http://support.asus.com/Troubleshooting/detail.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&m=ASUS%20VivoBook&s=480&hashedid=n/a&os=&no=1775
Posted 5 months ago by daylenyang about the Asus VivoBook S400
The Asus VivoBook S400 comes with a load of crapware: McAfee Internet Security, an Office trial, and even stuff like Asus Calculator. (Really, Asus Calculator? Wow.)
One would think that all this crapware could easily be removed using Windows 8 Push Button Reset, but unfortunately Asus has modified the recovery image to include all this crapware. So the only real way to get a “clean” installation of Windows is by booting the Windows installer from a USB flash drive, deleting the hard disk partitions, and reinstalling Windows.
The first step is to obtain a copy of Windows 8 64-bit as an ISO file that can be transferred to a USB flash drive. Since the Asus VivoBook S400 comes with Windows 8 and not Windows 8 Pro, we want a Windows 8 “Core” ISO so that OEM activation can be preserved. If we attempt to use the Windows 8 Pro ISO file, the Windows installer will generate an error because the OEM activation key for Windows 8 and the Windows 8 Pro installation files do not match.
The Windows 8 “Core” ISO (64-bit) is available to MSDN subscribers on the MSDN website. The file is about 3.5 GB. After downloading the ISO file, we need to image the flash drive. Because the VivoBook uses UEFI rather than a traditional BIOS, the flash drive needs to be formatted with FAT32 rather than NTFS. After formatting the drive correctly, we select all the files in the ISO file and copy them to the thumb drive. Then, we reboot the VivoBook and rapidly press the ESC button during the boot sequence to enter the boot menu. Select the flash drive, and the Windows 8 installer will launch.
Because we are using Windows 8 “Core” installation files rather than Windows 8 Pro installation files, the Windows installer automatically detects the Windows 8 OEM license key and does not prompt us to enter one. When the Windows installer asks whether we want to do an Upgrade or Custom install, select Custom. There are about 6 existing partitions; we use the Advanced Drive Options to delete all the existing partitions. We should end up with 2 partitions: a ~460 GB partition and a ~22 GB partition. The larger partition corresponds to the 5400-RPM HDD, while the smaller partition corresponds to the SanDisk SSD. We want to install Windows on the hard disk drive so that the SSD can be used as a cache later.
After the Windows installation finishes, we need to install a bunch of drivers. Unfortunately Windows does not automatically install the Wi-Fi adapter driver, so we will need to plug an Ethernet cable into the Ethernet port for this part. On the ASUS support website, we can download drivers for the Wi-Fi adapter, the touchpad, etc. Most of these driver installations are pretty straightforward. But the drivers for the SSD are slightly more tricky.
We want to use the small SSD as a cache. ASUS preloads two applications to do this. One of them is called Intel Rapid Start Technology. This program saves the contents of memory to the SSD to make resuming from hibernation much faster. The other is called ExpressCache. This program automatically caches frequently used files to the solid state drive to make accessing them faster.
In order to get these 2 programs to use the same SSD, we need to install Intel Rapid Start first. To do so, we need to partition the SSD. One partition needs to be equivalent to the amount of RAM in the machine (4 GB). Instructions to do this are available on Intel’s website. It involves using the
diskpart tool to set the correct ID on the partition to support hibernation.
After installing Intel Rapid Start, we can install ExpressCache, which will use the remaining 18 GB partition. And that’s that! The main challenges were figuring out how to get the actual installation started (using Windows 8 “Core” rather than Pro files, and formatting the flash drive as FAT32 rather than NTFS) and configuring the SSD properly (by partitioning the SSD and installing Rapid Start first).
