Andrew finally gets his hands on the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, but his first venture into Windows 8 turn sour fast as hardware problems plague the convertible laptop.

The streetcar taking mehome from FedEx was excruciatingly slow. The large cardboard box resting on my legs meant no one could sit beside me and I was collecting more than enough dirty looks to spoil my afternoon. But inside that box was the key to my new Microsoft-centered universe. A piece of hardware that would finally allow me to adopt Windows 8 as my main operating system, something I had been lusting over for months: Lenovos Yoga 13. When I finally arrived home and freed it from its corrugated confines, I was pleased to find a good looking, thin Ultrabook. I turned it on and it booted up in under 10 seconds. The Start screen popped up and I tried to use the touchpad to navigate before I remembered I was staring at a touch screen. I immediately snatched it off my desk and flipped the screen all the way back until the Yogawas transformed into Tablet mode. Call it a novelty, but it truly felt like I was stepping into the future.

Then it all fell apart.

My first order of business with Windows 8 was performing a refresh. The Yoga had previously been used as a review device at the office and I wanted towipe it cleanbefore loading my own files onto it. As I snooped around, however, I noticed the usable storage of the Yogas 128GB SSD was closer to 64GB. I searched the Internet and found an official fix from Lenovo. Curious but not quite satisfied,I bookmarkedthe pagebut found a better solution in a forum that gave me a bit more free space. Following the tutorial, I backed up my recovery partition to an external hard drive and repartitioned the hard drive to gain 112GB of free space. But when I tried to refresh the OS, it failed.

In what I stillthink is a natural reaction to a Windows 8 software problem, I visited Microsofts support page to figure out what went wrong. Not wanting to make a phone call, I chose the online chat option. I was connected to a nice man with a ponytail, whom I sincerely hoped could solve my problem. According to him, I could just create a USB recovery drive using Windows 8s built-in tool that would allow me to refresh the OS. I thanked him and tried to implement the instructions he gave me. Unfortunately for me, it didnt work and I received an error about missing files. Feeling burned by customer service, I decided to pursue the answer on my own.

What I found was both worrisome and comforting. I could use the recovery drive I had backed up to my external hard drive to refresh Windows 8, but I wouldnt be able to usethe drivefor anything else.Since I needed my external drive for media storage, I needed a different set up. I had to get the recovery information off of my external hard drive and back onto my computer. Maybe Im a poor excuse for a technology aficionado, but I thought maybe a simple copy and paste from external drive to hard drive partition would suffice? Wrong. The refresh still failed and since the thought of reading one more forum post made me want to vomit, I went to bed.

In the morning, with a fresh outlook, I decided to once again approach Microsofts support team for advice. I was connected via chat to a very lovely lady. She was extremely courteous, made a few good jokes, and was generally great to talk to. She walked me through a rather lengthy process of copying all my system files to a separate partition and told me that should fix my refresh problem. I was overjoyed and happily made small talk with her as we waited for the files to be copied. Once it was finished, I attempted to do a refresh of my computer to see if the recovery partition would kick in. Surprise! It failed. At this point I was pissed off. I skipped Saturday brunch to work on this, spent almost two hours copying files, and had absolutely nothing to show for it. I caught the woman right before she signed out of our chat session.

Oh, she said. You needed a recovery partition?

Yes, I replied. What did we just do?

See the article here:
The Life and Tiles of a Windows 8 Convert: How the Yoga broke me