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Is it possible to run windows 7 on a surface rt which is running windows 8

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  • Windows 7
  • Surface
  • Windows 8
Last response: in Windows 7
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October 16, 2014 1:23:45 PM


Hi, i'm just wondering before i try and in all respects prob fail at running windows 7 from a live disk on a surface rt,

My daughter has just got one on loan from college and its good and all but she’s a dedicated windows 7 user... plus even though they loan them out to all students they have locked them up so tight that even a single cell organism would find it difficult to get through... I could circumvent the security but i don’t want her to break the college ICT policy and get into trouble... so the first thought i had was to create a live usb running windows 7... I have access to genuine pro, standard and rt versions of windows 7 but i would rather not use the rt version as it is a clean copy and has not been installed or used on any device and would like to keep it.

Anyone give me some advice

Thanks

More about : run windows surface running windows

a b $ Windows 7
a b * Windows 8
October 16, 2014 1:27:40 PM

I'll bet a quarter that there are devices on it that don't have win7 drivers - if they are making totally new hardware, and making it for win8, why bother to write win7 drivers?

You might be able to run win7 in a VM, but she's young and her brain is more plastic than ours are; she may be able to adapt.
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October 16, 2014 1:29:29 PM

I dont think you will be able to get it to work. The Surface RT is an ARM based CPU, think cell phone, where the surface pro is an x86 CPU more like a normal PC. Bottom line Win 7 does not have the instruction set to make sense of the ARM CPU.
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a b $ Windows 7
a b * Windows 8
October 16, 2014 1:39:09 PM

if you could find a version of windows 7 compiled for ARM it could work.
I don't think the version exists
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a b $ Windows 7
a b * Windows 8
October 16, 2014 1:47:05 PM

As stated by others your two primary issues are first are foremost there is no Windows 7 compiled for the ARM processor the RT uses, second problem is driver support.

Now you could probably get a surface pro with an intel x86 in i to run windows 7 if you can get drivers to work. Key word being "work", i make no promises as to how well.
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