The Asus Transformer AiO will be launching soon, and it looks like the company may need to thank Intel for some code contributions. That’s because Intel has just released its code for Android 4.2.2, and one of the key additions is support for dual-booting Android alongside Windows 8 on systems that utilize UEFI instead of BIOS. The new release actually doesn’t support booting using BIOS at all.
Intel says the release is still “rough around the edges,” and that it’s not the kind of OS you want to install on any device that contains mission-critical data or treasured family photos. Right now it’s pre-alpha software — the kind you might throw on a spare laptop or desktop or boot in a virtual machine so that you can take a sneak peek. There’s still a lot of work to be done before the Android 4.2.2 code is stable and optimized for use on Intel’s chips.
On non-UEFI systems, it has been possible to boot both Windows and Android for quite some time. Using a current Android-x86 image, you can install Google’s OS alongside Windows and then use the GRUB loader to enable boot-time switching. Intel’s work is welcome, though, since we haven’t seen a ton of touchscreen Windows hardware until the advent of Windows 8 — which has also contributed to the rise of UEFI on mainboards.
Once the code is polished, it should be a relatively simple task to pop Android into some empty drive space on your Windows 8 tablet or convertible — provided it has any to spare. All that recovery software takes up the bulk of the available storage on systems with smaller SSDs.
Source: Geek.com
