Windows 7 UEFI vs legacy BIOS

So... I'm officially tired of Windows 8.1 and I'm probably going to fall back to Windows 7. My question is... Is there any benefit to keeping UEFI or should I go back to BIOS and MBR?

I'm just really fed up with 8.1

 

UEFI/GPT for:
Boot from >2.2TB partition
>4 partitions/drive
Slightly faster boot and wake time

Otherwise BIOS/MBR

 

I've never been even remotely concerned about a few extra seconds going from power button to desktop, and I don't use sleep or hibernation. I just turn my system off when I am not using it.

Agree with octiceps... if you're not hung up on those things there is no compelling reason to stay with a pure UEFI setup. Legacy BIOS and MBR is a tried and true setup that is more forgiving. Even though they are really small and waste is minimal, I do not care for the extra system partitions that go along with GPT. I also do not have any use for breaking up my usable drive space into a bunch of smaller partitions.

The other exception some folks might need to consider in this situation is the 2TB volume limitation with MBR. To avoid losing half of my data volume's drive space (2 x 2TB HDD in RAID0) I have to set up the volume as GPT in spite of my preference for MBR. That does not require setting the BIOS in UEFI mode. GPT still works fine for me with Legacy BIOS or UEFI with Legacy Option ROM.

 

Thanks for the responses guys. I ended up having the installer freeze with UEFI disabled so I ended up having to install it in UEFI anyway.

It's good to hear there aren't too many differences between the two. I use Linux occasionally with UEFI so I guess it makes sense to just run both.

I'm glad this laptop still has a USB 2.0 port. Totally spaced that Windows 7 won't install from 3.0 ports.

Just got the install finished, now I need to find all the Windows 7 tweaks I used to use, haven't used 7 in a long time.

Amazingly, the Bluetooth and sound are working out of the box. Usually laptops... Well nothing works.

 

Yes it will but you need to manually install usb3 drivers during installation since they are not included in media. Or customize the media with the needed drivers, just like XP and achi drivers back in the old days.

On some laptops you can downgrade usb3 to usb2 from bios.

 

On my Alienware 18, it doesn't like UEFI / Legacy ROM if installing Windows 7, after doing all the Windows updates, for some odd reason, something would not work right, sometimes event viewer when launched would just give an error or the Group Policy Editor would not load. Try them and make sure those 2 are working fine then also launch services.msc and see if it's working.

Now back to your question, other than GPT supporting 2 TB+ partitions, it also takes 0.5 seconds to initialize a partition during bootup so that's the only plus about GPT.

I install Windows 7 on MBR / Legacy BIOS and Windows 8.1 on UEFI / GPT. I always keep going back to Windows 7 for some reason though.

 

I've been fighting with it for awhile now. There's something it doesn't like in UEFI mode but when I try to install it in MBR, it refuses to install because of the GPT drives. I'm slipstreaming an ISO right now with all the updates and a driver pack and I'm going to try an MBR install again. This machine supports both 7 and 8 so it really shouldn't be giving me this much trouble. If it won't coexist with GPT I'll have to go back to 8.1 =\

 

Wait a second, I forgot to mention.

If you want to install Windows 7 in UEFI / Leagacy ROM, then you need to do this:

1- Insert the Windows 7 DVD
2- Start your computer and bring up the boot menu (on my Alienware I have to press F12)
3- When given the boot menu options, you need to select the DVD Drive but UEFI so it would be something such as UEFI: BD-ROM for example
4- When in the partition screen of the Windows 7 setup, if the partition is not GPT, then Windows will tell you it cannot be installed so you'd have to press SHIFT + F10 to get the command prompt then type diskpart then ENTER
now select disk X (where X is the number of the disk you are trying to install onto)
then type CLEAN then hit ENTER
then type CONVERT GPT then type ENTER

now refresh the partitions screen in the Windows 7 setup and create a partition, it would then create a GPT partition


For installing Windows7 in MBR mode, we have to reverse the above

1- Insert the Windows 7 DVD
2- Start your computer and bring up the boot menu (on my Alienware I have to press F12)
3- When given the boot menu options, you need to select the DVD Drive ensuring you don't boot off the UEFI mode of the BD-ROM/DVD-Drive but just the normal mode, so you need to select the DVD/BD Drive that has no UEFI preceeding it
4- When in the partition screen of the Windows 7 setup, if the partition is not MBR, then Windows will tell you it cannot be installed so you'd have to press SHIFT + F10 to get the command prompt then type diskpart then ENTER
now select disk X (where X is the number of the disk you are trying to install onto)
then type CLEAN then hit ENTER
then type CONVERT MBR then type ENTER

 

Well I wish I would have read this but the slipstream worked. For some reason it was giving me a BSOD when I tried to activate (it's the original RTM DVD I got years ago for my M17xR1) so that's when I tried to do it MBR and that failed so I made a slipstream with SP1 and installed in UEFI mode. That went off without a hitch. All of Clevo's drivers are installed and everything is working, now I'm installing the updates lol...

Hopefully I'm happy with 7... Really don't want to have to put 8.1 on and dual boot. I'd have to wipe out my RAID and give one 240GB SSD to each.

 

I've tried RAID on laptops bro, while the benchmarks look tempting, in real world, it proved to be slower in my case.

On my Alienware 18, taking an image of C: after installing Windows + all updates with no drivers or software takes 1:33 seconds on RAID 0 but only takes 42 seconds in a single SSD Setup. RAID on a laptop sucks because it's software RAID and not a dedicated RAID card. Yes the benchmarks in sequentials reads/writes was double those of a single SSD, but the 4K speeds remained the same if not a bit lower, latency increased, and the performance decreased big time.

Just giving you my 2 cents worth. Tried every single setup you could imagine, RAID x3 using all my SSDs including the mSATA, RAID x2 without the mSATA, all slower in real world but shine in benchmarks. It's your system and your call

 

I actually just run RAID for the sake of having a larger drive. I didn't want to fork out the money for a 480GB SSD when I built the machine so I bought two 240GB instead.

Windows 7 is running like a dream... Except one thing... I can't adjust the brightness on the LCD anymore unless I change it in the nVidia control panel. =(

 

That is easy to fix usually and involves finding the right FN Button Driver. Each laptop has it named different.y

For ASUS laptops it is a utility called the ATK Package, for Alienware, it's the Alienware OSD Application, you'd have to ask in the SAGER forums what is the utility responsible for activating the FN buttons which will in turn make your FN + Brightness keys work

 

Its the Hotkey app. I have it installed and literally every button works except the brightness... Lol

 

1) I linked to the Windows 7 version of the Hot Key Utility for your laptop

2) Check to see if Sager has a recommended driver installation order. I know with Sony laptops, if you don't install them in the right order, the FN keys won't work, some laptops are very particular about the driver installation order.

Hot Key Utility for Windows 7 64 BIT v2.31.40

 

Thank you for the help.

There is in fact an order that the drivers are supposed to be installed and since I no longer have the 880M, I skipped the video driver install. I'll try removing and reinstalling Hotkey to see if that fixes it. I also have the latest stock EC on it which may be part of the issue too.

 

Well, back to 8.1

Clevo doesn't supposed Windows 7 anymore and since I'm on the newest EC and I'm unwilling to flash my system BIOS again, I need the 3.xx Hotkey which is 8.1 only.

So that is the end of that...

 

Only 2 months and win 10

 

Windows 10 can do down in flames. I'll migrate to OS X before I'll give in to Microsoft and their agenda... As it is I purposely left my ethernet disconnected and didn't connect to a WiFi AP so that I would have a local Windows account on Windows 8 just now, not that Microsoft account garbage.

 

yes in that case you need to stick to Windows 8.1

Just customize it to your liking, install Classic Shell FTW and you should be good to go

 

Its the idle tasks that tick me off... No matter what I do on both my laptop and desktop, 8.1 has high CPU usage idle tasks that I can't find and disable (everything in task scheduler is disabled) which shoots my CPU fan up.

I installed Linux Mint 17.1 to test it out... Got my 980M accelerated and everything... Too bad there's no SLI support but hey, at least I know Linux works flawlessly on this machine if I get too annoyed.

Of course... brightness control doesn't work -_-

 

I wouldn't use linux EVER just for this, on every laptop I owned, the FN keys won't work, kind of stupid really that even after so many years, the Linux people haven't figured out a way to make everything on a laptop work. Messes with my OCD

Now with regards to background tasks,

do this:

1) uninstall all metro apps, and I mean all with the exception to the 2 that never get uninstalled normally like Photos and Webcam

2) Check this: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/34374-automatic-maintenance-enable-disable-windows-8-a.html

 

Also, I just came to know that the latest SAGER laptop has HARDWARE RAID can you please answer in my thread here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/sager-has-hardware-raid.776061/

Does your lappy also have this hardware RAID? never knew that laptops can have hardware RAID unless this is some sort of marketing gimmick from Sager

My next laptop will be a SAGER/CLEVO BTW just waiting till next year till CPUs have been upgraded so I can really feel that I did a major upgrade

 

You know now that I didn't link my Microsoft account to it, the performance issue seems to be gone. I wonder what Microsoft was doing......

Hardware RAID is extremely unlikely in laptops. There's no real performance impact with fake RAID in normal 0 or 1 configurations to justify it and the cost would be astronomical to have a dedicated hardware RAID solution that offered a performance advantage due to its cache.

 

I left the computer idle for 10 minutes today and sure enough it fired right up. Did exactly what you said and bam, no more issues! Thank you so much, I had disabled all those tasks before but I guess it was Metro.

 

Also disable tge trigger of the idle maintenance task in the task scheduler... Disabling rhe task itself doesn't work as it enables itself... You have to disable the trigger

 

Well it's been on for about 6 hours now without one fan burst. If it turns itself back on I'll work on it further.

 

Yeah you will need Microsoft maintenance manger to re enable it which it does the 1st time you open the pc in a certain day... So till a day has passed you will be safe

 

Glad I could help bro, metro apps, even when not active, such your resources and internet bandwidth to no joke! it cripples your whole internet speed and browsing snappiness! Metro is for touch screen suckers! (no offense to you at all)

 

Its back. And i actually did go delete the triggers. This is extremely frustrating. I can't run my overclock because of this mess!

 

How about letting the trigger start win maintenance in the lock screen? I'm not good to explain (google translate) but I do this with win maintenance. So that the trash does not start unnecessary during idle when the laptop is turned on. You can run the risk that this garbage starts when you running benchmark tests. Destroying scores when it starts. Windows maintenance do not understand that the hardware is working hard under (benchmark test) unless the mouse is moved.

 

I don't want it running at all. I found out it was the windows defender cache manager task and disabled it. Apparently this task has a habit of never finishing and it runs the CPU the whole time by about 15% which is enough to kick my fans up. I never had any of these issues with Windows 7. Then again I didn't use defender. I used avast and turned off scheduled scans.

 

Some say that win maintenance trash gets better in Win 10. LoL. It's amazing that win Maintenance don't understand that the laptop working (run bencmark tests). Stop only when the mouse is used

 

The annoying thing is that Microsoft doesn't set this task to stop when the computer isn't idle anymore... It keeps running.

 

Several of my friends did not understand what happened when they started using win 8. The fans began to make noise no and then. LoL. Briliant plan by Microsoft.

 

Disabling the trigger that executes the maintenance on idle pc state did the trick for me ... I also use Avast so dunno about windows defender issue

 

I stopped using Avast because it's just not necessary and takes too many system resources. Plus the horrible nags!

Everything is fine now that I disabled that task and deleted the triggers for Windows maintenance. Hopefully it holds up...

 

Here you go buddy:

1.
Control Panel > Action Center > Change Action Center settings
uncheck Automatic Maintenance

2.
http://reboot.pro/files/file/237-runassystem-and-runfromtoken/
RunasSystem_v1.0.0.3.zip
RunFromToken_v1.0.0.2.zip

extract to same folder
open admin cmd, execute:

Code:

net start trustedinstaller
runassystem.exe "runfromtoken.exe trustedinstaller.exe 1 cmd"

in the new opened cmd, start task scheduler:

Code:

%windir%\system32\taskschd.msc /s

and disable the tasks in \Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler

or better, from new cmd windows execute:

Code:

SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler\Idle Maintenance" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler\Maintenance Configurator" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler\Manual Maintenance" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler\Regular Maintenance" /DISABLE

you may disable those as well:

Code:

SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\Diagnosis\Scheduled" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\DiskCleanup\SilentCleanup" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\DiskDiagnostic\Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticDataCollector" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\DiskFootprint\Diagnostics" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\Maintenance\WinSAT" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\RAC\RacTask" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\Servicing\StartComponentCleanup" /DISABLE
SCHTASKS /Change /TN "Microsoft\Windows\Setup\SetupCleanupTask" /DISABLE

 

Sorry, if I should have created a new theme regarding the following question, but I saw a discussion of RAID benefits on laptops here and it's related to my question.

I have three Samsung 840 SSD 500 gb each in RAID plus one micron c400 RealSSD mSata 256 gb (not included in the raid). I am trying to fall back to windows 7 and install it on that micron drive, but during installation from the USB stick, my laptop freezes right after the "setup is loading drivers" at the "windows is starting" screen. I assume this has something to do with the missing RAID drivers. I went to the Intel website and downloaded the latest "f6" drivers and placed them to my USB stick. After that I hit f6 right after windows 7 starts its first setup steps, the menu pops up with only one choice that does nothing and I'm again stuck at the "windows is starting" screen.

Oh and I created my USB drive with Rufus, in F12 boot menu it says that it is an EFI drive but not UEFI, perhaps that's where my problem is?

Should I disable my RAID (since it gives no performance at all, judging by the comments here) and go with AHCI?

Thank you.