Winbook - Tiny and fun

I got that Winbook TW700 as mentioned in the previous blog post; I also asked the "pay per post" service how they wanted me to post so that I would get paid, and never heard back from them.

My favorite thing about this tiny tablet, is it fits in my back pocket. I carried around an iPad for a few days to test it, and it was always a problem of where I was going to set it down when I needed to do something with my hands.

My biggest complaint, is the size of the hard drive. The specs list it as a 16 gig drive, and I figured that would work just fine; but once you login to the Windows 8.1 stock install, you see a drive of 8.77 gigs, with something like 3 gigs free. The "Recovery Partition" is 5.57 gigs of the drive.

Now there is a micro SD card slot, and the Quick Start guide says the biggest card it can read is 64 gigs, so I got a "fast" (as opposed to "cheap") 64 gig micro SD, and the first thing I did was try and put the "Users" folder onto the it. (The micro SD card is called the "D" drive). I then ran into a problem with the "Windows Store" app not opening, as well as some of the other "tiles" programs. I eventually find out that the micro SD card is on a format called exFAT, which doesn't like some file that shows up in the Users profile that relates to the new kinds of Windows apps. I wrote out on their forums the problem, I don't expect them to come up with an answer, but I expect to find a way to "mklink /d" some of the bigger directories so my data files don't fill up this tiny hard drive.

I did have a success story that I also shared on their forums. You can install programs into C, then do the "mklink /d c:\name d:\name" and program still work. So far I've done this with Hearthstone, Chrome, Teamviewer, and Microsoft Office.

Another thing that's tiny are the system menu's and icons that look oversized on a PC, are tiny on the Winbook; I've had more than a few problems with clicking the right thing. So far I think I have this licked by putting "Magnifier" on the Start Menu, and using it if I am having problems with hitting the right option with my fat fingers; and also by using "Teamviewer" to remote into the tablet, then use a keyboard/mouse to get done all the configuring.

So the tablet was $80 on Amazon, got the 64gig card for $30, then I'm using this great tablet stand, then a USB hub that has a keyboard/mouse/external hard drive plugged into it when I want to use those directly (like if I want to fiddle with the BIOS), and use my regular PC to remote into it if I want to do some file cut/paste mklink /d work since that's fairly time consuming to do via the on-screen keyboard.

Okay, now what do I use this tablet for?