Upgrade from Windows 8.1 Bing to 10 on Asus X205TA?

[larrytucaz]

I just purchased an Asus X205T locally, for $125. It's a Windows 8.1 Bing "EeeBook," a recent model. It is this model: https://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks/ASUS_EeeBook_X205TA/specifications/

(Basically it's a 11.6" 1366x768 LCD, 2G DDR3 RAM, Intel Quad Core Z3735 1.33 GHz Processor, 32G eMMC model.)

It has Windows 8.1 Bing on it, I added "Classic Shell" to bring back the start button (and it's set to where the Metro screen is ditched). Naturally, it is offering me Windows 10.

My question is: will this make the model run slower, take up more space on the 32G eMMC? Am I better off just staying with Windows 8.1 Bing with the Classic Shell? (I'm thinking I could just make a system image, I have "Drive Snapshot" that does this, in its current 8.1 state and then try Windows 10, and simply restore the image if I change my mind.)

 

[NomanA]

I highly recommend moving to Windows 10 on this machine. You may know already that Windows 8.1 uses WimBoot on these 32GB storage machines. It does so by having a separate partition to store the compressed Windows OS (the wim files). It's great in the beginning, but as you use your machine and install Windows updates, all of the updated components end up on the main system hard-disk in uncompressed (regular) format. Given enough time, more than half of your wimboot partition becomes a complete waste of space. Now there are methods, where you can take the current updated installation of windows, and create a Wim (compressed) version, which can then replace the files in the wim partition. It's not a very straight forward process though.

Windows 10, does away with all the Wimboot stuff. When you upgrade from 8.1 to Windows10, it'll even delete the 6-7 GB wimboot partition. The OS files are still stored in compressed format on these storage challenged machines, but they are all on system partition.

Moving to Windows 10, (and after you have cleaned up the old installation), will easily free up additional 6-7 GB of space, and even more if you have been using the system for a while. You'll need about 5-6GB of free space for the upgrade. Make sure that you create the recovery image when prompted during the upgrade process. On many of these 32GB machines the space is so much constrained, that the older wimboot recovery partition, and the windows installation in system partition all need to be backed up to an external storage. Skipping that step, will limit your options of going back to the Windows 8.1 Wimboot setup.

Windows 10 will give you better performance and lot more free space on the 32GB eMMC storage.