New Windows-powered tablet-notebook hybrids now in SA

Slingshot said:
I just finished updating Windows 10 to Build 10240 and cleaned up the drive. Now there's a whopping 7GB free of the 16GB drive, which is the most I've had so far.
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Hi can you give me the process. Currently have 800mb free
 
I have been struggling.

Had to do a fresh install, windows 10 insists on downloading to the system HDD. Even then that is not enough. It still chows the HDD. Best yet, there is little to no download resume. So if something happens(literally), you have to start again.

Even the media creation tool, which is supposed to create an iso on an external drive, still wants to use the system drive.

I am going to try upgrading with a torrented iso(OMG I can actually resume !!) of the update. I theoretically should be able to perform the update with that.

Funny how MS were so anxious to push their OS in this segment, yet couldn't be bothered to actually see if someone can update a computer with a 16GB HDD. I guess some things never change.
 
konfab said:
I have been struggling.

Had to do a fresh install, windows 10 insists on downloading to the system HDD. Even then that is not enough. It still chows the HDD. Best yet, there is little to no download resume. So if something happens(literally), you have to start again.

Even the media creation tool, which is supposed to create an iso on an external drive, still wants to use the system drive.

I am going to try upgrading with a torrented iso(OMG I can actually resume !!) of the update. I theoretically should be able to perform the update with that.

Funny how MS were so anxious to push their OS in this segment, yet couldn't be bothered to actually see if someone can update a computer with a 16GB HDD. I guess some things never change.
Click to expand...

I still want to know if the SSD can be replaced with a bigger one, or if it is soldered to the board somehow. If it can be replaced a person could get a 128GB SSD cheap from overseas suppliers. I also don't see how upgrading from a USB stick could work without a USB hub, the Nextbook 8 refuses to boot from a SD card. But I did use Linux tools to write the image to SD and USB, if wrong please tell me what to use @ anyone who knows to make it able to boot from SD.
 
saa044 said:
I still want to know if the SSD can be replaced with a bigger one, or if it is soldered to the board somehow. If it can be replaced a person could get a 128GB SSD cheap from overseas suppliers.
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I don't know, have not opened mine. In all likelihood it is soldered to the board :(
 
konfab said:
I am going to try upgrading with a torrented iso(OMG I can actually resume !!) of the update. I theoretically should be able to perform the update with that.

Funny how MS were so anxious to push their OS in this segment, yet couldn't be bothered to actually see if someone can update a computer with a 16GB HDD. I guess some things never change.
Click to expand...

You can upgrade to any of the older Technical Preview builds from the default OS, and then update to 10240.

As for the 16GB thing, freeing up more space on the drive should be an easier task. You can read about the improvements here, but the gist of it is that you should enable compression on C: to benefit from the improvements to Windows 10's space-saving tricks.

konfab said:
I don't know, have not opened mine. In all likelihood it is soldered to the board :(
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Its soldered, unfortunately. Very few reference designs like the Nextbook support mSATA devices. Surface Pro supports mSATA SSD upgrades, though you have to rip it apart to perform one.
 
CataclysmZA said:
You can upgrade to any of the older Technical Preview builds from the default OS, and then update to 10240.

As for the 16GB thing, freeing up more space on the drive should be an easier task. You can read about the improvements here, but the gist of it is that you should enable compression on C: to benefit from the improvements to Windows 10's space-saving tricks.



Its soldered, unfortunately. Very few reference designs like the Nextbook support mSATA devices. Surface Pro supports mSATA SSD upgrades, though you have to rip it apart to perform one.
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My initial thought was to raid drive c and a 32GB SD card, quickly found out that was not possible. :(
 
saa044 said:
My initial thought was to raid drive c and a 32GB SD card, quickly found out that was not possible. :(
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You can try to set up a symbolic link and see if that allows you to do what you want:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

Windows will see this technically as extra drive space, but it might not work for the Windows 10 upgrade, because IIRC symbolic links aren't preserved during an upgrade of an existing OS.

Edit: This blog also goes into more detail about what you can do with symbolic links. Its very useful for some particular things.

http://blog.danieljost.com/symbolic-links-save-space-ssd/

Things get really fun when you realise that you can even create a symbolic link to a remotely hosted drive on a server. I did that for an experiment once, and had a remotely hosted "Users" folder that backed itself up constantly.
 
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Ok first part of my upgrade is done. The tormented ISO worked perfectly. I have about 2GB of free space left. Going to do a clean install and reclaim the recovery partition. So far my impressions of 10 are very good. Edge is a real treat.
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So I tried being clever and freeing up more space on the tablet in order to do the upgrade, even going so far as deleting "unnecessary" files in the Windows and Program Files directories (unnecessary as in I don't care if it breaks the system). I gathered a measly 3.4GB this way.
I then got fed up and did a restore (the "delete all files and restore to factory settings" type of restore). Here I only chose the default settings and did not allow it to connect to the internet (so it doesn't start downloading updates and stuff).

Once the restore was done, I had about 7GB free! From my other PC, I used the media creation tool to create a flash drive with the setup files on (you can choose to create one for 32bit Windows Home, even if the other system is 64bit and you use the 64bit tool to create it.)

Before I got to having 7GB free, using the media creation tool (on a flash disk) complained about there not being enough space, this time it went right along. You just plug the flashdisk into the Nextbook (using a micro-USB to normal USB adapter) and double click setup from Windows explorer. It takes a while to get ready. Somewhere there I chose "keep nothing" when it gave me the option to "choose what to keep".

It seems to be working, as it's now restarted and busy with the installation process. I'll post here once I have a result.

Please let me know if anything is unclear in this post that you'd like further explanation on. :)
 
So an upgrade using "upgrade this pc now" option on the media creation tool is a no go zone on a device with 5GB of free storage right? Apparently devices with less than 32Gb will only start seeing the update pushed to them after 4 August. Can't deal.
 
SammyD said:
So an upgrade using "upgrade this pc now" option on the media creation tool is a no go zone on a device with 5GB of free storage right? Apparently devices with less than 32Gb will only start seeing the update pushed to them after 4 August. Can't deal.
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5GB might pull it off, but I couldn't even get to 5, so that's why I did the restore.

The update worked perfectly after the restore, by the way. I haven't really tested anything, but that 3GB recovery partition was still there. I didn't check if Win10 allows it to be removed after saving it to a flash disk (mainly because I only have the one flash disk lying around at the moment, which has the upgrade stuff on). I now used the recovery boot setting to boot from the flash disk and do a proper clean install of Win10. I deleted the recovery partition during the clean install. It seems to have installed Win10 now (it's now saying "getting ready"), but I'll let you guys know once it's finished.
 
My clean install worked, but you do have to reinstall the drivers as per the site that konfab suggested... (Drivers).
So, if you managed to upgrade, I would suggest investigating whether Win10 allows you to backup and delete the recovery partition before doing a clean install. I did manage to get most things working, though. The front facing camera is just a bit dark and the rotate settings I still need to fix.
 
wvantzand said:
My clean install worked, but you do have to reinstall the drivers as per the site that konfab suggested... (Drivers).
So, if you managed to upgrade, I would suggest investigating whether Win10 allows you to backup and delete the recovery partition before doing a clean install. I did manage to get most things working, though. The front facing camera is just a bit dark and the rotate settings I still need to fix.
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Does the Nextbook 8 use the same drivers?
 
saa044 said:
Does the Nextbook 8 use the same drivers?
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No idea, but I think it would... What might also work is to make a backup of wherever Windows stores the driver information and reference that folder when you reinstall the drivers. But I only have experience with the 10" Nextbook, so it might not be the best idea to listen to me. :)
 
wvantzand said:
No idea, but I think it would... What might also work is to make a backup of wherever Windows stores the driver information and reference that folder when you reinstall the drivers. But I only have experience with the 10" Nextbook, so it might not be the best idea to listen to me. :)
Click to expand...

haha thanks, I will make a backup with Snappy Driver Installer. But yeah that is how we learn, to play around, mess things up and fix it again. :p
 
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