Windows 7 fans -- another caution about the Ryzen 5 2400G BIOS.

The latest BIOS on GIGABYTE GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 micro-ATX motherboard effectively prevents installing Windows Vista, Windows 7, and probably Windows 8 (I'll try 8 -- maybe today).

It will allow those to run properly, IF they had been installed prior to the BIOS update.

However, if they are damaged and one must use a recovery disk to restore them, the recovery disk will fail.

The symptom is a work stoppage during install or recovery with a message that the BIOS is "too old to use" (Huh???) -- I'm paraphrasing. So far I've found no work around. If you want Windows 7, have it fully installed before updating to the latest BIOS on my motherboard.

This problem may affect other motherboards - but, I won't be testing (I have 3 Ryzen motherboards).

So, for now, if a W7 user updates to the latest AMD BIOS to make the motherboard compatible with an APU (or to get other features), you might be stuck needing to buy Windows 10. Again, I have not tried all the motherboards out there.

Hopefully, its something that will be fixed in the next BIOS release. Or maybe there is a work around. But, who knows? Not me, yet.

Just occurred to me that the Gigabyte has two BIOSs installed concurrently. One easily switches between them. That may provide some sort of workaround path (keep one old BIOS, and one new BIOS). Not sure -- probably still need a regular Ryzen CPU handy. Being a fanatic, I might just buy a cheap Ryzen CPU for playing around, or not (just as cheap to buy Windows 10).