Tiny 10 on a 9 year old Windows 8 Tablet

My wife handed me a Kindle Fire tablet a couple of days ago and told me she’d trade me for her old Windows tablet back. (I have zero use for a Fire tablet mind you.)

Mind you this is an HP Stream 8 that was manufactured and bought in 2015. It originally came with Windows 8.1, but at some point I upgraded it to Windows 10. Let’s just say this thing was not a performance leader. About the only thing I did with it was to occasionally use it to read e-books. Anything else was pretty painful even with a USB keyboard and mouse.

After seeing the article here on Tiny 11 last week I checked to see if there was a version of Windows 10 that might be better than the version that was on the tablet. The site says this is the last version of Tiny 10 as it will concentrate on Tiny 11 from now on, but Windows Update works with it (it didn’t with previous versions.)

The problems were myriad. Insert USB drive, tell the BIOS to boot it and error. Simply run setup from Windows and error. Fixed that and error again, this time after setup had run for an hour or more. I ran half a dozen DISM commands, a few registry hacks, and a system file check, but eventually it installed. Your mileage may vary, but you might need to bring a little nerd muscle to the fight.

And it’s not awful. Mind you it’s not great either, but it’s certainly a working device that’s fine for music and video consumption, light web browsing, and other light tasks while certainly being easier to carry around than a laptop. The quad-core atom processor would probably do just fine, if not for the paltry 1GB of RAM. It is definitely an improvement over the standard Windows 10 installation. The version I installed is based on a 32-bit enterprise edition so it’s completely bloat-free, including no Store which might be an issue for some, but that’s the point. A lot of stuff has been pulled out of it to the point that it is about half the size of a normal installation.

If you have a device, be it a tablet or older laptop or PC, that you think is to old to get any use out of, this is worth a try.