Troubleshooting

Is your Lenovo Miix 2 not working? Try checking it against [[Lenovo Miix 2 Troubleshooting|the troubleshooting page!]]

Background and Identification

On October 16th, 2013, Lenovo released the Miix 2 tablet for $300. This 8 inch tablet running 32 bit Windows 8.1 is powered by a 1.8 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 2GB of RAM, and 7 hours of battery life. The battery is accessible by opening the back cover and removing 6 screws.

Inside, the tablet contains 2GB of RAM, 32, 64 or 128 GB of built in storage, and allows for expansion cards via microSDHC or microSDXC cards. The only I/O present to the outside world is the MicroUSB port, which also doubles as a charging point. The device does support USB OTG and power injection to allow the port to charge the tablet and serve as an OTG hub at the same time, which is atypical of similar 8 inch Windows based tablets.

The Miix2 8 has a five finger multi-touch sensitive, 1280 x 800 pixel touch screen. Lenovo's website boasts of using In-Plane Switching (IPS) for their display to ensure vivid colours. It also contain a 5 megapixel rear facing camera along with a front facing 2 megapixel camera. All 3 peripherals are connected to the system via the I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit) bus.

The tablet is typical of the Intel Bay Trail generation of machines in that it only supports UEFI32. 64 Bit computing requires hybrid booting from the 32 Bit environment (which makes running 64 Bit Windows impossible, and 64 bit Linux a challenge). The RAM is not upgradeable.

Post-sale support from Lenovo is notably poor with driver support packages dating back at least to mid-2013. Windows 10 is not officially supported by Lenovo, but it can be done (all the way to Windows 10 20H2 32 bit edition). The default partitioning scheme for Windows 8 only leaves about 9 GB of storage free in a typical 32 GB machine - a good idea is to remove the (badly outdated) recovery partition and install Windows 10 clean, but use the Lenovo provided driver packages (especially the camera - you’ll need to use the Intel Imaging Signal Processor 2400 drivers dating back to October 2013 (603.9600.1948.25849) in order for the 2 I2C connected cameras to work (or not crash the tablet on any newer drivers). A clean 20H2 install with Office 2013 (included with the original Win8 x86 image) should leave between 16-18 GB of free space, and the license should be digitally activated

The tablet is easily identifiable via the sticker on the back side labeled "Lenovo Miix 2".

Additional Information

• Hardware Maintenance Manual

• Miix 2 8 User Guide

• Lenovo Support Page