Hi, I think you can count this as a clarification message: You can in fact downgrade your KeySoft version, provided that you have a license key for an earlier version of KeySoft. However, there are some exceptions to this. As far as hardware is concerned, whether you upgrade or downgrade, it performs the same operation - loads "new" KeySoft image and overrides the existing KeySoft image with the new one. Here's how it is done: 1. When KeySoft detects you have a hwi file (a specialized cab file for storing ROM files, similar to iOS upgrade files), BrailleNote will ask you to perform a soft reset. After a reset, the user is asked to install this hwi file. If the user says "yes", the upgrade starts. 2. Before the actual upgrade can begin, the upgrade files from the hwi file are extracted to Flash Disk/Temp folder. There are three files: eboot.bex (bootloader), fpga.bex (low-level hardware config) and kernel.bex (KeySoft image). 3. Once extraction is done, the actual upgrade starts by using KeySoft Installer (vaInstaller.exe). This is divided into five phases: A. Bootloader is loaded and flashed to ROM. B. Low-level hardware configurations are applied (using FPGA config file; as for what FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are, I'll not answer it here, as we might get into too much electrical engineering materials, which I think that topic doesn't really fit this list). C. The integrity of KeySoft ROM image is checked by performing what's called "checksum calculation" (again, I think that would be too technical for this list). If KeySoft image is fine, then upgrade continues. If not, upgrade stops and you'll end up with new bootloader and old KeySoft version. D. KeySoft image is then applied on ROM. This process may take 30 to 40 seconds, as the ROM image size is about 60 MB. E. The extracted temp files are deleted from Flash Disk. When all processes are done, KeySoft restarts. After restarting, KeySoft will first check if you have the license for the installed version. Thus, when you downgrade, you are effectively replacing the "later" version of KeySoft ROM image with "older" KeySoft ROM image, which is the same process when upgrading to newer KeySoft versions. This process is called "flashing". Hope this clears some confusion. Cheers, Joseph
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