the course of the deployment – it’s not just a case of writing
Windows 10 to an SD card. The WOA Deployer adds things likea
virtual UEFI setup, USB drivers, and LAN drivers, so you needto
click the odd Accept button to confirm you’ve signed your life
away. Let it tick for a while, and don’t be fooled if it seems tostall
[Image C], just be patient; even after the image is written, the
deployment, which brings it up to date with the latest patches,
takes its sweet time. Don’t rush to whip out your card the second
WOA Deployer says it’s finished, either – it injects a few drivers
afteryou’veclickedOK.
5
First boot
If you thought waiting for deployment to complete wasfun,
wait until you take your SD card, put it in your Pi, and power iton.
First you need to set your UEFI options; type exit at the initial
prompt, head to Boot Maintenance Manager in the UEFI interface,
and change the boot order so that ‘SD/MMC on Broadcom
SDHOST’ is listed first. Select ‘Commit changes and exit’, press
[Esc] a couple of times, then select Boot Manager on the first
screen, and press [Enter] on SD/MMC. Now wait, and watch that
lovely Windows spinning circle for a while. If you see an errorat
this point, it’s likely to be the fault of the SD card you’ve written
to; first time around, we received a driver error when Windows 10
was written to a Kingston 32GB Class 10 card, but booted justfine
whenweswitchedtoa 64GBSanDiskcardingoldlivery.
6 Make it faster
It’s quite the sluggish boot experience, because of boththe
slow ARM processor and the generally terrible I/O performanceof
Cthe SD card it’s running on. Give it time, though, and
you’ll hit the standard Windows 10 initial setup – walk
through it, wait some more, and you end up at the
Windows desktop running in test mode [Image D], and
you’ll be ready to make a few essential tweaks. First off,
disable Cortana – there’s even less benefit to having the
voice assistant here – and switch off Windows’ cached
searches, too. If you’re feeling gung-ho, a trip back to the
UEFI menu on reboot enables you to boost the clock
speed up from the default 600MHz to 1GHz, and leave
your Pi even toastier than it is by default; you can, if
you’re happy for your hardware to fry itself, open the
config file by putting your SD card back into your PC,
and up the clock speed even further there. QWhy go through all this bother when there’s a perfectly
good skew of Windows 10 available for the Raspberry Pi?
That may be true, but Windows 10 IoT just isn’t
Windows 10. It’s a severely trimmed-down version that’s
been designed, as its name suggests, for Internet of Things
devices. If you’re looking to apply your Raspberry Pi to a
single task, such as digital signage, robotics, or similar,
Windows 10 IoT Core (think Windows CE, if you’re old-
school) is the operating system for you, as long as there’s a
Universal App, designed to run on an ARM processor, that
you’re sure will do the job.
If not, and if full Windows 10 doesn’t do what you want it
to (spoiler: It probably won’t), you may well be better off
sticking to the Raspberry Pi’s more familiar Linux-based
operating systems, such as Raspbian. Linux may be less
familiar than Microsoft’s warm embrace, but it’s also far
better documented. If there’s something you need to do,
some bit of hardware you want to interact with, someone
has probably created a guide to doing it, and Linux is
built for tinkering.Windows 10
vs. Windows 10 IoT
DExplore
Run Windows on a Raspberry Pi
June 2019 | |^41