Windows 7 on a Surface Pro?

Anybody going to put Windows 7 on a Surface Pro?

Here's the situation. My IT dept is not ready for Windows 8. We won't be moving off of SCCM 2007 for another 9 to 12 months and we won't be have 2008 on the domain servers for another 7 to 10 months. So we're just not in a position to deploy W8 for a little while. However everybody wants Windows 8 hardware.  Bottom line, I will be building OSD driver packages for Windows 8 hardware like the Dell XPS 12 duo and the Surface Pro. Anybody else have any experience with W7 on W8 hardware. 

February 17th, 2013 12:17am

you are better off using what the tablet shipped with

there are still some tablets out there with 7 on them but not many of them remain in the channel

Visual Studio 2012 can target the new tablets fine and the development tools are relatively solid.

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February 17th, 2013 4:30am

Hi,

Surface is only for Windows 8 right now. And it was not design for Windows 7.

February 18th, 2013 11:29am

Leo/Vegan, 

As soon as I receive my Surface Pro tablets and load my corporate Windows 7 64 Enterprise image via OSD I will post my experience. I thank you for your input but you failed to grasp the real world situation of a Fortune 500 company. 

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February 18th, 2013 9:36pm

I have lots of experience with dinosaurs in my shop, mainframe anybody?

February 18th, 2013 10:51pm

Leo/Vegan, 

As soon as I receive my Surface Pro tablets and load my corporate Windows 7 64 Enterprise image via OSD I will post my experience. I thank you for your input but you failed to grasp the real world situation of a Fortune 500 company. 

So, what happened?

Are there even Windows 7 drivers available for all the hardware that would allow a Surface Pro to fully function on Windows 7?

Even though people "don't like" the UI, the reason we can't use Windows 8 now is because there is some mandatory security software that must be deployed on all systems that may not be updated to support Windows 8 until 2014 and management would like to get Surface Pros (or similar Core i5 tablet) now.  

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March 14th, 2013 6:17am

Why do you want to use an touch unfriendly UI on a Tablet? Use Win8 but install StartIsBack and Modern Mix, to have a lot of Win7 features back:

http://www.startisback.com/#download-tab

http://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/features.asp

March 14th, 2013 9:11am

I am going to try this now, Install Windows 7 Ultimate X64 on my Surface pro using the Windows 8 Driver pack, I was able to get the windows 7 installer to launch by going into the advanced options boot menu in Windows 8, starting Command Prompt, changing the directory to the windows 7 drive cd D:/ and running Setup.exe
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June 27th, 2013 12:12am

I am going to try this now, Install Windows 7 Ultimate X64 on my Surface pro using the Windows 8 Driver pack, I was able to get the windows 7 installer to launch by going into the advanced options boot menu in Windows 8, starting Command Prompt, changing the directory to the windows 7 drive cd D:/ and running Setup.exe

lets us know how you make out

June 27th, 2013 12:16am

MS posted a KB and said that it doesn't owrk:

Windows 7 Setup hangs at "Starting Windows" on Surface Pro

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2828074/en-us

The Surface Pro is a Class 3 UEFI device that does not support legacy BIOS Interrupt 10 (INT 10H) video transitioning and it requires Windows 8 or later operating systems to run.

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June 27th, 2013 8:34am

MS posted a KB and said that it doesn't owrk:

Windows 7 Setup hangs at "Starting Windows" on Surface Pro

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2828074/en-us

The Surface Pro is a Class 3 UEFI device that does not support legacy BIOS Interrupt 10 (INT 10H) video transitioning and it requires Windows 8 or later operating systems to run.

July 14th, 2013 7:57pm

Ubuntu supports Secure boot while Windows 7 doesn't. That's why it works. I don't have a Surface Pro so I can't look into the UEFI.
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July 14th, 2013 9:47pm

Ubuntu supports Secure boot while Windows 7 doesn't. That's why it works. I don't have a Surface Pro so I can't look into
July 14th, 2013 10:50pm

loolllll its true I tested it and my SP crashed and wouldn't want to load windows
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September 27th, 2013 2:17pm

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