Windows 10
So after realising that my desktop PC has been running in BIOS mode (how 1970s and probably the result of multiple clones from HDD to 10k HDD, to 10k HDD in RAID0 to SSD and to another SSD) and with a free weekend I thought it was time to have a look at the MBR2GPT tool.
However in running the validate phase I was getting the error message:
Disk layout validation failed for disk 0
After following through a few red herrings on the internet I had a bit more of a dig into what the tool was up to and it appears that one of the first steps is to shrink the OS partition.
It appears that the fix is actually to preempt this and shrink the OS partition yourself (I reduced it by about 1GB – which made sense as one of the new partitions goes right in at the end of the disk), given these kinds of steps should only be performed by a person who knows what they are doing and understands the implications I won’t go into any detail as to how to do this other than providing the screenshot below.
Over the past year or so I’ve come to realise that although my Surface Pro 3 (i5/4GB/128GB) is an awesome machine I just don’t take it out of the house as much as I should be for fear of breaking it. On that note I’ve decided to sell it and in turn replace it with a true beast of the computing world – a Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 (link to Panasonic product page).
The astute of you will probably realise that bought new that is a very expensive bit of kit and such I’ve opted for (what I believe to be) a refurbished 1st generation model from Fully Rugged.
Hardware Specification
- Intel i5-3437U Dual Core @ 1.9ghz (details on the Intel website)
- 4GB RAM DDR3 RAM @ 1,333mhz
- 128GB SSD
- USB 3.0 Port
- HDMI Port
- Ethernet Port (see the photos below!)
- Front and Rear Cameras
- N class WiFi
- Active Digitiser Pen and Capacitive Touch Screen
- LTE Mobile Data Connectivity (WWAN)
- 1.8m drop safe (please don’t test this!)
- IP65 compliant (see link for more details on what this means)
- 1.1kg in weight (yep that’s heavy compared to your iPad Air Gen 88 and no I don’t care! :))
Initial Thoughts
Thus far I am very impressed; the build quality is excellent, I may not feel tempted to drop it from 1.8m to test the specification however I’ve been out in the rain with the tablet and are it didn’t show any issues at all. Having access to a WWAN connection against using the mobile hotspot on my phone is very liberating and Windows 10 will manage connecting to the mobile network for you whenever you are away from WiFi. I haven’t done any real work on battery life as yet however I’ve used it on and off over the course of an 8 hour day and battery life didn’t drop into my head once as something to be concerned by. Resume from standby is as fast as my Surface ever was and performance running web browsing/document editing/playing UWP games is top notch (don’t expect to be gaming on it though).
Over all I am very impressed!
Gallery
After giving the Customer/Technical previews of Windows 10 a wide berth (just haven’t had the time to play with them) I’m now finding I quite like Windows 10 on my Surface Pro 3 (i5 128GB); an interesting issue though – whenever I launched the new Mail app I found I was presented with the error message-
Your Outlook account settings are out of date.
Clicking the Fix account button didn’t seem to do anything…
However I then realised since the upgrade to Windows 10 I had only been using the PIN I defined back on Windows 8.1 to login (and as such had not yet provided Windows 10 with my Microsoft account password).
So after logging out and then logging back in again this time clicking the Sign-in options and then the full password option (as seen below) I found that clicking the Fix account button did actually this time fix the account.
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