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@woachk
Last active April 24, 2020 14:55
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A review of a Windows on Arm laptop... and the software.

Experiences with an Arm64 Windows laptop

This is describing the experience with a retail device, experience on the engineering devices that I played with before was a bit different to say the least...

Chosen model

A Snapdragon 835 laptop for 350 euros, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. LTE is present but won't be used.

Unpacking and OOBE

It was Windows 10 Home without S mode, and shipped with Windows 10 version 1903. After connecting to the Wi-Fi network (LTE wasn't used here), it updated automatically to Windows 10 version 1909.

There was an upsale attempt to get Office 365 Personal in addition to the ad that the computer shipped with. I ended up connecting it to my Microsoft 365 account later.

Setting up the system

An ugly OEM wallpaper was set as default when I did reach the desktop, and it opened the old Microsoft Edge. The first thing that I did at that point was upgrading Microsoft Edge to the new Chromium-based version.

I had to uninstall Office, and to grab it again from the Office 365 portal. I did not try to use a Windows 10 Enterprise license by linking to AAD. It's worth noting that Store Office didn't ship, it was Click-to-Run.

While the OS got upgraded in the OOBE, all the Microsoft Store apps were not. Updating those has to be handled separately. I also grabbed ARM64 Firefox from the Mozilla FTP.

User experience

I explicitly avoided using x86 apps (Office is built as CHPE, even for Click-to-Run) in this case. The system is perfectly reactive for the purposes of the end-user of the device.

Asphalt 8 from the Microsoft Store was chosen as a game for testing. With settings tuned, the tester says that it works quite well, better than the Cherry Trail Atom x5 (with 2GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC) that it replaces. He also didn't see issues when using Office.

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