Samsung Series 7 Slate Upgrade

Malteser powered programming at Three Thing Game..

I’m still liking my Samsung Series 7 Slate a lot. I’ve had Windows 8 on it for a while now and most of the time it works great. The only problems that I’ve had have been related to the discovery of devices when docking and undocking. The operating system really doesn’t like surprises, particularly when it wakes up from being asleep. I've discovered that if I make sure the operating system is awake before putting it in and out of the docking station it seems to detect and load the new devices quite successfully. If I do this with the machine powered down results are less satisfactory, with USB drivers falling over and needing to be disabled and enabled before I can use the keyboard and mouse.

Me being me, and paranoid about damaging the machine through powering it wrongly, I make sure that the dock is powered off when I plug the machine in and out of it. There have been some reports of people damaging their machines if the dock is live when the slate is plugged into it. I’ve no idea if this is a common problem, but I’m playing safe out of cowardice.

The good news, at least I hope it is good news, is that Samsung have released a whole slew of driver updates for the Slate. These include new drivers for the graphics and the motherboard, along with a whole new BIOS. You can find them here, just get hold of the Download SW Update link on this page, extract the upgrade application and run it.

The upgrade application worked fine for me, although the BIOS update didn’t end well because after it my machine failed to boot, ending up stuck at the BIOS configuration screen. If you get this, find your way to the setting involving Boot options and disable the legacy boot option so that the UEFI Boot Support is enabled again. This seems to have been set back to a default during the upgrade process.

You can move around the BIOS screen using the buttons on the slate, but this will drive you completely nuts, so plug a USB keyboard into the machine and use that to set it up. Once I’d done the change my machine rebooted fine. I’ve not really had a chance to test out the docking behaviour, but at least I’ve not gone backwards by upgrading. I’ll post an update if I find out more.

I did all this just before my 9:15 lecture. It is a matter of personal pride (although I’m not really that proud of it in some ways) that i had the machine back working before I had to go and talk. Oh, and I have a spare machine too. Just in case….