Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsAwesome tablet. Here is some technical advice...
Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2014
Apparently this little guy works extremely well. I don't know what magic Lenovo has used, but the processor pegs out at 2.25GHz with all 4 cores in use and 2.4GHz when just 1 is in use. Dramatic performance improvement over other 8 inch tablets that start at around 1.8GHz and then after a few seconds throttle down to 1.33Ghz. Unexpectedly, this table is 50-70% faster than the Dell Venue 8 Pro in number crunching (benchmarks and video encoding).
Oh, did I mention the 1200p screen is gorgeous?
Battery life is a tad on the slim side. Also, speakers are quiet
Technical:
- Set it up with a clean install of Windows 8.1 (with the USB3 hub, this is trivial with a keyboard and mouse) to erase the recovery partition. Lenovo has made it so that the recovery partition is co-active with the main partition to save main partition space -- this made erasing it glitch out (force-erasing with DiskPart only works in recovery -- and then fries boot irreparably even with GPT-aware rebuilding and EFI chasing, so don't try it).
- Because speakers are quiet, be sure to grab some kind of FX booster online (there are free ones out there that do great noise leveling and amplification across the whole system such as DFX). Makes it nice and loud without wasting much RAM or resources.
- To use multiple bluetooth devices simultaneously with Wifi, you must go into device manager and disable HybridCoEx bluetooth collaboration in the Wireless adapter settings
- To get newer versions of the bluetooth and wifi drivers, feel free to use the 64-bit executables on the Lenovo support page -- they also contain updated 32-bit versions. (This is not true of the platform drivers, but many others).
- No lenovo-branded software is essential, but the Power Manager is highly recommended. It allows you to limit the CPU speed with its "cool mode" in realtime while booted (otherwise the option is buried in the touch UEFI).
- To reclaim some disk space, feel free to compress the Program Files directory and read a tutorial somewhere about compressing WinSxS (although the latter is of limited benefit and not worth the hassle unless really low on space).
- Works with 128GB microSD cards -- you may have to dig in the ini for the hub to change read speeds, though, because it topped out at around 17MB/sec writes normally -- but not a big deal.
- Limited success outputting to 4k by forcing the Intel HD driver to install with modified INF and custom resolutions -- be careful here! The official CustomMode app does NOT work on Bay Trail.
