Is there an advantage to using their image, like hard to find/install drivers? I generally always advise people to use first party install media, in this case, via Media Creation Tool.
Yeah, the GPD stuff generally has very specific to them drivers. Internally they straddle the line between regular PC and embedded device and there's some custom code to smooth over the differences.
Oof, I'm sorry. I'm really lucky to not have hit any battery bloat issues it seems. I don't even treat it well, regularly leaving it in my car's back window sill.
i have always found the microsoft model here understandable but unfortunate.
i'm running stock linux on my gpd pocket 2 and i have never even had to consider whether there is any special hardware (apart from the rotated screen -- that required adding a parameter each to the kernel cmdline and the x11 config).
I’ve had a lot of trouble reinstalling Windows on similar devices, the worst of which was a 2-in-1 tablet laptop, RCA brand sold at Walmart. I forget the model exactly, but they sold new under $200, maybe even under $100 on sale. I couldn’t find the vendor who assembled them, but I think it was a W101 V or V2, originally shipping with Windows 8/8.1. Whenever I tried to clean install Windows 10, I could get everything to work but the touchscreen driver.
I wish I still had that driver to see why it wouldn’t install, but I’m not sorry I don’t have the tablet, as it was a end user repair job. I tried DoubleDriver[0] to save my Windows 8 driver config, but it wouldn’t work under restore on Windows 10. I tried Snappy Driver Installer Origin[1], and none of the drivers in my driver db worked. I even tried DriverStoreExplorer[2] to manually install from the .cabs and .infs. No luck.
I suspect it had OEM offsets, registry keys, or other customizations which are applied at install time. I eventually had to use the OEM factory reset through the Shift + Restart menu to reinstall Windows 8, then in-place upgrade to Windows 10.
It really makes me wonder what the market forces and actors are doing, such that a poorly integrated, barely functional underpowered laptop, with nonstandard hardware and software, can be sold in big box stores. I suspect that price conscious customers with basic needs get the majority of these, closely followed by gifts for kids or other family/friends.
I usually have great success with these tools, but certain hardware tends to have vendor/integrater modifications to the OEM driver. I didn’t have time to dig into the reasons why in this specific case, but the OEM didn’t even provide a driver/installer for this model for the touchscreen. I know that for some people losing a touchscreen may not be a big deal, but as I was doing the repair as a service, I wanted total restoration of original OEM state, ideally without any unnecessary bloat. Can’t win them all, I guess.
I eventually got there, and it was the long way I knew would work, but it wasn’t the Windows 10 clean install I had hoped for the end user. They were more than happy with the repair and so I choose to be happy with the outcome also, if not with the hoops I had to jump through, which ended up being for naught. All’s well that ends well.
I dealt with a bunch of these types of issues at my previous workplace. They used cheap consumer Windows tablets for point-of-sale kiosks.
Trying to maintain a single deployable Windows 10 image for these devices was a real pain and it often was the touchscreen drivers that gave issues. Drivers with the same device/driver IDs but different settings if I remember correctly (it's been awhile since I was involved in this stuff). Touchscreen orientation and calibration was also a nuisance between models, which is where I suspect some of the driver customizations done by the OEMs are needed.
I think the market forces are just getting something as cheap as possible to market that satisfies the bare minimum. It's assumed that you won't be fresh installing anything onto them. I found a lot of hardware in this class was okay as a single-purpose device where you'd only ever be running one application at a time (though barely so if what you're running is a web browser).
Of course you’re right; low cost is the main selling point of these classes of computers, secondary to basic functionality beyond booting to desktop.
It almost feels like the low end tech is just a grab bag of cheap spare parts to keep the assembly lines hot between higher profit margin product runs. But most of these weird third party PCs aren’t made by well-known OEMs, so what is really going on here? How do these smaller OEMs make money?
