Best Minipc Forum

I got my T8 Pro yesterday, and although I haven't done a lot with it as of yet, it's a fun little PC, especially being as small as it is.

Thus far I've set it up, then brought the Windows installation fully up to date with Windows Update. I then saved the driver folder to a USB drive, then performed a clean install of Windows 11 22H2. The unit came with 21H2, and though I could have just performed an upgrade in place to 22H2, I prefer clean installs. I always save the driver folder in case I need any drivers after the clean install, and that was the case with this.

So far I'm pretty impressed. It's very responsive, and the few 3rd party programs I put on it installed very quickly. I haven't really stressed the unit much at this point, but I have had a number of web pages open while running both Windows Update and Windows Store Update in the background, and while running a Defender scan. The temps during this went no higher than 65°C. So far, it's handled what I've thrown at it perfectly.

I ran a disk benchmark with CyrstalDiskMark8, and the results were about what I would expect for an SATA m.2 drive. And though I could upgrade the storage to NVMe, its higher speed wouldn't really be of much benefit to me with what I'll use this unit for, so I'll likely just leave it alone, at least for now.

I look forward to playing around with this T8 Pro a good bit more. It's a really nice unit and I'm glad I got it.

Nice! I'm glad you like it. I can't get over how small it is.

I've been searching for a good way to make a system backup that I can restore with a clean install, something like the old Norton Ghost would do. Backing up the Drivers folder sounds like a good start. I just want to purchase a USB drive, get the necessary files on it to reinstall Windows (with drivers) and install and have everything work "out of the box."

dragonpoo,

Have you ever tried the built in system imaging tool? Granted, it restores the computer to the exact way it was when the image was saved, but if one is saved at the beginning, it could be used to quickly restore the PC to what it was when new.

Gabe wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 7:19 pm Have you ever tried the built in system imaging tool? Granted, it restores the computer to the exact way it was when the image was saved, but if one is saved at the beginning, it could be used to quickly restore the PC to what it was when new.

I have not. Is this a Windows feature? I feel like I'm missing out. And honestly, I wouldn't mind getting the "initial deployment" image; that would probably be better than vanilla and manually installing the drivers. Might be worthy of a different thread in the forums, if you wanted to try documenting it. Otherwise, I can try to figure it out on my own.

dragonpoo,

It's built into Windows. It basically takes a 'snapshot' of your entire system and saves that image to your chosen media, which for me is a external HDD (USB), as the images can be quite large, as in 60 or 70GB. Then, if later on something goes goofy with your system, or if you have to replace a bad SSD, you can restore the system with that saved image, and it will be exactly as it was when you saved it.

I'm not very good at instructions, but the following PC Magazine page does it pretty well...

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-bac ... windows-10

Where is talks about creating a system repair disk, if you're not able to do that you can use either a Recovery Drive or USB W11 installation media, like that which you can make using Microsoft's Media Creation Tool, to start the PC and get into the Recovery environment in order to be able to restore the image. You can do it from the Advanced startup thing it shows in the article (right under the System Image Recovery header), but if Windows is so messed up you can't start it, you won't be able to use that option, so that's where the Recovery Drive or W11 installation media comes in handy.