Got rid of the darn Asus T100 tablet

I waited till the 5th to pay a visit to Sofmap to sell the Asus T100 tablet off. That's because days ending with the number 5 are called the "Sofmap中古日" which means if you decide to exchange the items for Sofmap points, you get a 5% boost on such days.

I hopped onto a train bound for Kawasaki after work on the Wednesday. There is a Sofmap support center in the Lazona shopping complex where they handle 買取 or purchases from their point of view. I went there and waited for my turn. When it was my turn, I handed over the tablet which was cleanly packed as it came from the factory, telling the staff personnel that the keyboard dock doesn't work properly. He made a serious face and told me that in that case there is a chance they might not accept the tablet at all or return the keyboard dock and take only the rest of the parts. I feared they would go with the former.

He took the tablet in for inspection and told me to come back in 30 minutes. That was short, probably because there weren't many people there and it was a weekday. I wandered around the Biccamera store checking out the cool gadgets during that 30 minutes.

Restored the recovery functionality of the Asus T100TA tablet

I finally decided to sell my Asus T100 tablet. That's because it is slow (Atom platform  is slow) and the keyboard was broken. (Read about that here) When I contacts Asus, they told me that they weren't selling the keyboard dock separately. Bastards!

I waited to see if Windows 10 can magically make the tablet experience awesome. But an Atom will always be an Atom. Windows 10 was also too slow for me on it. And I frequently got BSODs.

So it is going out of the house. That is final.

Instead of auctioning, I decided to it to Sofmap. I had no idea how much money I would receive due to the malfunctioning keyboard and the various scratch marks on the body of the tablet, but I wanted to give it a try. If Sofmap wasn’t prepared to offer a reasonable amount of money, I would go back to my regular method: Rakuten Auctions.

First things first though. I needed to load factory defaults of the tablet. I was running Windows 10 on it and I wanted to go back to Windows 8.1 that it originally came with. I tried resetting from the Settings app, and it reset back to Windows 10, and not 8.1 I don't have any recovery media to do a manual recovery either.

[Rant] New firmware and eMMC performance update for Asus T100 tablet

This is not a new update, but I only found out about it recently.

A new BIOS update called 223 and something else. It seems that the “something else” part seems to improve the eMMC storage performance, but it needs BIOS 223 to work.

This is what I saw on the Asus Live Update application.

I wanted to see if it really improved the eMMC storage performance. So I ran Crystal Disk Mark before installing the updates. These are the scores that I got.