Dell Tablet Stupidity

[Bobby Ricigliano]

I briefly owned a Dell Venue 7" tablet recently. I figured for $100 I couldn't lose.

No surprise that I ended up hating it for many reasons, primarily Windows 8 which is the worst POS operating system I have ever seen.

On top of the microscopic font, which apparently could not be made larger without changing the screen resolution and blurring the entire display, there was lots of bloatware / spamware / suckware that cannot be removed.

But here is the kicker: The tablet relentlessly and mercilessly prodded the user to install the "free upgrade to Windows 10." Once I was fed up with Windows 8, which took about one day, I figured "what the hell" and followed the prompts to install Windows 10.

The tablet spent several hours apparently downloading and installing Windows 10. After following all of the prompts and directions, the end result was just an error message saying that the Windows 10 install would exceed the available hard drive space available. I had not installed any other programs whatsoever prior to this.

To make a short story long, the Dell tablet is gone and I bought a Samsung Galaxy 7" tablet for just a little more money. It works perfectly and the Android OS makes Windows 8 look like a sad joke.

[The War Wagon]

And I just had someone on ANOTHER board, talk about how "great" Dell's are. Thanks for the re-assuring evidence - sorry it had to happen to YOU.

[Peter.Steele]

8" is too small for a Windows tablet. You need at least 10" for it to be worth doing.

Also, and I'm probably bucking the trend here, but as much as I like Windows 10 on my desktops and my laptop, I really think that 8.1 was the sweet spot for my tablet.

[itisagoodname]

I got one of these guys too. Amazon has a real nice deal on them every once in a while. I only got it for 1 single program that requires windows to run. Vag-Com diagnostic software for VW/Audi. For this its been perfect (when it works). I have a car mount and use it to log/display EGT's, boost pressure(specified/actual), timing, etc.

Ton of network connection issues that take multiple restarts to solve

The disk space is a big pain in the ***. Whatever you do, don't let it copy Onedrive files to the disk! This will leave the tablet useless. The tablet doesnt even have enough room to download windows update files!
-This can be partially solved by getting a 128GB micro SD and removing the restore partition (which can be moved to a separate 16GB micro SD for later use). Install all programs (non-marketplace) like office to the SD card.

The tablet has had non-recoverable crashes 2x now that require a complete factory reset.

[Bobby Ricigliano]

If I had not been rid of the Dell Tablet, I was going to dispose of it in this manner:

[riprap]

I really like mine. Works flawlessly after installing a 128 G microSD.