Thursday, December 3, 2015

Dell Venue 8 Pro (32GB) - Upgrade to Windows 10

Late last night, I impulsively decided to upgrade my Dell Venue 8 Pro 32GB, (model 5830) tablet's OS from windows 8.1 to windows 10. I promptly got online searching for issues/challenges and quickly realized I had to deal with the age old "short on disk space" issue again. Even though I only had a few apps installed on top of windows 8.1, there was only 3.5 GB left on C: drive. And it seems windows 10 upgrade requires roughly twice that amount of free space on C:.

So, after searching online, I was thrilled and my hopes soared when I read this page and thought I could use my microSD card to get through the installation. So, I immediately downloaded and started the upgrade and promptly selected external microSD card and hit refresh, but unfortunately, installer stalled and continue to give me the error message saying something like "You need an additional 3.25 GB on drive C:\". I tried multiple ways without any success.  

Then I thought of heroically removing the recovery partition, free up the space and go with the upgrade. Thank god I did not act on that plan with my sleep deprived state of mind.  Instead, I ended up using windows recovery disk creation tool, which also simultaneously moves the recovery files from your local recovery partition to the external media and in the end wipes out the recovery partition on your tablet, all in one shot. See this tutorial (or simply google for "create windows recovery drive"), and make sure you select "copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive" check box. Of course you need an external USB thumb with min of 8 GB capacity and the USB dongle for venue pro to get through this, and I was in luck. 

Once I freed up the space by removing recovery partition safely, rest was straight forward. Windows 10 upgrade utility proceeded without a hitch, and I went back to sleep as it took long time before coming back up with brand new windows 10. 

Though I haven't given it a full try, I immediately noticed that I am sorely missing the Metro App style flavor of IE present in my previous windows 8.1. The latest Edge explorer resembles traditional  desktop app version, which looks and behaves really sloppy and sluggish on Venue 8 compared to previous metro app. May be I should give it  more time, but right now I am hating it.