It's Alive... It's Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiveeeeee!

So I got a Minion Wintab 7 in the Valentine's Day Fukubukuro, and despite having everything in the box and looking almost brand new, it was refusing to boot after I charged it. I was seeing an alert stating "The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click OK to restart the computer and then restart the installation." So, I clicked OK, and...got the same screen. Over, and over, and over. I searched high and low, and figured out how to boot into bios (holding down volume up, volume down, and the power button all at the same time) but was unable to do much there.

After repeated attempts to turn on and off the tablet, I managed to get it on the screen saying I needed to press the Windows key to go to recovery mode. Only problem was the on-screen keyboard wasn't appearing. And the only port was a micro usb port. And I didn't have an adaptor.

Ok, so I hit up Amazon and ordered an adaptor and a micro usb keyboard. Way too late, I realized I somehow didn't order the adaptor with Amazon Prime shipping, but instead one that was like 10 cents cheaper with free shipping from China. It's supposed to arrive at the end of March. Great. At least I'd be able to use the keyboard. It said it was for Samsung android devices but people in the comments section swore it would work fine with Windows. Smashing! Keyboard arrived shortly thereafter. It plugged in just fine, but the Home key (that should have mapped to the Windows key) didn't work. And there weren't any function keys either. Cryingface.

More Google searching ensued. Looks like I could make a recovery disk on a usb drive. Great! Ordered a Kingston 16 GB USB 3.0 OTG flash drive. It arrived, then I realized that making a recovery disk for Windows on my Mac would be a royal pain in the ass. Things were getting ridiculous at this point.

Fast forward to today, I ordered a $3 micro usb adaptor and was able to plug a keyboard in to the tablet. Got back to that screen, pressed the Windows key...and nothing happened. Maybe that android keyboard was working fine, and for some reason the Windows key just wasn't doing anything on that particular screen like it was supposed to. Curses. At least I had function keys now.

I remembered something I had briefly seen during my original research but had neglected to bookmark, did some more searching on Google and found The answer to all my problems

I got back to the error message screen, pressed shift + F10 on my keyboard and voila! It worked perfectly. I changed one little entry in the Windows Registry, the tablet rebooted, and didn't immediately hang! I was able to continue through the Windows 10 install (the box had said it came with Windows 8 but had a crude "Windows 10" sticker on the front, so I wasn't quite sure what I was going to be getting there), and I'm currently downloading a bunch of games and apps. The tablet has been holding its battery charge just fine, so all the effort and multiple Amazon orders were worth it!

In the end, I spent just over $25 on random adaptors and hardware, but on the plus side it's all stuff I can use in the future. Considering the tablet is selling for over $100 online, I'd consider this a win overall!

Thanks, Meh!