I’ve been on a quest for a light, portable laptop that was powerful enough to do what I want but cheap enough to not to make me worry about travelling with it (whenever travelling happens again).
There are a lot of options in the Ultrabook category but, for me, I find most of them are either not light enough, too large or just too expensive. Ideally I didn’t want to spend more than £500.
A pretty tough set of criteria. So I was really excited to read about the Star Labs Lite MkIII which looked to be the perfect specs:
- Super light at just under 1kg
- 11.6" screen in a small, solid aluminium chassis
- Able to be charged by USB-C so that I only have to carry one charger with me for phone & laptop
- Full HD screen
- 8gb RAM / 256Gb SSD
- Decent battery life
- Cheap at £399
To cut a long story short, I got one and I’ve been really blown away by how well made it is and the quality of the components. However one thing didn’t work for me and that’s Linux, which is the default operating system installed. You can order a version with Windows installed for a higher price, but I got the Linux one and after using it a while decided to install Windows 10 Pro on it, and it turned out not to be completely straightforward, so I’m going to go through a few gotchas I found here.
It’s all About the Drivers
As you can probably imagine, the main issue you get when installing Windows is that a lot of the devices are not picked up during the install process and a whole bunch of them don’t work immediately afterwards.
I did a Windows update but still I was left with a posse of yellow exclamation points in Device Manager:
The good news is that the Star Labs site does provide a download area with Windows drivers on it. The bad news is that even after installing these drivers I was left with three unknown devices:
And that wasn’t all. Despite installing the Audio driver from Star Labs, I had no sound and the dreaded Red X on the sound icon in the Windows taskbar.
Getting the Sound Going
Lack of sound was an interesting one because there was an HD Sound driver installed, but clearly I wasn’t getting any sound and the Windows troubleshooter wasn’t able to fix it (does it ever?). I knew the sound was working fine in Linux so I went the long route around to find out the driver I needed. I booted into Linux from a live USB stick, and there I found the driver that worked fine in Ubuntu was an “Intel Corporation Device 3198" driver. A little bit of searching online and I found the right Windows driver to get the sound going. Oddly enough, it was a Realtek audio driver for an Intel NUC device that I guess has the same audio sub system. You can get it here: Download Realtek* High Definition Audio Driver for NUC7CJY, NUC7PJY (intel.com).
And the Rest of the Devices
With the sound working, it was just a case of getting the last three unknown devices in the Device Manager working. Here it was slightly easier. Searching for some information on the hardware device IDs led me to the discovery that what we were missing was the Intel Dynamic Thermal Framework drivers (whatever those are). The latest version I could find online was 8.5.10103.7263. I downloaded those from Dell and once installed, all devices seemed to be working fine. See: Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Driver
