David Wesst

I have to say that I really did like the Windows Phone 10 technical preview. I think that the new phone OS is heading the right direction, and that if you have a secondary device or want to be "hardcore" , you should install it and check it out.

I'll talk about that in a future post, for now I want to share the steps I took to downgrade my Lumia 920 from the Windows 10 Technical Preview back to Windows Phone 8.1.

Not being a phone expert, the idea of downgrading incorrectly was pretty scary proposition as I didn't want to ruin it nor lose any of my data. But, this weekend I managed to find the guidance from windowscentral.com I needed and it wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it would be.

Follow the guide from windowscentral.com above. The tool is easy and self explanitory, and was quite happy that it just did everything it needed to do to get my phone back onto a officially released Windows Phone OS.

Nevertheless I hit a few bumps in the roads that may or may not have been caused by me, but I would be remiss if I didn't share my experience on the web, as hopefully it prevents someone else from hitting the same issues.

Mobile Carrier Settings Lost

This one wasn't such a big deal to me.

Being on the Windows Phone 10 preview, whenever a new upgrade was installed, I would lose my settings. Not sure why that would happen, but it did. The downgrade wasn't any different. Here's the fun part though: you won't realize you don't have a data connection until you need it.

The SIM card worked just fine as phone calls and text messages would come in just fine. Plus, my apps were downloaded and re-installed as I was on my wireless network, so I didn't consider my data connection to be be broken.

Until I needed it out in the wild.

So, it's not a big deal as you just need to take note of what your carrier settings are, or do a quick web search for them prior to make sure you have them on hand after the downgrade completes.

Backup Your OneDrive

After the downgrade was complete, all of my photos and files backed up on OneDrive were scortched. Not just on the phone, but in the cloud too.

This step burned me pretty badly, considering I had a bunch of photos of my new daughter on there and they are all gone now. Given, it may have been my phone settings or something else that I didn't configure properly. Either way, I should have been smart and backed up my files onto a medium other than OneDrive itself.

For a free service it's great, but man does it burn when something goes wrong.

The Point

Outside of the lowlights listed above, I liked the downgrading experience. It was simple, intuitive, and will encourage me to take part in future technical preview programs from Microsoft.

Just make sure you back up everything before you do.