RCA Cambio 10" 2-in-1 & Other OSes
November 29, 2020
Introduction
Here's another adventure in tech where I see what I can do in making an old RCA 2-in-1 tablet useful. Similar to my adventure with a NuVision tablet, a (different) friend gave it to me running Windows 10. Did I make use of it? Read on and find out!
Oh, BTW, I made a full OS Recovery USB within Windows 10.
Table Of Contents
Device Itself
Right now, I do not know the model. I think it originally came with Windows 8.1. The specs are:
CPU:
RAM:
HD:
The BIOS is an American Megatrends. They always seem a bit odd, but most BIOSes are odd. There were two big observations. The first is the BIOS boots sideways when the keyboard/trackpad is attached. The second is there is a boot override in the BIOS, so no need to muck around with the boot order.
Chrome OS Flex
The first thing I wanted to try was ChromeOS Flex. I'm a huge fan of Chrome OS, especially since it supports Android and Linux apps. It is a shame that Flex does not support Android. But it does Linux, so it's another distro to me. And to my wife, it just runs the apps she needs.
The summation of ChromeOS Flex is:
It never auto-rotated, from the install through usage. I could manually change rotation, but not ideal.
The internal speakers seemed to be found, but I never could get the sound to work. The speakers nor the headphone jack would output anything no matter what I did. This is a common aspect of this adventure.
Youtube.com would buffer, but with no sound, who cares! :-P
Most sites were fine, but there was some lag on media-heavy news sites.
Alas, I could use it for looking up stuff, but no sound, what's next?!?!
Bunsen Labs
I've had good luck with Bunsen Labs on lower-end hardware. It is what I first go to when I get EOL'ed Chromebooks. This sorta worked. Pretty much the same experience as ChromeOS Flex. I could tweak the config files for auto-rotation, but the sound drivers never worked. The whole piece where the orientation and lack of keyboard/mouse came into play too often too.
TL;DR
Nothing worked really well. And Windows on it was just, well, I still don't like Windows. I eventually recycled the device.