TABLET 8.1 Pro

[10101010]

We are currenty considering replacing our student laptops with a tablet 8.1 pro of some description.

(for students in a large secondary school)

 

I have identified the 2 dell models below as potential replacements, does anyone have experience of these?

 

Dell Venue Pro 8 spec

Intel® Atom™ Processor Z3740D (2MB Cache, up to 1.8GHz Quad-Core)

2GB Single Channel DDR3L-RS 1600MHz

64GB eMMC Hard Drive

 

Dell Venue Pro 11 spec

Intel® Atom™ Processor Z3770 (2MB Cache, 2.4GHz, Quad-Core)

2GB LPDDR3 Memory

64GB eMMC flash drive

 

 

Or could anyone recommend an alternative ?

 

Any advice welcome.

[chazzy2501]

The Toshiba Encore is cheaper and has similar specs to the 8, alought it has an 8Mpixel camera and built in GPS but no stylus option. The build quality is acceptable. Battery life and speed are great.

[3s-gtech]

What spec are your current laptops?

[10101010]

What spec are your current laptops?

 

Lenovo R61's

3GB RAM

80 GB 7200RPM

Intel Core Duo processor T7500(2.2GHz)

[dhicks]

The Toshiba Encore is cheaper and has similar specs to the 8, alought it has an 8Mpixel camera and built in GPS but no stylus option. The build quality is acceptable. Battery life and speed are great.

 

We're currently trying out a selection of tablets - @rickjames has the Toshiba Encore 8 running Windows 8.1 Home, he's had it for a couple of days now. We've got to try and figure out how we go about getting Windows 8.1 Enterprise on it. Also, storage seems to be fairly limited (32GB disk), which might be a factor if people are thinking they'll get all the same software as the desktop machines.

[VeryPC_Colin_M]

We are currenty considering replacing our student laptops with a tablet 8.1 pro of some description.

(for students in a large secondary school)

 

I have identified the 2 dell models below as potential replacements, does anyone have experience of these?

 

Dell Venue Pro 8 spec

Intel® Atom™ Processor Z3740D (2MB Cache, up to 1.8GHz Quad-Core)

2GB Single Channel DDR3L-RS 1600MHz

64GB eMMC Hard Drive

 

Dell Venue Pro 11 spec

Intel® Atom™ Processor Z3770 (2MB Cache, 2.4GHz, Quad-Core)

2GB LPDDR3 Memory

64GB eMMC flash drive

 

 

Or could anyone recommend an alternative ?

 

Any advice welcome.

 

Hi, thanks for your post. Whatever you do it's worth grabbing hold of a few students and teachers and polling them on what they would get the best use out of to help them with their studies. Most may prefer to stick with a netbook type device and engage with them faster. At VeryPC we're seeing a lot of interest in tablets for the sake of tablets when in the end a reasonably specced touch screen windows netbook / laptop, chromebook or rugged android tablet has won the day. Personally can't fault the dells or the Toshiba's and am interested in what people think of them and what you go for in the end.

[3s-gtech]

We're currently trying out a selection of tablets - @rickjames has the Toshiba Encore 8 running Windows 8.1 Home, he's had it for a couple of days now. We've got to try and figure out how we go about getting Windows 8.1 Enterprise on it. Also, storage seems to be fairly limited (32GB disk), which might be a factor if people are thinking they'll get all the same software as the desktop machines.

I managed it with a Rufus built Windows 8.1 Enterprise 32 bit memory stick (though the Windows 7 USB tool probably would have worked too) on an Asus T100. Wouldn't boot a 64 bit install sadly, as the UEFI is only 32 bit compatible. May be the same on the Tosh. The T100 is only 32 bit, but there was space for Windows, SIMS and Office with space to operate.

[dhicks]

Wouldn't boot a 64 bit install sadly, as the UEFI is only 32 bit compatible. May be the same on the Tosh.

 

Hmm, something to check, many thanks - we're moving all our other machines over to Windows 8.1 Exterprise 64-bit, so if we can't go for a matching tablet OS we might as well get Android devices.

[3s-gtech]

Exactly. That one T100 is the only 32 bit client on site - I was pretty miffed! Would require Asus to release an updated UEFI which won't happen.

 

See if you can find any tips from existing owners about installing 64 bit - it should work as Bay Trail supports it as a platform, even if most devices only have 2GB of RAM. It's up to the manufacturer though.

[SYNACK]

Exactly. That one T100 is the only 32 bit client on site - I was pretty miffed! Would require Asus to release an updated UEFI which won't happen.

 

See if you can find any tips from existing owners about installing 64 bit - it should work as Bay Trail supports it as a platform, even if most devices only have 2GB of RAM. It's up to the manufacturer though.

 

Dirty ASUS garbage, I had to image five of these things and you are right, despite the 64bit CPU the EFI will not boot it. What is even more charming is that it will not boot Windows PE either - at least for me - so I had to manually apply a system image with a Windows 8 32bit boot key from a hard drive powered by an externally powered USB hub as they don't provide enough power. Oh and if you thought a big enough USB key would do it, better luck next time... to boot it has to be FAT32 with the 4GB limit so a custom image won't fit without splitting. Then you run a system startup repair to get it to boot and it is fine but what a hassle. I was not able to find a USB NIC that would allow it to UEFI PXE boot either.

 

To ASUS... Die in a fire.

 

To Dell please stop being tools and release the new Atom version of the Venue Pro in NZ rather than the Celeron or Pentium ones. If any site sponsors can get a hold of these that can be shipped direct from Dell to NZ and work with NZ power please PM me @CPLTD @VeryPC - we have tried four times to get a Dell direct account manager and every time have been ignored or passed around a telephone black hole.

[m25man]

I've been using the Lenovo Miix 2

8" Bay Trail which is a great bit of kit crippled by lack of usable storage and a Miix 2 11" Core i3 with SSD which is far better.

 

No doubt in my mind the Bay Trail Quad Core is my favourite but 32 Gb is useless as an OS drive.

 

What we need is a decent 10" Bay Trail with 4Gb and a 128 SSD

 

Lenovo have got close but not quite...

[Arthur]

32GB is useless as an OS drive.

You could use the new WIMBoot feature of Windows 8.1 Update 1 to increase the amount of free disk space.

 

www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2014/04/11/wimboot/1

 

The advantage of this method, Microsoft explains, is that the WIMBoot image can remain lightly compressed - not enough to harm overall performance, but enough to mean that the user is given a little more storage space with which to play. 'Let’s assume the WIM file (INSTALL.WIM) is around 3GB and you are using a 16GB SSD,' explains Microsoft's Ben Hunter of the feature. 'In that configuration, you’ll still be left with over 12GB of free disk space (after subtracting out the size of the WIM and a little bit of additional “overhead”). And the same WIM file (which is read-only, never being changed in this process) can also be used as a recovery image, in case you want to reset the computer back to its original state.

 

'How does that compare to a non-WIMBoot configuration? Well, on that same 16GB system there might be only 7GB free after installing Windows – and then only if you don’t set up a separate recovery image.'

[Arthur]

to boot it has to be FAT32 with the 4GB limit so a custom image won't fit without splitting.

UEFI BIOSs typically will only read FAT32 partitions.

 

As a workaround, you could create flash drive with two partitions. The first being FAT32 (for WinPE) and the second, NTFS (for the image).

[SYNACK]

UEFI BIOSs typically will only read FAT32 partitions.

 

 

 

As a workaround, you could create flash drive with two partitions. The first being FAT32 (for WinPE) and the second, NTFS (for the image).

 

 

 

 

Nice idea but even the hack way only works on certain usb keys to be able to be read in windows and hence windows pe. Wasted a good hour and a flash drive on that line of investigation, come to think of it it would be much simpler with two usb keys, one fat32 boot and one data which gets around the limits of some usb keys on windows. Still a hassle though.

[10101010]

I've been using the Lenovo Miix 2

8" Bay Trail which is a great bit of kit crippled by lack of usable storage and a Miix 2 11" Core i3 with SSD which is far better.

 

Yeah I like lenovo, they've got an interesting model coming out, just waiting for uk release

 

Meet the New Education-Built ThinkPad 11e

[SYNACK]

So with MDT, a USB NIC with drivers you can inject and MDT you can manage the ASUS ones, just go to the Lightouch.vbs file in the scripts directory of your MDT from the live OS and then run through as normal, no PXE but doable. Be sure to patch your MDT though and check it is working alright on one in your deployment to make sure.

 

As promised reposted Imaging The Atom and other Mysteries - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

The new quad core Atom CPUs are great for 1:1 devices, long battery life, support everything and not too expensive, problem is imaging them. The issue with MDT imaging is that they are detected correctly as 64 bit architecture and so copy 64 bit EFI. This should work fine but most of the vendors have crippled the EFI implementations to only support 32 bit EFI. Some tablets support PXE with a USB NIC like the Acer Aspire Switch 10, others like the ASUS T100 don't. Either way if you are trying to use MDT it will happily fill them with un-bootable EFI code.

 

Turns out that the detection algorythm used by MDT is largely WMI and as such, you can just tweak it to look for the offending processor type and switch to 32 bit instead. After a good hour in the company of notepad I found this:

 

On line 515 of ZTIGather.wsf

 

replace all of case 9 with this

' Compensate for bad EFI on atom units. WMI ProcessorId BFEBFBFF00030678
			Case 9
				If objInstance.Caption = "x64 Family 6 Model 55 Stepping 8" then
					sCapableArchitecture = "X86"
					bSupportsX86 = true
					bSupportsX64 = false
				Else
					sCapableArchitecture = "AMD64 X64 X86"
					bSupportsX86 = true
					bSupportsX64 = true
				End If

 

In our implementation this seems to have worked nicely, hopefully it saves someone else some frustration.

 

 

Hopefully now it will show in the search engines