Laptop above minimum specs incompatible with 8.1 and 10?

[WPCentral Question]

Hey guys, I require some assistance with a problem I can't really make out. Yesterday, I tried to install Windows 10 on a laptop with a T2080 cpu, 2gb of ram and the ATI Radeon Xpress 200M gpu.
It had been running 7 for a while and I thought it's the perfect time to upgrade. I created an ISO, and, to my surprise, it failed to even start the installer, giving the error "system_thread_exception_not_handled". I tried updating as well, and it throws the exact same error after a restart, with the official error being "Installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during BOOT operation" after booting again in the previous version of Windows. For the record, I also tried installing after wiping the HDD, so that's not it. I thought I'd give 8.1 a go as well, just for the heck of it, and it has the exact same symptoms. As far as I can tell, the hardware is fine (since 7 works perfectly), there are no additional BIOS options I can tweak (there're barely any), the laptop successfully passes the system requirements in the official installer, and I have absolutely no idea what to do further. Thank you!

 

[carraig]

I was wondering, do your Radeon Xpress and CPU share memory? And do you run the x64 or the x86 version?
Requirement for Win 10 x64 is 2 GB, so if your GPU eats a chunk of that, your laptop may fail the hardware requirements.
Though if you're on the x86 version only 1 GB is required, and thus memory size will not explain the problems.

Another thing could be driver issues, if you have any external devices like mouse, keyboard, etc. connected to the laptop, you can try and remove everything, and see if that changes anything... (I know it's a long shot...)

 

[kenryk01]

OP here.
The GPU supports "Hypermemory up to 256 MB", but since there is no setting in the BIOS as far as shared memory is concerned, nothing can be done about it anyway. The T2080 doesn't support the x64 instruction set, so I made sure to only try 32-bit versions. No peripherals were connected to the laptop during the failed installs.
It's probably the GPU, but I've searched online and it seems that people have successfully installed 8.1, so I don't know what's going on really. Think I'm going to stop here and just go with 7, or maybe switch to linux...

 

[rich177]

WPCentral Question:
I have same problem with similar hardware. Can you please contact me for detailed discussion?
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