Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

I have a Surface 3 tablet with a stylus. And, honestly, it looks very good at first glance. The screen has absolutely no scratches and the chassis is almost perfect, so in that respect it's really great. For the price of shipping, it's a great deal.

It came with Windows 8.1 already installed. However, the GUI was not the standard version of Windows, but a strange edition that was unable to run a lot of basic software, such as the Vivaldi browser. After some research and discovering that Linux is not the answer as it has a lot of driver problems, I decided to reinstall Windows 10.

The process went relatively smoothly, with only one issue arising. There was no touch driver during installation and the tablet does not have a docking keyboard. I therefore had to abort the installation, unplug the USB drive containing the installer and connect the USB hub to the device's only USB port. I then connected the USB drive, together with the mouse and keyboard.



Then the installation was without any more issues, and after running one single executable from microsoft pages, it has installed all the necessary drivers and everything worked well.

Another issue with Windows 8.1 that I did not mention was the lack of space. As the tablet only has 32 GB of internal storage (29 GB in reality), it was completely full. I only managed to free up a few hundred megabytes by cleaning up. So I tried to solve this by reinstalling the system. Now I have to install all the updates and try to make the most of the 8 GB I have free and protect it as much as possible.

The bad thing is that not only is the storage incredibly small, but the tablet also does not have any expansion slots for an SSD or even a microSD card to provide at least some extra storage space.



So, I have to manage the available space really well and use it as wisely as possible. I have installed Xournal++ for taking notes and Tailscale VPN and Syncthing to synchronise files across my network. I know it's unusual for me to use a Windows device as my everyday device, but I guess I'd keep it as a note-taking tablet in my bag. I will see hSow limited I am by the storage.

I tried some tricks involving compressing system files, but I can't see any real improvement in available space. I have no idea if it did anything at all.



To be honest, I still don't understand why any computer or tablet with a computer-like operating system would have such limited storage. I would understand if it were 64 GB; 128 GB would be optimal for me, but 32 GB is completely ridiculous. They're definitely filled up if you have a clean installation and do two or three Windows updates. Then you've wasted all your drive space and don't have a single byte left for anything useful.