Austin Maliszewski's Blog

A few weeks ago, I replaced my Gateway Tablet PC under Best Buy’s extended warranty no-lemon policy. In exchange for that computer, I got one of HP’s newest tablets, the TouchSmart tx2-1025dx. My initial impression is actually really good. I’ve never really liked Vista, but on this PC it just works. Granted, this is a really powerful PC. It’s got 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HD and a decent AMD dual core 64-bit processor. This said, the integration of touch into the operating system is great. This machine has multitouch technology on the display. Basically, it’s like a big iPhone/iPod Touch running Windows Vista. This is all really well integrated into Vista.

This PC has nTrig’s latest capacitive and active digitizer where you can use both your fingers and a electrostatic pen. The pen is quite good. My only complaint about the pen is the lack of an eraser, but I’ve heard that one’s in development. The touch screen is also really good. I find myself using the touch screen pretty often. Heck, I find myself in tablet mode far more often than I did with the old PC.

All in all, I’m really impressed. This could very well become my primary PC, especially, if it becomes my notebook.

I finally got around to installing Vista on my Gateway CX2724. I made a pledge to wait until at least SP1 and since that’s here, I did it. I pulled a copy of Vista Business from MSDN, burned it to DVD, resized my XP Tablet PC partition with GPartEd on Knoppix and installed it. The installation process was pretty painless. Put in your product key, time zone, if you want it to automatically update, it installs everything, about 30 minutes later, you put in your new username and password and it’s done. It rebooted a final time. Loaded, and well, it’s pretty and seems to run pretty nicely, etc.

First thing I notice, the pen doesn’t work. Well, I knew that would happen. Connected it to my WiFi and went and downloaded the pen drivers from Gateway.com. (Well, I downloaded Firefox first.) I installed the drivers based on the HWID of the HID. Then I installed the Tablet Buttons drivers based on its HWID. And what do you know, I point the pen at the screen and the mouse moves. Well, it’s a good deal away from where it should be. I fiddled with Calibration which failed every time. I decided I should do Windows Update, so I go do that, and in my list of updates are drivers for the pen device. Well, it does its thing and an hour later, I’m prompted to reboot. It tells me that the updates for the pen device failed, which makes sense since I already had the newest drivers. Upon reboot, everything works perfectly.

This morning, I played with it a bit more. I tried out the Input Panel. Boy, the handwriting recognition is so much greater than XP TPE. It could make everything I threw at it. I wrote in cursive, manuscript, mixed it up (that is pseudocursive), neatly, messily, it could read it all. It even got my name. I had to wait until about 4 o’clock before I could download OneNote because MSDN was being updated. Loaded up OneNote and did some sample

The way OneNote’s handwriting recognition works is based on the OS it’s running on. It makes a hook to the host OS’s handwriting recognition API if it has one. It installs TPE’s if you’re running it on any version of XP besides TPE, and on Vista it uses the native API except on Home Basic which doesn’t have one. (This is to the best of my knowledge, not sure if 2007 still works that way). So, handwriting recognition worked nicely, again recognizing everything I threw at it.

The best part is it’s supposed to learn your handwriting and improve over time kind of like the way Speech to Test works now. Well, we’ll see.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way Vista and Tablet PCs work. In the near future I should be getting a new Tablet (HP tx2525nr) with Vista Ultimate which should be a pleasure to work with.

Another thing: If anyone has computer questions, shoot me an email. I fix/can help with PCs (XP, Vista), Macs (OS X), *nix boxes, networking, servers, and hardware problems. Oh yeah, I also do programming and web design.