube its totally fine. I'm running a Core2 Quad Q6600 4 Core, 8gb of DDR2 and a 120gb SSD. The OS just feels normal and not sluggish whatsoever. Other than a frame or 2 here and there dropping, this OS just glides. A stark contrast to the much heavier Win10 that was honestly dog slow on this hardware. 6) Installation literally took no time So much less button clicks. So much less telemetry settings. So much less "TRY OFFICE 365". Just select the version of Windows you want to install, select the drive to install it to, and boom it starts installing. Literally took no time. These are just 6 little things that I liked about 8.1. Do I think its overall better than Win10? No. That can go for many reasons, whether its compatitbility with newer games and software or newer hardware. The design of Win10 is far more modern compared to its predecessor. Overall I just prefer to use Win10 on the day to day. But this little experiment was fun and it brought me back in time and I found somethings I like and don't like about this older OS. Remeber hot corners in 8.1? That was annoying lol Let me know if anyone else has some thoughts on Win8.1 or older versions of Windows. Maybe things that would be cool to be brought back and re-introduced in Windows 11. Thanks for reading my random thoughts.

I was doing updates on my pc and i got a very suspicious error code. It was just saying 666 as the error code. I'm very confused on why is it that specific number. After i saw the error code i just came here to ask about it. Please help me with this error code.

I am at a brick wall so to say. I've started trying to use windows 8.1 as a secondardy driver due to finding an old drive, however i cannot get half of the board's features to be detected. Namely second pcie slot, and built in network card. Device namager shows them with the yellow explimationmark as lacking a driver. How do i fix the second pcie slot bluetooth and wifi? I also do not have intel graphics control pannel.

Hi, I just installed Windows 8.1 on a laptop I wanted to let my family member use and I installed Windows then I realized the Wifi Drivers weren't installed, so, I did so. Then I ran into the issue I'm bringing today. It says "No Battery Detected". I brought this to a repair shop less than a month ago about another issue and nothing was said about it and I had Linux Mint previously less than 2 weeks ago and it detected a battery and showed percentage. I think the batteries fine as the laptop isn't even that OLD. (2018ish). Is there just a driver I'm missing or did I screw something up or is it just windows 8. When I unplug it when its on it instantly dies but I really don't think its the problem, any advice would help.

Good morning/afternoon/evening, I recently picked up a shiny new NVME drive for my MSI GE72VR 7RF laptop. After installing and attempting a clean Windows 10 install the computer started behaving weirdly. After about 10 minutes of up time it would lose connection to wifi, the usb ports would stop working, and it would refuse to reboot. Thinking that it was a problem with the image I recreated my boot device with Rufus and reinstalled with the same outcome. After that I removed the NVME drive and attempted to reinstall Win10 on my 2 tb platter drive. The same thing happened. After several minutes of near panic attacks I decided to give Win 8.1 a test to see if it would work, it did. However, it absolutely refuses to allow me to install the drivers for the network controller and as a result will not allow me to connect to the internet. Is there a decent offline solution that will help me get my driver installed? Is there another route I can attempt to get Win 10 working?

I want to upgrade my old Toshiba C55-B5200 to an 120GB SSD since my old harddrive on it is dying and is unbearably slow. I have prepared a USB for Windows 8.1 and have Initialized the SSD too, I have changed the boot settings on the laptops BIOS to boot from the USB first but everytime I boot into the USB, I get an error "Reboot and select proper Boot device... etc etc". Does anyone know how to fix this? The laptop already came with Windows 8.1 and I made sure I used the correct 64bit of Windows 8.1. Am I doing something wrong? How can I fix this? Please help.

I want to upgrade my old Toshiba C55-B5200 to an 120GB SSD since my old harddrive on it is dying and is unbearably slow. I have prepared a USB for Windows 8.1 and have Initialized the SSD too, I have changed the boot settings on the laptops BIOS to boot from the USB first but everytime I boot into the USB, I get an error "Reboot and select proper Boot device... etc etc". Does anyone know how to fix this? The laptop already came with Windows 8.1 and I made sure I used the correct 64bit of Windows 8.1. Am I doing something wrong? How can I fix this? Please help.

So guys I finally built my first dream pc and i have encountered a small problem.. my hard drive is not showing up anywhere except the bios.. I have a 120 gig SSD as bootdrive and i have windows 8.1 installed but the hard drive isn't showing up anywhere.. the 500gig harddrive has windows 7 in it and i want to formatt it, but except the bios it isn't showing up anyways even 3rd party partition managers. I tried to boot throught the hard drive but it prompted me into recovery mode and i was stuck in a endless restart loop. Any ideas?

Guys my new system will be here within like 5 days, so I need help for selection of an os Specs: I5 2500k 8gb ddr3 ram (single) Gigabyte h61 motherboard 120gb SSD (for os of course) 500gb hdd 400w psu There reason for building this pc is for livestreaming my games on Android through this and to get some playable fps on csgo... I am heavily tempted to get windows 8.1 cuz I have seen some reviews online saying it's even less bloated than windows 7, and almost all games support it(is it true?) .. Ill buy a GPU later, when I have the budget of course...

One of my friends upgraded to windows 10 recently and realized that his FPS went from over 100 to 80 in CSGO. This is not the case in any other game. All his drivers are up to date. What could be causing this issue?

Hi LTT Forum ! Happy new year ! I want to transfer a windows 8.1 (i know, ew !) installation from a HDD drive to a VirtualBox environment for my friend. The HDD drive seem to be going dead soon and I would help out my friend to save his data before it is dead. He can't just take his copies of his files because he has a suite of program that are a pain in the butt to reinstall. So, he must make a verbatim copy of his OS to keep everything set up at it is. I know I need to create an .iso file to be able to complete this task. I am a linux user and I know I can make an entire copy of a disk with the following command : # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb If anyone here know the way to make the same process in Windows via a trusted program. You would be of great help !

So I'm seeing this widely reported across Slashdot, Reddit, and other news sources. I was wondering what people though about this here. As i don't see a post about it yet? It seems Microsoft it really pulling out all the stops to drive people to Windows 10? Or is this justified? Thoughts? https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/03/16/2047215/microsoft-locks-ryzen-kaby-lake-users-out-of-updates-on-windows-7-81

i took a backup of some of my games and put it in a SD card,now im unable to copy those files back in to my pc. it does not give me a error or show anything.when i hit paste after copying it just doesnt do anything.i tried copying another set of files in the same SD card to my pc and they copied without any issue. what could be the problem.

so i have the dell inspiron 15 5558 core i3 laptop.I firstly didnt know this keyboard was backlit, after finding it out from some websites i found it.how ever i dont see a way to turn it on.some say to check mobility center but it doesnt refer to anything about keyboard backlight. i checked BIOS settings and the backlit keyboard was enabled and set to full brightness. i guessing a driver is missing.is there a driver to get this running.my os is windows 8.1

Hey hope your all having a great day! So I'm building my first PC and my final step is trying to find a windows product key but I really don't want to pay the full 120$ for home. Windows 8.1 or 10 are the only ones that I want. Can anyone tell me a website where I can buy a product key for a good price from a reputable seller?

I have Windows 8.1 currently installed on my Asus ROG G750JM. I reinstalled it Wednesday night and started downloading all my drivers. Upon completion, I began installing things such as Google Chrome and Steam. TO make sure my PC was running fine, I installed CSGO (I typically use it as my GPU test, if it runs bad that's usually because my GPU driver isn't installed) and it began running fine. I installed minecraft and everything seemed fine until I tried to launch the game. It would crash in seconds without even pulling the game up and the launcher would say "GAME CRASH, an unexpected issue occurred and the game has crashed. We're sorry for the inconvenience". Realistically the most inconvenient part is the fact that it won't tell me what's wrong. I pulled up the game log and this is all it said: 15:45:22 launcher Preparing to launch minecraft client for 1.11.2 15:45:22 launcher Minecraft client 1.11.2 is ready to start. 15:45:22 launcher Using default game log configuration client-1.7.xml (outputs XML) 15:45:23 bes Setting user: Kirikoza 15:45:24 bes LWJGL Version: 2.9.4 15:45:26 launcher Process closed with exit code -1073740791 15:45:26 launcher So it wasn't particularly helpful in pinpointing the problem. I tried older versions and even a modpack (which was the entire reason I wanted Minecraft installed) and none of it worked. The modpack game log also didn't help. It would do the same thing as normal Minecraft, try to load me in then crash and go back to the launcher without telling me what happened. I tried installing everything multiple times and it still won't work. I gave up on MC and tried to play the Skyrim remake on Steam. It's doing the same exact thing while also not telling me crap. So far i've tried 4 games and two have worked: CSGO and Binding of Isaac Rebirth. I'm currently downloading Portal 2 to see if it will work. Does anyone know what's happening? Is it something to do with my Windows 8.1 install? What am I missing? UPDATE: Portal 2 runs fine, i'm not sure why these other games don't work.

I'm installing Windows 8.1 (don't judge I have my reasons) on my Asus ROG G750JM. Windows is demanding I install drivers (without specifying WHAT drivers) so I installed the most up-to-date versions of EVERY driver on the official AsusTek drivers page https://www.asus.com/support/Download/3/521/0/4/hk9WNtlEOFPl0Q7s/41/ I put all the files on a USB flash drive and popped it into my PC. Windows recognizes the flash drive but not ANY of the drivers. Idk wtf to do. The files saved as .zip and I have every one of them. Am I missing a specific driver that Asus wants? The fuck is wrong here because I've been dealing with Windows installation giving me shit on this machine for the past two days and I'm getting really pissed off at the thing. Should I put the drivers on the same drive as the Windows installation media is?

Since VM seems to be inappropriate for even low-demanding gaming I want to have Windows XP installed along Windows 8.1 64-bit to be able to play TOCA Race Driver 2 one of my first and favorite games I ever played. I am new to the subject and have concerns over mainboard-operating system compability. Are the mainboards out there that support both XP BIOS and 8.1 UEFI?

the laptop is a alienware m17x r3 with Core i7 2670QM,8gb ram,gtx 460m gpu and 750gb hdd. it currently has windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. if i upgrade to windows 8.1 will it slow down this laptop? i want to play games in it without any lag