Notes on Initial Setup

Swap a white pen nib (included in the small zip-lock with your stylus) for the black one that comes pre-installed. The black one wears out faster and you probably will not notice the difference on the smooth screen. You can buy more nibs from Wacom. (http:www.wacom.com) 

You will want a USB hub, wired mouse & keyboard, external CD-ROM drive, and external Hard Drive. These aren’t needed for day-to-day operations, but will be helpful when you install software, perform backups, etc. For maintenance purposes, a wired mouse and keyboard are preferred because they do not require the Bluetooth drivers and work with the BIOS.

Speaking of BIOS, you will want access to it so that you can change the boot order to boot off the CD-ROM. You do this by holding the home button on your slate down when you press the power button to start the system. The volume buttons and the rotation lock button are used to move about the menus.

BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP  –  I cannot stress how important this is. Something WILL go wrong and you will thank yourself. I backed up the entire drive using Acronis TrueImage. I booted off the CD-ROM so that I would get a clean copy of the drive. I stored it on two different archive drives. Next, I used the Samsung Recovery Solutions program to back up the System Software to a DVD. I then backed up the entire system to another Hard drive using the Samsung software, and finally backed it up again on to 6 DVD disks. You need to do this last because if your system goes completely belly up, you can boot off the DVDs and restore your system and the Recovery Partition. Validate your backups at every step!! (As you can tell, I am rather paranoid about backups.)

Once you have done all this, the next step is to remove the Recovery Partition. I know Samsung warns against this, but 30GB is a large chunk to take away from your 120GB SSD. If you have performed the above steps, then you can safely do this. I tested it for myself by disk, and then restoring from the Acronis backup. Deleting the Recovery partition is not easy, and Samsung Tech Support does not know very much about this unit at this time. Disk Manager  will not let you touch it. Check the help instructions in Samsung Recovery Manager for full instructions. (Rather than risk steering you wrong, I leave it to you to get the latest instructions from your own slate.) Once this is removed, you can shrink/expand your system partition at will. I adjusted the space so that I had two 60 GB partitions and installed the Windows 8 Preview in the second. (More about this later.)