Category: Gadgets

In my previous post, I described how I ended up with a Windows tablet that does not have a Windows (or any other OS for that matter) installed. In this one, I’ll write down how I recovered it.

A really good thing about these small tablets is the absence of a discrete USB port. They usually have only one micro USB port – just like phones – which can be used either for charging the device or by plugging in an OTG adapter, as a regular USB port. So one can only hope that the battery won’t run out before the Windows installer finishes copying files from a removable device to the internal flash storage. At first, I thought that this would be my biggest worry.

I’ve bought an Asus M80TA tablet a year and a half ago because it has a Wacom digitizer integrated into its display and came with a small pressure sensitive stylus. Also, it is a lot faster than my Asus Eee PC 1000H that I bought while I was studying at the university. The tablet has an Intel Atom Z3740 CPU integrated onto its motherboard, which allows it to run a desktop version of Windows. It came with a 32-bit version of Windows 8.1 preinstalled, even though the CPU has a 64-bit architecture, due to the size difference between the two versions.

I often had a problem with its Wacom driver; Windows just kept ‘updating’ it from Windows Update, rendering it unusable. When I lost my patience, I’ve restored the device to its factory state. This is a pretty tricky thing; it’s definitely worth a further reading: Compact OS, image optimization.