I know almost everything I’ve posted lately has been reblogs, and I’m a bit sorry about that. I’d love to put up more unique content. My life is about to get even busier, so I don’t know if that will change. But today, I’d like to share a couple of tech notes.

First, one of my computers is an older model Dell Venue 8 Pro; it has a 32gb drive and 2gb of RAM and Dell makes a decent active stylus for their tablet systems (the stylus also works with my main computer, an Inspiron 7352!). The Windows 10 Anniversary update came out a couple of weeks ago now, and included some nice updates for stylus-enabled systems. Being more of a geek than is healthy for me, I really wanted to install it on my tablet. The problem is that, even after removing everything but the operating system – and even using some admin tools to strip the OS to bare bones, I was never able to free enough space to get the installer to work. It says it wants 16GB of free space, tough to accomplish when the 32gb drive has 23gb of usable space, and the OS takes up around 8gb. Even when I got to 17gb free the installer failed.

So. I downloaded the installation image creation tool from Microsoft and did a clean Windows 10 install (no Dell preloaded software). This took forever, and the OS I ended up with was not the Anniversary update. After running all of the system updates, I grabbed a fresh copy of the installation image creation tool and did another clean install. This time I got the update! Hooray 🙂

If you are going through this, don’t give up. You can make it work.

Windows 10 image creation tool (use “Download Tool Now”)
Freeing up space in Windows 10: Article 1, Article 2
Dell USB adapter/power adapter – so you can charge the battery & use a keyboard and mouse at the same time. (I got mine on eBay a bit cheaper)

Now, to get a copy of the most recent MS Office and a drawing glove for using OneNote for Sketchnotes.