fit-IoT Users Forum

Has anyone successfully gotten PC2 to run the Windows 8 developer preview?
Ever since I installed the GMA500 drivers, I only get a black start scren and a mouse cursor.

Hello

The performance of the FitPC2 under Windows 8 is poor for now, during the drivers problem, but it's fully operational.

The gma500 driver from Windows 7 seems to not only work, but provide acceleration under Windows 8. If you experiment with the "full native reolution" (1920x1080), you will find that it works rather well. It also can read apps, but not all of them. And, running the performance measurement with the gma500 system and driver will cause a crash midway.

Still, that is the case with other gma systems, including doing Windows 8 on a cedarview chipset.

It looks as if windows update includes something that spoils the performance of the gma500 driver under Windows 8. Conclusion: Disable the update after a fresh installation to confirm to yourself that the gma500 driver is adequate for Windows 8, then update. By "spoil performance", I refer to the screen flashing under full "recommended resolution" after a run of updates. It doesn't flash that way on a fresh installation.

I should correct the previous charge against Microsoft. If you shut off the "Enable Performance Mode" in the Intel graphics driver, you get better stability in the sense that the screen stops flashing. There are still occasional "jumps" on the screen. Also, streaming flash "hardware" acceleration is decoding acceleration, which means you drop frames, but voice synchronization is pretty good. This is "full-screen" setting, BTW, i. e., 1920x1080.

Also, Windows 8 "apps", like the news app, is capable of switching back and forth between streaming video and text with no problem.

So, as an experimental setup with reasonable, but qualified, success, this works in Windows 8 by using the gma500 driver with performance turned off. The question is whether Intel really expects to have any greatly improved success with its promised atom chipsets, given that they have the same basic hardware limitations as the z550.

One more thing: In case you checked out my customer review of the z550 fit pc2 at the amazon.com web site, I gave a discussion of how to set up the fit pc2 for Windows 8 and RIPLinuX using the fbdev graphics driver on a separate partition.

It turns out that sound can be 24-bits studio quality without affecting the voice synchronization of streaming flash going full screen. That means you might be getting 8 or 10 frames per second, but great and synchronized sound, depending on the web site doing the sound streaming, of course. It seems that flash has to request data transfer to synchronize the sound, and some web sites don't support that.

Also, there is occasional screen streaking at full screen reminiscent of the gma500_gfx kernel module that works in Linux. In fact, you get more frames per second at, say 'video=1600x900' on RIPLinuX than you do in any corresponding Windows 8, assuming you tolerate the greater screen tearing that goes along with the faster RIPLinuX setup.

I don't honestly think that Windows 7 is any improvement on this, and I think the gma500 with 2 gb of ram and a z550 is "as good as it gets" at the given power consumption.

I have a fairly new Windows 8 installation disk, and my earlier z550 Windows 8 installation stopped working because I tried out the MID for the display adapter and there are no mechanisms for going back to the dvi-d display. So, what the heck, I re-installed Windows 8 with the brand-new installation disk, and I tried out the emgd driver, which not only installed this Time, but also works correctly at all kinds of full-screen video resolutions and using the built-in apps as well.

I am still testing it, and it may yet stop working correctly, but streaming flash "nerd information" tells me that the system is using direct display and software decoding to display flash, sort of like the fbdev direct display in Linux. Remember that the gma500 Windows 7 driver used a software display and chip graphics decoding and gave fewer screen resolutions.