Iconia W500 Upgrade Thread: Windows 8.1, SSD, CPU speed, etc.

Suleeto · January 2015

Yes, the Iconia W500 is aging a bit. It's still a cheap way to get yourself into a fairly functional Windows tablet, and personally I find it useful in an office and student capacity, as well as general surfing and occasional connectivity to my bigscreen TV for movies.

So let's say like me, you found one second hand for cheap. What can you do? I have questions about that, and some questions I had I found answers to. So hopefully this thread ends up pointing people in the right direction.

Windows 7/8/8.1?

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These shipped with Windows 7. Later, people installed Windows 8 with varying degrees of success until stable drivers found their way to the platform. By the time I bought mine, the previous owner had successfully installed Windows 8. Not a preview version, but the real deal. The only thing was he didn't have rotation and a few other things working, but there are resources to fix that. This was a year ago, and Windows 8.1 was already showing up in the Store as a free upgrade. Unfortunately, people had some issues and many found that things ran better with Windows 8 before the 8.1 upgrade.

So I waited. And a bunch of people found "workarounds". One day I decided to take the plunge, and apparently in the year I waited, the bugs were worked out by Microsoft. My 8 to 8.1 update went flawlessly, without bluescreens, without hassle.

NOTE: The screen rotation and video and a few other things required the Windows 7 drivers to be installed (if I remember right) just like it did for Windows 8, and the Windows 8 video driver. More information can be found here:

http://community.acer.com/t5/Windows-Tablets/Iconia-W500-Device-Control-for-Windows-8-1/td-p/128807/page/4

I don't remember which post worked for me, but after sorting through that thread I solved it. Mine has been on 8.1 with full functionality for almost a year now.

Another NOTE: Windows update KB2881553 NEVER succeed, and it is a well-documented issue with people who upgraded from 8 to 8.1. KB2881553 is an update for the dictionary for virtual keyboard (think "autocorrect"). I had to manually choose updates and uncheck that one... There was ABSOLUTELY no way to resolve it. It would NEVER go away, even after I told it to ignore it. I spent a lot of time over the last year looking for a solution. However, after almost a year of toiling, this literally "went away" as of two days ago. And hasn't been back. Maybe Microsoft fixed it? Who knows.

Drive Space. It sux. What to do, what to do...

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So this thing shipped with what, 32GB of SSD space? Hmmm well maybe on an Android or iPad that's fine, but when you upgrade things to Windows 8.1 and it's *lovely* WinSXS folder woes, that all gets gobbled up. I installed Office 2007 on mine and between that and Windows 8.1, there's very little left. Sure, you can throw in a 32GB SD card in the full-sized slot, and I've tested a SanDisk Ultra 40 MB/s fullsized SD card in it recently and it's very fast reading high-resolution DSLR images, but is that going to be the best solution? What if you could swap out that teensy, tiny internal SSD for something larger?

Well, here you go:

http://www.tweaking4all.com/hardware/pc/ssd-upgrade-for-acer-iconia-tab-w500/

This shows you, step by step, with pictures, how to clone your drive, open up your W500, and switch out the 32GB mSATA SSD for something larger, like 100+ GB. Now, some (many?) of us won't have Windows recovery discs, so this guy's method won't work. There is a comment left on Novermber 8th, 2013 @ 8:12pm that I thought will be most helpful in avoiding any of that hassle:

"Just followed the directions above (to step 5) and upgraded my older W500 32GB tablet with a new MySSD 240GB drive ($170 from Amazon). I used EaseUS Todo Backup Free to clone the drive (Sector by Sector copy) and then installed the new drive. It worked immediately (still as a 32GB drive and the little system partition), then I just expanded the unallocated space using windows disk management. It booted right into windows, logged right in, and after installing the new drivers, I have plenty of breathing room now! I didn’t even have to restore or fix the windows installation, or alter any BIOS settings. The hardest part was separating the covers, but I managed that without breaking any tabs (45 minutes or so), since I knew what to expect.

Flawless. Victory."

So... do this, and faster boot time, more space, quicker file access. Not too shabby. I honestly haven't done this yet but it seems to be fairly straightforward as long as you pick up the cheapo plastic pry tools and use some patience. So I probably will do it this spring.

But what about the brains? Can I speed this thing up more?
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Computer speed is determined by a few factors of course, and this is where my comments become questions. A computer's "speed" is relative to CPU performance, memory access time (bus speed on the motherboard), memory read/write speed, HD/SSD read/write speed, and in many cases, video chipset performance.

Well, we can't do much about the video. It's built-in. We already covered the SDD above, and a newer high-speed mSATA will handle that point (as well as greatly increase your storage space). We can't change the motherboard for faster bus speeds, and I'm not sure we can do much about the memory chipset.

But what about the CPU? In other computer senarios, overrclocking is an option.

Has anyone overclocked their W500? What are the benchmarks?

Also is there any way to optimize Windows further to improve performance?

As I said, this is the final hurdle to overcome. I occasionally have some HD 1080p videos that have laggy playback. 720p seems "ok". To me, overclocking makes the most sense. It's not an area I am familiar with. I also wonder if this is a BIOS thing. If that's so, then there aren't really any options.

What I worry about is that as Windows gets more sophisticated, the hardware in this W500 reaches its limit. So while this thread can point new people in the right direction with the most vital issues, in the (near) end it may be too late. But if anyone has other ideas to help speed up a W500, this is as good a place as any to discuss it. Can we breathe new life into these W500's for a bit longer?