Archive for December 29th, 2014

Tip (Updated): Getting Drivers for the Emdoor 7″ EM-18270 Windows 8.1 Tablet

Monday, December 29th, 2014

Hi Folks,

maybe you noticed that 7″ Windows 8.1 (with Bing) Tablets are available now very cheap… The cheapeast one is the Emdoor EM-18270 Tablet but in this case cheap means not cheap.

I got one of these tablets and iam very happy with it, it’s a Emdoor EM-18270 Tablet, this tablet is available for less than 100€ and comes with Windows 8.1 with Bing, a one year Office 365 subscription and offers a Micro HDMI, USB and SD Card extension incl. 2×2 MP Cameras incl. Bluetooth 4.0 based on a Intel Atom Z3735G (Baytrail) platform.

The tablet is available in different revisions (EM-18270 seen in the UK as Linx 7″ Tablet or EM-18270-D seen in Switzerland as Surf 7 Tab), there are only two differences i notified: The UK Version is partly available with a 32GB internal e-MMC the Swiss Version in general comes with a 16GB internal e-MMC also the UK Version comes with a plastic instead a metal case which comes with the Swiss Version.

Update: In the US/UK a similar device can be seen as Cube Iwork7 (U67GT), it seams to be the same device based on a EM-18270 but i got this only as report and I was not able to verify this on my own.

For my Swiss Version i tried to optimize the e-MMC/SSD usage, 16GB is not very much and in the default Version there is only ~1GB HDD space available, enough for surfing but to less for working. 🙂

So i wiped the e-MMC and re-installed a regular Windows 8.1 x86 incl. Office (you should enable Office 365 thru the device before wiping the e-MMC 😉 ), compressed the Windows winsxs (script can be provided on demand but on your own risk) and c:/Program Files folder and installed/moved Office 365 by using symbolic links to a fast SD-Card in the slot.. (Microsoft is still not able to provide a simple target selection during the installation for Office 365). Now i got ~5GB free space for the e-MMC and a big issue.. Where do i get the damm drivers for the hardware? Emdoor do not provide any recovery media or driver packages on the website.. Very weak by Emdoor but after a lot of research i found an article here: Article . The drivers for the Linx 7″ incl. the Kionix G-Sensor are working like a charm (don’t forget to install the registry file for the Kionix G-Sensor with Administrator permissions).

So i would really like to thank the author for providing the drivers in a simple way! If you also got the Emdoor Tablet this download is a must have for future recovery and maybe Emdoor should re-thing the way how “support” is provided to customers. The device itself is great but it doesn’t help if you can not recover or reinstall it and not all people do like the “default” installation coming with the device (like me). It should not be so hard to provide simple driver downloads…

Important: Do not perform a new installation without a Windows 8.1 installation media and a valid Product Key, do not wipe the partition without this! You will not get a Windows 8.1 with Bing installation media from Microsoft or the hardware Vendor! You also have to use the x86 Windows 8.1 Version, the 64-Bit Version will not fit on the 16GB e-MMC harddisk.

Cheers

Michael

P.S.: I did not try to install the Linx Bios on a Surf 7 Tab, the BIOS coming with my device is only a few days older than the Linx one but don’t come with the Linx icon. So i can not say if this works or not, i used only the drivers…. You should also get the Windows OEM Key from the BIOS in advance by following these instructions Get OEM BIOS Windows Key