Trying to use Windows on Samsung Dex By 91Tech

Anyone remembers, Samsung decks. I would say it was a mostly failed experiment, but kind of cool concept. It was a docking station that allowed you to use your Galaxy S H, our no-date as almost a desktop computer kind of it used Samsung's own software, and it actually worked pretty darn well, but not good enough to actually replace anybody's computer, and so it quickly faded from the spotlight. Well, today we're going to dust it off and give it a go almost three years after it came out, believe it or not, but we're not going to sell for Samsung software. Oh, no! No! No! We're gonna! Do this right, hey how's! It's going I'm Josh from ninety-one tech, and today we're gonna, try to run Windows 10 on this Galaxy S8 a phone from early 2017. What could possibly go wrong? This video might get a little long, so I will have timestamps in the description if you want to skip ahead and see what happens, but otherwise, let's just jump right into this now believe it or not.

Samsung is actually still supporting DEX on all of its newest to fling ships, including the note, 10 and I, think there's even been a couple generations of DEX. So that's kind of neat. The s8 I bought a fair few months. Back now actually came with the DEX pad. I didn't buy it separately, but I did want to try to use DEX for something in a video, because I thought it would be fun and so, of course, I figured yeah.

Why not run Windows on Android? That sounds like a fun time. I was surprised to see this hadn't really been done before at least not done. Well, we're going to try to push this a lot further than I think anyone has at least with DEX Windows 10 on Android would be pretty darn cool if it works and unfortunately that's a pretty big. If, but, let's start this off by talking about DEX there are two types of DEX there's the DEX pad and the docking station I have the DEX pad and here's the box inside the box. We have the DEX pad on the top and then underneath, if I can never get.

This cover off, we have the charging cables simple, but all we need the DEX pad has two USB ports, one HDMI port and one USB, C port USB could I think be used for pretty much anything, although typically I'd. Imagine you'd want to use it for a mouse and keyboard, although you could always do that with Bluetooth as well. HDMI is to hook it up to the monitor and USB. C is for powering the whole thing now to clarify. If I have this right, you don't actually need this DEX pad or docking station to get this to work and USB-C to HDMI, cable or a USB-C to USB cable, with a monitor that accepts USB-C should get DEX working.

Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but regardless I don't think it's very practical, because without your phone being charged at the same time, your batteries probably going to die pretty quick. If you hook it up to a big screen but anyways upon plugging the Samsung Galaxy S H into the DEX pad, we get Samsung's desktop OS. It actually looks like a regular computer kind of bit like Chrome OS mixed with Windows I would say you have the date and time and all your basic smartphone options in the bottom right corner, and then you also have a desktop like you would a regular computer and of course you still have the app drawer which you can scroll through. This is kind of cool if you wanted to put your phone on the big screen. If you want to do basic internet browsing Samsung internet is the way to do it.

Chrome will default to mobile version of all pages, which is super annoying, so Samsung internet is definitely the way to go when it comes to practical use, I'd say there's, basically none for DEX shocker. If you have a monitor, you probably have a computer. So why would you use your phone? You could hook it up to a TV, and so I guess there could be some limited use of that, but I mean at the same time, I feel like there are other ways to do that too. Most Smart TVs have web features built-in nowadays like Netflix but anyways. That is a possibility, and you can even hook it up to your laptop believe it or not, with DEX for PC, which is an app from Samsung, but doesn't that completely negate the entire point of having a laptop? Why would you want to use your phone on your laptop? It doesn't make a lot of sense.

One interesting way to use DEX is on a Samsung, Galaxy Tab. You can basically just turn it into a PC kind of. If you hook up a keyboard and mouse, you can have it act like it would. If it was connected to a monitor, that's kind of neat and if you prop it up, I could see there being a real use case for that. If you really hate the touch interface, that's something that I would consider doing if I was interested in buying a Samsung tablet for the most part, though, when it comes to DEX, there's no reason to use it over a Windows computer, because it's not Windows and people need Windows.

Now, if you could run Windows with DEX, that would be a whole different story. So, let's do that or at least let's try, and we're going to try Windows 10. Will it work? I, don't know, maybe we're going to give it our best shot. Though now there's a couple ways we could go about this. The first one is definitely more boring, but also more practical and that's streaming, your PC to the galaxy.

There are plenty of apps out there to let you do this personally. I use. Parsec is an app that's more geared towards gaming. I would say which I don't have never really used it for gaming, but that's what if I think it's supposed to be for, regardless, though it works great for me normally, and there is an app on the Android Play Store, so you can get parsec on your Android phone. There isn't on the iOS store.

So if you're on iPhone you're out of luck regardless, though I think that would work really well to get Windows 10 running on your phone, it's not actually on your phone, it's a different PC, but it would definitely work. The second and much more fun method would be to run Windows 10 natively on the galaxy, but as far as I could find, that is impossible and definitely not possible. Without rooting, the phone accepts a kind of unconventional and annoying way to do it, which is an emulator slash of virtual machine. This is, unfortunately I think as close as we'll be able to get, but it might allow us to run Windows 10, and that would be ideal, so we will give it a shot, but first, let's start with streaming, because it's the easy way- and we know it'll- probably work, so I went and installed a parsec on the galaxy s, 8 plus, and then I went into DEX, so really poor design feature, but by defaults, DEX doesn't allow you to resize apps. This is pretty annoying.

Only apps that are designed for DEX can be resized so the way to get around this is, if you go into the settings and then into DEX settings and then into like Advanced Settings. Basically, you can essentially force it to be able to go full screen. So I did this. So we could force full screen and then I full screen to parsec and hey there's my PC love that sky wallpaper and many ways that there it is overall, this is usable. I actually can use this with the mouse and keyboard it's working, fine.

Now there might be the question of. Why would you do this? If you have a monitor, you probably have a laptop or other computer nearby. So what opportunity are you going to have to stream your PC from your phone blah blah blah blah? Don't bring logic into this? That's no fun! Let's try gaming, because what else are we going to do so, let's start by opening up a single-player game. Theoretically, this is what would be best on this kind of thing, because a little of latency is gonna. It's going to happen.

You're on internet you're, not hardwired, so there is gonna, be some latency, but for a single-player game it doesn't really matter so much. So, let's start up the outer worlds, which I'm really having a lot of fun with by the way it would recommend. I got in game here and nope. This isn't working so for whatever reason the mouse on the Samsung send won't possess I, don't know how to say it possess the character or the screen, or it just doesn't properly take control of the game. My guess is it's because DEX is doing something to kind of force, the mouse out of disappearing, and so it's kind of messing everything up.

I, don't really know. However, there is a way around this and that's hooking up a controller and using that now, if you hook up a controller, it actually works perfectly fine. There are no issues here, you can absolutely play run around, do whatever there is definitely latency, but I am able to play, and this game, for the most part, is looking pretty darn good. There's some distortion here and there resolutions definitely not as nice as it could be. Frame rate we won't even talk about.

It is playable, but this is a single-player game, and so you would kind of hope, it's playable, so I guess we should move to a multiplayer game and a good example that might be destiny too. So I booted up destiny too, and right away. We had the exact same problem with the mouse and keyboard, although this time I could kind of look around, but not really go any further than that, like I couldn't turn around all the way, which is not ideal for a first-person shooter, notably I could walk around WAS did work, but the mouse didn't so again. I hated doing this, but I hooked up a controller to it and yeah it worked. It was slow, and you don't want to play destiny with a controller on PC.

That's a terrible idea, and you also don't want to stream a multiplayer game like this, either where every millisecond counts. Really. Overall, you definitely can't do multiplayer games, that's really what it comes down to single-player games, for this would probably be fine if you're just streaming, and you're okay with using a controller, unless you could figure out a way to get the mouse and keyboard to work which unfortunately, I couldn't overhaul this works. You can run Windows 10 this way kind of, but it isn't good. This brings us to option number dos and that is Donna Windows 10 natively.

This isn't going to be easy, but it might be possible now the go-to app for this. If you look it up was limbo. That's what it's called! It is no longer on the Play Store, but you can still download it from the GitHub. So that's where I recommend downloading it from not for many of the other sketchy download links upon downloading it and installing it and allowing permissions I got here. This is limbo, so, essentially how it works.

Are you can set up your own virtual machine create a virtual hard drive within your phone select, an ISO and in theory you should be able to install Windows, so that seems almost too easy, and so after getting limbo, installed, I proceeded for the next many hours to try to get Windows 10 working specifically a 32-bit version and I. Couldn't, let's put it at that once in a while I'd get stuck in recovery mode and the most common thing that happened was just the Windows logo being up forever. It would not go past this. It's very frustrating because we're that close right, the Windows logos there come on bring us a little further. I left it on for about an hour just to see, if maybe it was loading super slowly, but it still didn't proceed past that, so I'm just thinking this isn't to work.

Unfortunately, suffice to say limbo isn't working for me. I know online for some people it did work for them and that's great, but I can't get it to work for me and I. Don't know why I tried so many methods, so many really, really bad tutorials online from YouTube. None of them worked really sucks, but we're not completely out of the woods yet completely at it. That's that's the wrong phrase for this completely out of the woods.

No, that's not right at all, regardless, though there was another app that does something similar called box or something like that and yeah I'm not even go through this. It didn't work at least not for me, so I. Don't know why this wasn't all working I tried everything I could think of, and everything tutorials had, and you know, I tried a lot of stuff I couldn't get it to work so Windows 10, unfortunately, is not going to run on the galaxy s 8 at least not this time, but we could try Windows XP just for fun, that's what most tutorials use after all. So why don't we do that, and that actually brings us to now, so I'm going to go try to install Windows XP with limbo, and we'll see if it works. Hopefully it does and then that would be kind of neat I guess, and it's not like Windows 10 would run well on the Samsung Galaxy S8 anyways.

So let's give it a shot, and I'll be right back. Alright, hey we're back it's a day later, plus a few hours, and things went interesting before we talk about Windows XP I did want to talk about PS4 more specifically PS4 remote play, that's a thing that can be used on Samsung decks. Of course, you could use it on a laptop for even just your smartphone without decks, but it is possible to use it on decks, and so, if you are away from your PS4, if you're at a hotel, you could hook your phone up to the TV and use it to play. PS4 and I. Think Xbox is going to have that soon too, but anyways.

Just another potential use case for Dec, so I thought I would bring it up, but back to Windows, XP I downloaded the 32-bit ISO went into limbo and set up the virtual machine, as usual. I then attempted to boot off the windows, XP ISO, and what do you know it worked right away? First, try to this is pretty cool. It started by loading a bunch of stuff, and then I formatted. The partition I had set up and then bam. We were setting up Windows XP.

One thing I'll say is that it was really, really slow. Moving like through options wasn't slow, but the actual setting up was really slow. Definitely not as fast as when I did this with an SSD a little while ago, but hey. What do you expect? I mean it's a smartphone, and eventually we got to the Windows XP install screen, and then it went from slow to barely moving it took forever. It said to expect 39 minutes and then 39 minutes later it said to expect 37 minutes within a couple of hours.

A few of the basic Windows XP prompts came up like what is your computer name, that kind of thing and another problem presented itself the mouse. The mouse doesn't work for whatever reason limbo isn't recognizing my mouse with decks as an actual Mouse I. Guess it's just not set up that way. I can't say I blame it, but this is resulting in the Mouse not actually really doing anything. So I have to actually click and drag the mouse around which sucks, but might be okay, if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't trans it around like you would expect.

It is extremely erratic, and the mouse could end up anywhere when you just do a simple drag to any direction. Well, crap, but lets at least get into Windows XP because hey that's at least partial success. I filled out the couple forms that wanted me to fill out, even though it was very hard with a non-working mouse. Keyboard works. Fine, though so, there's that after this, there was still a ton of setting up to do.

Apparently so I left the phone to do its thing overnight. When I woke up the next morning, we'd actually moved past. It Windows was wanting to auto, detect my resolutions, so I said sure why not and finally the Windows XP logo popped up this. Is it all this work leading up to this one beautiful moment and then twelve hours later I started to realize? Maybe we weren't going to get past this I kid I realized it a little faster than that, but yeah. It was still up there 12 hours later, stuck at.

Please wait! So that's a good sign uh! This is enough for me. Finally, finally, give up it just isn't happening. Windows on Android is not meant to be at least not today. If I want to push this further, I could try using a Postbox emulator for like Windows, 95 or something, but honestly I couldn't be bothered at this point. This is taking way too long just to get to here moral of the story.

Decks for Windows doesn't work unless you're just streaming. Your PC, so yeah I'm sure everyone's shocked by that conclusion and also I, think DEX is just kind of pointless in general. If someone out there uses DEX, if one of my viewers here uses DEX on the regular, that's actually kind of impressive, and I'm curious as to what you've used it for so maybe let me know in the comments down below I'm sure there is a use case for it for some people I personally, though, and I think most people just wouldn't have one, so I do think. DEX is a bit pointless, but hey if you can find a use for it. That's great, and of course, if you really desperately need to use Windows onto your phone windows, phones are technically still an option.

I love the picture for the news there, yeah I mean you could always use a Windows Phone, even though they're unsupported and also kind of suck, but what's interesting, is that a Windows Phone actually did all this. What Samsung DEX does before Samsung DEX and that was the HP elite x3. It came with a doc that you could use to hook it up to a monitor and turn it into like actual Windows, but it still used an ARM processor, and so it couldn't run actual Windows apps, making it just as pointless as Samsung DEX but hey. It was kind of neat and I'm sure. That's where Samsung got the idea for DEX the Samsung DEX is a cool idea, and I've always liked the concept there.

Just are not a lot of practical use. Cases for it, I mean sure. If you have, you know a Samsung, Galaxy, Tab I could see you wanting to use DEX, but that's a little different from what I was mostly talking about in this video DEX just isn't great and that's why not a lot of people use it and it kind of flopped I appreciate what Samsung tried, but I would not be surprised if, in the near future it was quietly discontinued. Windows on Android right now is, unfortunately a pipe dream, but as smartphones get more powerful hey you never know hope you found this video at least somewhat interesting. I spent a lot of time on this, so hopefully people will like it if you did maybe hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content.

Just like this, you can follow me over on Twitter and Instagram at 91 underscore tech. If you want sneak peeks into what I've got going on, I won't say anything, but I do have a project. I'll start working on pretty soon here that I'm kind of excited about not dropping any hints here, probably well non-social at some point, but for now yeah go follow me over there or don't I mean it's up to you anyways. Thank you. So much for watching I'm Josh from ninety-one tech and I will see you all next time.

Source : 91Tech