Windows 10 on Inspiron 3135

I have had the 3135 for about a year and decided to see how Windows 10 fares on it.

I downloaded the 64-bit ISO image from Microsoft ( http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-iso). At the time it was build 9926.
The image did not fit on a 4GB flash drive, so I burned it onto a DVD-R using an external USB DVD writer.

I had also purchased a new 120GB SSD (Kingston SSDNow V300 from NewEgg, it was $52.99 shipped Super Eggsaver; took 2 days to the Boston area). Note you need a 7mm thick drive.
I removed the 7 screws from the bottom (2 have plastic caps that need to be pried), 2 more screws connect the caddy to the computer. Swap the caddy over to the new drive (4 more screws), install the drive in the computer. I waited to close it up until everything ran.

To boot from the DVD drive I believed that I needed to turn Secure Boot off in the BIOS (hold F2 pressed when turning on). I had also changed the boot to Legacy; this seems to be unneeded to boot from the DVD drive, and actually prevents the hard drive from booting after the installation.
After the installation was complete I set Secure Boot back on. Note you need to first turn the Legacy ROM option off before you can change the Secure Boot back to Enabled.
In retrospect I tried to boot from the DVD with Secure Boot on and it did boot, so maybe the whole trip through the BIOS was not needed. Your experience with a USB flash drive may be different.

The installation took maybe 20-30 minutes, I did not time it exactly.

After Windows 10 booted from the hard drive I found that there were 3 devices without drivers in the Device Manager, and that the Display was using the Microsoft Basic driver.
Since one of the 3 missing drivers was WiFi I connected Ethernet.

After the network was up I let Windows update itself. I installed a few Windows 10 updates and a couple of drivers, including "Airplane Mode Switch", Realtek Audio and AMD Radeon HD 8250.
I downloaded the following from the 3135 Drivers page:

• Chipset. I thought it would help the SD card and maybe one of the missing driver items; although it installed I do not know whether it helped anything.
• Touch Pad (AKA Input Driver). It installed and also served for the missing SME bus driver item.
• Network. This refused to install, asking me to enable Blue Tooth and I could not convince it to proceed.

After searching a while I located a Dell driver for DW1705 on the Inspiron 2350 Drivers page. This installed and works.

I tested the SD card slot to see whether it's now opeartional. The first time I inserted a card the system blue-screened. I tried again after the reboot and the card was seen and formatted.

Of course, the current device with similar form factor (and price) to the 3135 is the 3147 which I also have and is smaller, lighter and has tablet functionality. The one advantage of the 3135 is the built-in Ethernet. This thread would be for historical perspective.

 

Additional information regarding the webcam: When I tried to add a camera photo to the account, the resulting image was all green. I then installed FastAccess face recognition (digital download available from my Dell 3147), and it works and logs me in. With a very small amount of test time invested, FastAccess sometimes shows the camera output and sometimes shows a green rectangle.
I did not try other camera clients e.g. Skype.

 

Power problems:

Restart does not seem to work. The system says "restarting" and goes dark. I need to hold Power for 5 seconds to remove power and then turn it on.
Sleep does not seem to work. Once asleep the system does not wake up. Neither when the power button is pressed, nor when the lid is opened.

Hibernate does not seem to work. The drive LED did not go completely dark for a long time (order of a minute) and that's on an SSD). Eventually the LED did go dark. However, when turned on the system showed a full boot and not restore from hibernation.
The Event Viewer showed that the system had a reset caused by the hardware watchdog. Also that "Windows failed to resume from hibernation withe error status 0xC0000001."


That's bad.

 

Power problems were resolved by a clean install. I re-installed the same applications and drivers and all is well.

Windows 10 just updated to build 10041. The Reltek audio driver failed to install, see http://kb.stonegroup.co.uk/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=289 for a fix that worked.

The camera seems to do OK if I reduce the resolution to 0.5MP or less. Full resolution (0.9MP) results in a green box.

 

Updated Windows 10 to build 10049. Nothing to report.

At some point, either with 10041 or 10049, the FastAccess face recognition software started showing a 30-day limited time warning. Whatever made the system accept the 3147 package as legit seems to have gone away.