Lenovo Yoga with Windows 8 Pro, Office 2013 and Visual Studio [ Edited ]

[lenovoyogauser]

For you developer types, I just wanted to post a message and let you know my experience with Lenovo Ideapad Yoga 13 as a development machine. I bought Lenovo Ideapad Yoga 13 from Bestbuy for $999.99. As expected, it came with a crap ton of bloatware installed by Lenovo.

Here is a summary of what I did to it (I take no responsilibity for accuracy of below information. You are on your own if you decide to follow them. I am just putting this down from my memory so that I can look it up in the future if I ever need to do this again).

INITIAL CLEANUP

• Installed Lenovo hotfix for partition cleanup/merging: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS033035
• Installed Lenovo Touchpad driver fix.

CAUTION: I take no responsibility for below steps. I am writing them from memory and if you decide to follow them and end up making your machine unusable, you are on your own as Lenovo might not honor your warranty.

BACK UP ENTIRE DISK (requires an empty USB flash drive for booting and another external USB drive for backup)

• Copied Drivers from D_Backup folder to the external USB hard drive (plugged into USB 3.0 port).
• Installed Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 Free: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/
• Created Paragon Backup & Recovery boot USB flash drive with default Linux recovery environment option (flash drive plugged into USB 2.0 port).
• Shutdown Lenovo Yoga.
• Plugged in the Paragon Backup & Recovery boot USB flash drive (USB 2.0 port). 
• Pressed the one key recovery button (next to power button). Went to BIOS.
• In the BIOS, enabled Legacay mode and made Legacy high priority and saved the changes.
• The machine booted into Paragon Backup & Recovery mode. From there, made a backup of entire disk to the external USB hard drive.
• Shut down the machine, pressed the one key recovery button (next to power button). Went to BIOS. Turned off Legacy mode and switched back to UEFI boot mode and saved the changes and restarted the machine.
• Logged into the machine and verified that everything was good and checked the external USB drive to verify that the backup image was present.

MAKE WINDOWS 8 PRO BOOT USB FLASH DRIVE (requires a second empty USB flash drive and a second computer with Windows 7. This USB Flash Drive has to be between 4GB to 32GB as Windows won't format 64GB flash drives to FAT32 mode)
(Note: I installed Windows 8 Pro in UEFI mode. See http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/install-windows-8-usb.htm)

• You need a licensed ISO image of Windows 8 Professional Full version (not the upgrade version) from your MSDN or Technet subscription or create an ISO from the Windows 8 Pro full version DVD.
• Download Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool on the computer with windows 7.
• Plug in the second empty USB flash drive (has to be at least 4GB but less than 32GB) into the computer with Windows 7.
• Using Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool and the ISO file, create the Windows 8 Pro bootable USB Flash drive.
• Create a new folder on your computer disk, for example, C:\WIN8USB.
• Copy all the files from your USB flash drive to the newly created folder (created in the previous step).
• Right click on the USB drive icon in Computer window and select “Format…” from the context menu. Make sure you select “FAT32 (Default)” in “File system” drop down menu. Click “Start” and wait till the drive gets formatted. This step is needed because NTFS is not readable by BIOS in UEFI boot mode. During formatting, MBR is preserved so the thumbdrive is still bootable.
• Copy all the files from the folder you created earlier (C:\WIN8USB, for example) to the formatted drive. Your Windows 8 installation USB drive is ready to install in UEFI mode.

WIPE THE DISK PARTITIONS

• Shut down the machine, pressed the one key recovery button (next to power button). Went to BIOS, enabled Legacay mode and made Legacy high priority and saved the changes.
• Booted into Paragon Backup & Recovery boot USB flash drive again. This time, I deleted all partitions on the primary disk (Disk 0). CAUTION: This WILL wipe your hard disk and will make your machine unusable!!! 
• Shut down the machine, pressed the one key recovery button (next to power button). Went to BIOS. Turned off Legacy mode and switched back to UEFI boot mode and saved the changes and shut down the machine.
• At this point, the disk is wiped clean. All factory installed software and recovery partitions are gone!!!

INSTALL WINDOWS 8 PRO

• Plug in the USB Flash Drive with Windows 8 Pro install files.
• Windows 8 Installer would show the unallocated disk space. I can't remember the exact details but either I had to click on Delete or New to delete and then create a new GPT partition. The entire partition was about 119GB.
• From that point, follow the Windows 8 Pro installation steps.
• After booting up into Windows 8 Pro, plug the external USB drive that had the drivers folder backed up from D_backups.
• Install all the drivers from this folder (I was able to install everything except for one Intel fast boot one because of missing partition but my Yoga still boots up just as fast).
• Go to device manager to check and everything should be good now.
• Run Windows Update.

You should now have about 101GB free on C: drive!!

INSTALL VISUAL STUDIO, SQL SERVER and OFFICE 2013 ON LENOVO YOGA 13
I installed the following in that order:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer edition (I installed all components, everything!). Then I installed latest service pack.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (I installed all components, everything!). Then I installed latest service pack.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Developer edition(I installed all components, everything!). Then I installed latest service pack.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2012(I installed all components, everything!)
• I ran Windows update and also installed Nov 2012 updates of SQL Server Data tools.
• I then installed Office 2013 Pro Plus.

MAKE LENOVO YOGA 13 MORE SECURE

• Go to Control Panel and enable Windows Defender (it is included by default in Windows 8 and is anti-virus and anti-malware solution)
• Enable full hard-disk encryption using BitLocker feature of Windows 8 Pro. Since Lenovo Ideapad Yoga 13 doesn't have hardware TPM, you have to enable password based option. For this, follow the steps here: http://rics.partners.org/show_article.php?id=274. 
• Basically, you go to GPEDIT.MSC and Open Computer Configuration => Administrative Templates => Windows Components => BitLocker Drive Encryption => Operating System Drives. From the right pane double-click "Require additional authentication at startup. Select Enabled radio button and check the box for "Allow BitLocker without a compatible TPM...". Click OK and close the policy editor. Then Right-click your C drive in the Computer folder, click Turn on BitLocker. Then select Enter a password instead of USB option. Then provide a strong password (make sure to write it down and put it in a SAFE place, if you lose the password, no one can boot into your hard disk). Then select Save to a file and save it to the External Drive. Select "Encrypt entire drive...", click Next. When this is done, you will get a pop-up on the lower-right a prompt to restart the computer. Restart your PC. Enter the encryption password created earlier. If you are successful in getting into Windows, you're all set.
• I also hooked up to Skydrive and used BoxCryptor to encrypt my files in cloud.

The available free disk space should now be about 54GB.

I verified that Lenovo Yoga 13 works like a champ with no slowdown with Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012 and SQL Server Management Studio open simultaneously and Bitlocker enabled!

The keyboard right SHIFT key is small but other than that, it can work as a great portable development machine and Microsoft Reader is great for reading PDF eBooks.

So if you are a Developer on Microsoft platform, go right ahead. Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 is great for running Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 (1600x900 resolution is totally usable) while on the move. Since I have only had this machine for a few days, I can't tell much about the long term reliability.

[bilbravo]

You mention that you installed Windows 8 Pro... did you pay to upgrade?  I was looking at the model at Best Buy and it looks like it only comes with Windows 8 64 standard.

Any update now that you've used it another full day (lol).  I will be running the same setup as you -- Visual Studio, SQL Server express and maybe Eclipse/mysql for Android development.

Thanks for this post!  Very helpful!

[lenovoyogauser · Accepted solution]

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bilbravo wrote:

You mention that you installed Windows 8 Pro... did you pay to upgrade?  I was looking at the model at Best Buy and it looks like it only comes with Windows 8 64 standard.

Any update now that you've used it another full day (lol).  I will be running the same setup as you -- Visual Studio, SQL Server express and maybe Eclipse/mysql for Android development.

Thanks for this post!  Very helpful!

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Correct, it comes with Windows 8.

I have MSDN subscription (this is what you get with it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx) and my Windows 8 Pro version came with the MSDN subscription (I am using this machine for development/testing). 

It is running great. Very fast and no performance issues with multiple Visual Studio instances open.

[lenovoyogauser]

Also note that in my original post, one of the links is  http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/install-windows-8-usb.htm . Somehow the closing parentheses got merged with the link and became the wrong link.

[bilbravo]

Thanks, was just curious about the Windows 8 Pro bit.

Still trying to locate one.  Out of stock everywhere near me.

[wp8developer]

Thank you for posting this. I am in this exact situation. I purchased a yoga 13, and installed Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone. As it turns out, the Windows Phone Emulator ONLY works in a Windows 8 Pro environment. Since the Yoga doesn't have a disc drive, I shared my W7 computer's cd drive, then put in Windows 8 Pro, so that it could install onto the Yoga. Well, after the installation was done, I tried running my program again and ran into the same issue. It prompted me that my environment must be Windows 8 Pro! I thought that Windows 8 Pro already installed but, what confuses me is that I see no indication that Windows 8 Pro installed. When I go to the System Window, it reads: "Windows 8". Should it read Windows 8 Pro?

Ultimately, I'd like to know, are you able to execute the Windows Phone Emulator? I'm not sure as to whether the Yoga has the hardware capability (needs to be SLAT enabled or something like that?), I HOPE it is able to, and judging by your post, it seems like it but I'd love to know your perspective on my approach.

Please let me know if this makes sense, as I'm new to this kind of thing but really want to start development for Windows Phone.

[lenovoyogauser]

When I go to Control Panel and then to System, it shows my Windows edition as "Windows 8 Pro".

I looked at installing Windows Phone Emulator. It will take many GB's of hard-disk space and since I am not developing for Windows phone, I am not going to download and install it at the moment. Since it is an i5, my guess is that it suppports SLAT. But it is also the ultra-low voltage version of i5. To be really sure, here's an easy way to find out:

1. Download coreinfo: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722

2. Follow the instructions here to see if it supports SLAT (EPT): http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1401.hyper-v-list-of-slat-capable-cpus-fo...

[wp8developer]

well, it looks the Yoga 13 DOES support SLAT  

Next step, I will create a bootable Windows 8 Pro disc,.

I am really confused as that I went through this shared dvd process of installing the OS but it did not say Windows 8 Pro on my system. Maybe that's not the way to do it. Maybe you can't install full Windows 8 Pro that way. I will create a bootable disc and report back to you my findings.

[wp8developer]

Well, I've successfully set up my windows phone development environment !! Just in case anyone searches on this topic, I've created a blog post, 6 Steps to Windows Phone 8 Development.

http://averysmith.pro/blog/6-steps-to-windows-phone-8-development

I hope this helps! Thank you so much for your assistance, lenovoyogauser.

[fharrington]

HI lenovoyogauser, thanks again for the clear write up, however it did not work for me.  I followed your steps closely, except i used diskpart to delete old partitions, and recived the same error as with most other attempts - "the product key entered does not match any of the Windows images available for installation.  Enter a different product key."  I am then kicked back to the start of the installer. No place to enter a key.

I suspect this is because i'm using a w8pro image from the full system builder DVD and you(as well as kasker) are using an MSDN build. One checks for the key and the other doesn't?

I was successful using winPE and autounattend.xml.. a longer process but at least I can use my purchased version of w8pro.

If you think I missed something and have a suggestion let me know!  Thanks.