Thursday, June 4, 2015

Teclast x89 - all the things my netbook couldn't

I bought a Teclast x89 tablet. I suppose the important specs are the screen - 2048x1536 in 7.9" - and the CPU - an Intel x86. I'm hoping to use it in all the ways my netbook wasn't good enough for. Mainly that it didn't have enough grunt or was still too big to carry around.

Anyway, to make it really useful, I decided to get rid of the Android OS and let Windows use up the full space on the eMMC.

http://manguiro.blogspot.com/2015/03/guide-teclast-x89-installation-guide.html

That guide can mostly be followed for the Windows flashing. You can use only the WINPE drive and go interactive with diskpart. The script in WIMPART-PRE mostly dance around the Android partitions which weren't relevant. I found that I could step through the WIMPART script interactively except that I was missing a convert gpt near the top, after clean.

Another task was to set the microSD card up as an alternative to the eMMC, which was only 32GB. Dropbox won't store on a removable disk so there's some trickery involved. I started here:

http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/win-8-1-format-a-sd-card-with-multiple-partitions-make-it-gpt-uefi-bootable-make-any-removable-storage-usb-appear-permanent.59815/#post369322

I found that the diskmod filter driver worked well by itself. It didn't need the powershell commands either since Windows 8.1 with Bing (32-bit) is installed. It did take some fumbling around with the different ways to recognise and store the microSD card identification in registry - drive letter, device etc.

I did end up using the VHD(x) method though.

http://mattblogsit.com/windows/configure-surface-to-use-microsd-as-primary-storage

It takes a little while longer to load after boot but I think having files inside the VHD container rather than out in the open will help stop silly things from happening when I do need to put the microSD card in other device or reader.

Next time - I may or may not be reporting about my success in getting the screen to turn off while continuing to play music.