Day 3 - A Bump in the Road

Day 3 - A Bump in the Road

A Windows 8 Tablet for Teaching and Learning - Day 3
December 7, 2012

Good news, first thing this morning after charging all night I pressed the on button and the Samsung Ativ 500 Tablet immediately turned on. Not sure what the issue was yesterday (Airplane Mode?) but everything works fine today. When I got to the office I turned on the WiFi and decided to do the Samsung driver updates. On day one I did all the Windows 8 updates and was excited to use the tablet so I skipped the Samsung hardware driver updates as the tablet was working fine. I was thinking in the back of my mind that yesterdays on/off issue might have been driver related so I set out to do the driver updates today.

Mistake #1

Samsung has an app called SW Update that kind of bundles all the Samsung updates into this one app. I started the SW Update and it found twenty some updates including Windows Critical updates. I deselected two of the apps as I uninstalled Norton Internet Security and Norton Online Backup trial software on day one and did not want it re-installed during the update process. This is something OEMs have been doing for years, loading trial software on Windows PCs that just clogs up the system and slows things down running unnecessary processes. I was a bit surprised by the Windows critical updates as I did a complete Windows update on the day I got this device.

A list of some of the Samsung SW Updates installed included:

Chipset driver, Graphics driver, NFC Driver, Bluetooth Device, Touchscreen Driver, Digitizer Driver, Display Color Profile, Windows 8 Critical Updates, Allshare Play, Wireless LAN Driver, Settings, Touch Support, Easy File Share Adobe Reader, Mini S Note, System BIOS Update, and ironically a SW Update Patch.

The downloads took 2 or 3 hours and I was in and out of meetings all morning so I could not see everything that was going on. When I got back to the office I received the message, cannot do critical updates without plugging in the power adapter, or something to that effect. Ugh, after waiting all that time the updates did not install until I plugged in the power adapter. My Android tablet does something similar and I probably should have known better but the tablet had a full charge and at ten hours of battery life. My Android updates remind me on the front-end to plug-in to the power adapter before beginning the update process. My bad, lesson learned.

A Bump in the Road

The updates did not finish correctly the first time and after 4 hours of waiting I chose to Restart the tablet. Once re-booted the SW Update process continued and concluded with a System BIOS update.  Updating the BIOS is a serious process as this updates the firmware used to boot the system. If the BIOS gets messed up during the update you have a brick.

All in all the first Samsung SW Update process was not a pleasant experience as things did not go smoothly and took 5 to 6 hours to complete (again, I was in and out of meetings so it may have went faster if I was there to see when the downloads completed and start the installs). I am glad I did not do the Samsung SW Update on the first day I got the tablet as it would have given me a negative impression right away. I have also had similar experiences on Android and Apple iOS devices so this is not to be completely unexpected but obviously all manufacturers need to work on improving the update process out of the box. Downloading large files over wireless takes time and most people (me included) are impatient, especially when you have a new device you want to use right away.

The good thing is the Samsung SW updates are done and any future updates should be of much smaller size. The other thing I did not like about SW Update was that it left shortcuts on the Desktop after the updates completed (see screenshot below). I deleted the shortcuts as I did not want a cluttered Desktop. I am not sure if this is normal for the Samsung SW Update process or if it did not cleanup the shortcuts because I did a restart during the process.

Discovery of the Day

I have a fairly long password and I am not the worlds fastest typist using the onscreen keyboard. I setup the Picture Password using a picture of my grandson and made three secret gestures that now quickly logs me into the tablet. Cool!

Picture Password

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/picture-passwords#1TC=t1

At the end of the evening the battery still had more than 50% available, I plugged in the electric adapter to recharge the tablet for day 4.

Keep on Learning,

Dr. Grissom