Hey, welcome back to the channel. Now,
you guys know by now that I love finding ways to revitalize older machines and
make them usable today. I normally do this on Max,
but today we're gonna be looking at a Surface Pro three.
This machine was released in 2014,
and the one I'm looking at is the base model with only four gigs of ram,
but we're gonna install a version of Windows 11 called Tiny11 on here.
That makes this a whole new machine. Now, if you haven't heard a Tiny11 yet,
it's basically just a stripped down version of Windows 11.
It's still fully featured,
just a lot of the bloatware and overhead has been removed from it.
It's a very small install on the machine and only uses about two gigs of
ram.
So it's actually usable on this four gig Surface Pro,
and it works really well with touch input and all that stuff. So let's get right
into the tutorial on how to get this installed. Now,
the first thing you're gonna want to do is go out to the site that I have linked
down in the description and download Tiny11.
You will have to sign up for an account on this, but it's a free account.
Don't worry about that. And there's three options to choose from.
Over on the side,
you want to choose the one in the middle that states there's no special
requirements, just download that one. And while that's downloading,
we're also gonna get an application called rufuss.
It's a free application. I'll also have that site link down below.
Just go out to that website, download rufuss.
I usually get the portable version,
which just means you don't have to install it,
you can just run it from anywhere.
So just get those downloaded and then we'll continue on. So now that we have
those downloaded,
the next thing we need to do is put a thumb drive into our computer.
this can be any size, 8 gigs, 16 gig, whatever.
Just pop it in there and then load up Rufuss.
This is gonna be in your downloads folder unless you've moved it somewhere else.
Launch that. Then in the area that lets you choose the disk image,
you're gonna browse out again to your download's folder and select that Tiny11
ISO. Make sure at the top that the drive,
the thumb drive that you put in is the one that's selected.
You don't want to do this to one of your internal drives or something like that.
It should default to that thumb drive, but just make sure it's on there.
Once you do that and you hit continue, you're gonna get some more prompts.
Just go ahead and check the options that I'm showing on the screen right now.
that'll just kind of streamline the installer for you and then fire it
off and let that right to the thumb drive. All right,
so now we got it all written on our thumb drive.
We're gonna take that over to our Surface Pro.
We're gonna stick it in the USB port on the side,
and then we're gonna start it up by holding the volume down button and then
pushing and releasing the power button.
Keep that volume down button pushed in until you see the surface logo,
and then you can release that and we'll just wait for it to.
Boot the installer. So there's nothing special about this installer,
it's just the basic Windows installer.
And when you get to the steps that let you choose what partition you want to
install it on,
I would recommend just deleting all the partitions that are there,
then clicking new and let it create a new set.
And then it's just gonna go and install it.
It takes only about five minutes. It's a relatively quick install,
but just let it install and then reboot,
and then we'll continue on with the setup. Okay, so we're back up.
You're gonna put in the password that you created during the Windows setup and
log into Windows. And at this point we're done.
A Windows is installed on this Surface Pro,
but what I would recommend is that you go out and do all the updates,
just you're gonna have to reboot probably two or three times to get all the
updates,
but just make sure you do that and then you're good to go. Now because this is
a stripped down version of Windows 11, it doesn't have any browsers,
web browsers installed in it,
but you can go out to the store and download Edge or Firefox or whatever you
want to use, and then you're golden.
You're have a fully functional computer on this surface.
Pro three running Windows 11 with all those latest updates that you just
got. The stylist works, the touchscreen works great.
The keyboard cover works as it should,
and an on-screen keyboard comes up when you detach it from the keyboard cover.
If you need to type some text just like you would expect it to work.
It's just a much more streamlined version of Windows 11 that runs
great on lower spec machines. Now, as usual,
if you have any questions on anything I talked about in this video,
lead those down in the comment section below.
hopefully you found this useful or informative. If you did hit that thumbs up,
if you really liked it subscribe and hit that notification bell so you know when
I put out more videos and I'll see you in the next one.
Thanks so much for stopping by.