| From: phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca | I was impressed by the packaging and build quality of the computer. I was | not impressed by Windows 8.1, which is a real dog's breakfast of Selling | Stuff and Requesting All Your Information, and a really badly designed UI. When you first log into Win8.1, they want you to use a Microsoft identity (i.e. in the cloud). Only when you cancel do they offer you the choice of local credentials. This is not obvious and most folks get tricked. | So I downloaded the latest version of Linux Mint and installed that as a | dual-boot system. For those that haven't done this - first you use the | partition tool in Win8.1 to reduce the size of the windows partition, | freeing up space. In my experience, the Windows partitioning tool will only reduce the space to about half. That's not good enough for me. Instead, I use a Linux tool to shrink the Win partition a whole lot. But that damages the Win parition so you have to immediately boot into Windows (before creating new partitions) and have it do a repair. This is witchcraft. (I think that Windows puts something immoveable in the middle of the partition and linux just ignores that.) | At the end of the installation we have a dual-boot selection menu that | comes up on power-on, and we can select either operating system. Both | operating systems detected and connected to the wireless network without | any fuss, which is convenient. Are you using UEFI or old-fashioned BIOS/MBR booting? Does MINT support Secure Boot? | In the previous install process, on an Asus laptop, the grub boot menu is | somehow accessible only from inside Windows and there is a lengthy | song-and-dance needed to get to it. That sounds odd. I guess you are using some Windows boot manager.