Repurpose MS Surface 3

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CrashAndBurn

668 posts

Ultimate Geek

#298565 28-Jun-2022 15:27

I have an old MS Surface 3 collecting dust and was wondering if anyone here have repurposed one? A quick search normally comes up with using as a desk clock or calendar. Is there a way to dumb down the OS to bare minimum and hopefully make it a bit more responsive?

gbwelly

1243 posts

Uber Geek

#2935428 28-Jun-2022 16:27

I glued a hard drive magnet to the back of an old 8" asus vivotab. I left Windows on it even though it ran like poo. I had firefox opening automatically on boot, running in full screen mode (F11), and a tab switching addon cycling between DAKboard, Windy.com and a couple of other tabs that escape me. Set the tabs so FF would always open with them. Slapped it on the side of the fridge and routed the power cable behind the fridge.

Went pretty well, would probably work better for you with the larger screen. It was a bit pokey to read on the 8" unit. Not sure what the free tier of DAKboard gets you now, since my tablet died I've seen several emails from them that I skimmed over that sounded like free version had less features now.

gbwelly

1243 posts

Uber Geek

#2935430 28-Jun-2022 16:32

As for making it more responsive, my Atom based system went best on the original Windows 8.1 it shipped with (sorry).

Other OSes is a rabbit hole I would not advise going down if you want to keep using it like a tablet (think screen rotation, touch etc). I looked into some sort of android or linux conversion for my vivotab and concluded it would be a ton of work and end up with something worse.