Toshiba Encore 2 Tablet Running Windows 10

Overview

I upgraded my Toshiba Encore 2 WT8-B tablet from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 using a micro SD card, and I was surprised by how easy and well it performed. This 8-inch tablet packs an Intel Atom Z3735G at 1.33GHz with just 1GB of RAM and 32GB storage, yet it handles full Windows 10 remarkably well. For about $40 on eBay, you get a complete x86 Windows machine that can run standard desktop software, stream video, and browse the web in a portable form factor with decent battery life.

Key Moments

• Tablet specs: Intel Atom 1.33GHz, 1GB RAM, 32GB storage, 1280x800 display
• Successfully upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 via micro SD card
• Testing YouTube video playback in Microsoft Edge browser
• Five-hour battery life with standard micro USB charging (2.5A at 5V)
• Front and rear cameras, speakers, headphone jack, and volume rocker
• Surprisingly responsive despite minimal RAM
• Available for ~$40 on eBay as a full Windows machine

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hello and welcome to my channel. I’m Car Tech Guy, and in this video I’m going to be showing you a Toshiba Encore 2 tablet. This is a tablet that I’ve had for a while and it originally came with Windows 8.1, but I recently upgraded it to Windows 10 and I was surprised to see how easy that was to do.

So I’m going to go ahead and show you some of the connections and the features of this tablet, as well as show you how Windows 10 looks and performs on it. Okay, so let’s get started.

All right, so let’s get started by talking about the charger. This is a standard micro USB charger. This is not USB-C. This one is 2.5 amps at 5 volts, and it’s enough to charge this pretty quickly. This has about a five hour average life, that’s what the advertised life is. It does a pretty good job at staying charged while asleep, so I haven’t seen any huge issues with that.

This is an 8-inch tablet and the screen has a 1280x800 resolution. It’s powered by… it has an Atom CPU running at 1.4 gigahertz, I believe. We’ll take a look at that. It’s got a front-facing camera here and a rear-facing camera. It also has these nice speakers down here, so if you put this on a stand like that, you could actually have a nice movie watching tablet here with Netflix or YouTube or any other video streaming service.

On the top it has… let me see if I can get that clear for you… it’s got the power button, it’s got volume toggles like a rocker switch here (plus and minus), and it’s got a micro SD slot here. And that’s what I used to install Windows 10. It has a microphone right there, I believe, on the top. It has a headphone jack, it’s got the Windows button, and the micro USB port that you can use to charge it and possibly other things.

On the bottom there’s just a place to put one of those straps, like so you can attach it to your wrist or something. And that’s it. On this side there’s nothing.

Overall, it has good weight to it. According to the specs, it’s 13.4 ounces and it does feel like it’s close to a pound. It has built-in Wi-Fi, of course, it’s 802.11 b/g/n. The rear webcam, this one, is 5 megapixels. The internal storage is 32 gigs and that came preloaded with Windows 8.1. And it has one gig of RAM, which is not a lot, but it does the job.

So let’s power it up and see how it all works.

[Powers up device]

All right, so when you power it up, the nice Toshiba splash screen comes up and then Windows 10 starts up. That’s a pretty fast startup. And to use it, I can just slide this up… sorry, slide that up, and I can type in my password. In this case, “user” is the username and “user” as my password because this is… as you can see, it loaded up Windows 10 very fast. It’s very responsive.

Let’s see, we can go to… I don’t have anything loaded on here right now because this is a fresh install of Windows 10. But if I go to Settings, you can see, go to System, and here let me change the brightness… let me make it brighter so that the camera has a better… It’s got 1280x800 which is the native resolution of the screen.

If we go to the About page, we can see that this is powered by an Intel Atom Z3735G at 1.33 gigahertz, and it’s got one gig of RAM. It’s a 32-bit operating system but it’s a x64-based processor. And this has Windows 10 Home.

Overall, this is basically a full-blown Windows computer. I can load a browser, Microsoft Edge, and if I go to YouTube, I should be able to play a YouTube video. Let me see if I can find myself. Let me see if it finds me.

Yep, so I can play my own video there. And I can put up the volume. [Plays video] “I’m here with a Car Tech Guy Junior. I’m the Car Tech Guy…” [Pauses] And I paused it right now, but I can make it full screen. [Plays] “Computer that I picked up. It’s an old Packard Bell Legend that I picked up from eBay. Unfortunately this one came with some damage that I kind of missed…”

Overall, not bad for a 1.3 gigahertz CPU and one gig of RAM. You can close that browser and go back to the start menu.

And that’s it! This is the Toshiba Encore 2. It’s a nice little tablet and you can actually pick these up for about 40 bucks from eBay. And you have an entire Windows machine that you can then use anywhere you’d like to install any standard x86 software and play with it.

So hope you liked it. If you appreciate this type of stuff, make sure you subscribe. I have a lot of videos coming up with retro computers, car hacks, all sorts of things that I do in my spare time. Let me know in the comments what you think of the video. See you next time! Bye!