Reinstalling Windows/Android/Ubuntu on the Wintel CX-W8

Well I recently acquired a Wintel CX-W8 Windows/Android TV box 

(mine had a lovely unlicensed Windows 8.1 with Bing on arrival, as the only OS) 

and quickly proceeded to corrupt my Windows installation beyond all repair... Oh well, native Android support anyways, right? Or not...

Hours upon hours of hunting later, I've finally learned enough about this PITA SOC to potentially save someone else a good amount of time, so why not?



1. Reinstalling Windows

The CX-W8 has two options for booting: EFI and GFY ('go fuck yourself'). Originally, I tried an install of Windows 7 x64 and probably could have gotten it to work... However I hadn't yet figured out item #4 below so ended up with Win8.1x32 again, though the 32bit OS is probably better given my unit only contains 2gB of RAM.

Anyways, I'll include some links here if you wish to do a bit more with this, however my recommendation (and the first step in multi-booting this son of a bitch regardless) is to pick up an ISO of Windows 8.1 x32, the USB ISO-boot app Rufus, and a flash drive.

You'll need DRIVERS (WITH RTL8723BS) (NOT WITH AP6330) of course:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_J0hmST3aYmdGxVVEtDWk56RmM/view?usp=sharing

Here's the quick:
1. Rufus the ISO to a flash drive - GPT for UEFI/FAT32 (you can find guides for EFI setup with Windows 8 easily)
2. Esc into bios on boot to enable USB booting (DISABLE THIS AFTER INSTALLATION)
3. Finish install and use these drivers, ripped from my own fresh install:


The F*** is wrong still? <--- Disable USB Boot in Bios
For some reason the device manager was throwing strange error codes on several devices and refusing the install drivers on others. Per a side-comment in a thread somewhere, I decided to disable USB booting in the bios and everything worked again, magically.https://plus.google.com/communities/117853703024346186936

Final Note: Power Management
I was having issues with the box going to sleep and either not coming back at all or seeming to lose USB drivers upon wake. The solution to this one was going through every item in device manager and, if there was a Power Management tab under its properties, unchecking 'Allow Windows to turn off this device to save power.'

Here's the util I used to backup all those drivers:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/

2. Where'd those drivers come from?

I found two devices that operate with the same SOC as this Wintel - the Linx 7 and the Transformer T100. Apparently the WLAN and BT hardware varies, however (either RTL8723BS/AP6330). From there, it was trial & error and alot of google. Mine uses RTL8723BS BTW


3. Installing Android

Here's a fairly new build of Android x86 for the T100, also great for the Wintel
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-x86/FUiFCtrgc6I/UAoQ-if9dZMJ

And here is a kickass prebuilt USB containing Ubuntu and Android for the T100 with several fixes already applied (be sure to search the group for any new version):
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/android-x86/DFBxPGlpn_M

Want to tri-boot this thing (add Ubuntu+Android)? Read here:
http://reboot.pro/topic/20334-tri-booting-on-meegopad-t01/


4. Where's Ubuntu?

Either get it from here:
https://plus.google.com/communities/117853703024346186936

Or check out the previous link to the T100 Magic Stick which includes a build already


5. A tip for graphics performance

In the bios there's an option to set the amount of RAM reserved by the system for the integrated video card... I set mine to the max (512mB) and have squeezed a small amount of gaming performance out of this system. I also went through and disabled the power management settings that would decrease performance.


6. Hope for the future? Thoughts on upgrading the SOC

The bios says that only one SODIMM slot is in use, however inside the device there's no obvious way to utilize the other slot. That said, if anyone manages to do so please let me know via comments. There's a teardown of CX-W8 on another blog, showing several unused pin sets that we should totally figure out what to do with.

My only other idea is adding a battery and a small HDMI board/LCD display like many do with the Raspberry Pi. I'd assume we'd just need to borrow the bios settings from a T100 in order to manage the battery.