Well now that I proved that you can actually run a Raspberry PI with #WindowsInsider 18334.1 While waiting for a new insider build, I am going to tell you how I tweaked it to make it a little bit more useable.
One of the things that is important to understand is that Windows 10 Pro was not really meant to run on this little device. That being said, the Windows Build team via @DonaSarkar has sure made some leaps and bounds in efficient memory management with the new #WindowsInsiders builds. Its amazing when you look at the minimuim specs that Microsoft places on Windows 10:
Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
This little Raspberry idles along with just over 560mb of Ram in use with a .6 GHZ proc!
Talk about some tight code to be able to run an operating system in ~560 MB of ram and have it not only function but actually useable. No doubt its slow, but in this actual case I was connected to a RDP session - You can see the actual network traffic on the Ethernet adapter - thanks to @SuperJMN for helping me light the nic! I have been experimenting with how to get the best bang for buck with cpu and ram usage and I would say that the best overall positive thing that I did was go into the Control Panel --> System --> Advanced Systems settings and adjust the performance.
Moving this from letting Windows choose to Adjust for best performance made it jump from a slow crawl to a much more responsive and consistent user experience.
The two other things that I did was to uninstall OneDrive - it was not setup up and it was constantly using system resources. I also stopped the Windows Search service, it was using up lots of disk IO and on a Micro SD card that is slow at the best of times, this alleviated a drain on overall system performance.
In my previous post i mentioned about being able to secure this device for use as a real secure IOT device. One of my use cases for this PI is an IOT device running a full windows stack and having a level of security on it that you can only get from Bitlocker! Now this little unit does not have a TPM chip, but I am pretty sure that will eventually come along - There are ways that you can save the bitlocker key on a USB drive - not ideal but this is a proof of concept to show the device can run fully encrypted! Sure enough I throw bitlocker at the device and it encrypts!
I wanted to make sure you could go all the way so I chose the AES 256 -
While the device was encrypting, it was quite unusable - much as you would expect, but once the encryption was complete, it got its peppy responsiveness back - in fact the Task Manager screen shot above is from a completely secured and Bitlockered device! Of course the key drive is unencrypted, I left it that way so it could boot without me having to enter a password every time. There are better ways to run this but this makes it useable, a working TPM would complete that aspect of security!
What's next for this little device - Its time to test out some capabilities on my use case list - - Enterprise management via Intune,
- External board sensor monitoring proof of concept
y operating as an IOT device up to Azure IOT Edge or 3rd part JSON service for data collection - Having a full windows stack is going to make this COTS device a gem of an IOT enabler!
Murray @murmanz
Great article. By the way - you can run the Pi faster. No, this is not about overclocking. 600MHz is the default speed, while the maximum is 1200 for Pi 3 and 1400 for Pi 3 B+. All you need to do is mash ESC at boot to enter UEFI set up, go to Device Manager, Raspberry Pi Configuration, Chipset Configuration, and set CPU Clock to Max.
You will want to use one of those Pi cases that come with small tack-on heatsinks, and I recommend a power supply that can relly can source 2.5A (I use one that claims to give 3A).
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the UEFI firmware powering 64-bit Windows on Pi (https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg)