Tablet PC Blog
This page is a running history of my experience with Tablet PC and related technologies.
Z’s Blog - it’s a matter of perspective…
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Date: 08/06/06 Views: 21
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Date: 08/06/06 Views: 21
This page is a running history of my experience with Tablet PC and related technologies.
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:11pm
Haven’t updated this in a while but about a year ago I upgraded to the Lenovo/IBM x61 Tablet PC. Summary: it rocks (blows x41 away).
CONS:
* Pcmcia card gets in way since on left hand side vs. right (where arrows are)
PROS:
* FAST
* RAM ++ (2GB in mine)
* HD ++ (4200 vs. 7200!!)
* can get built in WAN
* High res - 1280×1024
* lightweight
* great battery life
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:30am
OneNote 12 (OneNote Office 2007) Beta 1 is out…
and has very cool features:
see http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2005/11/16/493772.aspx
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:18pm
how did you remove franklin covey on your x41? its not letting me
write to my email please… thanks!
Z says (thought I’d add this for everyone’s benefit):
Saw your post. I removed it with Add/Remove programs I think. It was a while ago. If that didn’t work I simply deleted it from c:\program files\ and also deleted the Start menu entry for it. Hope that helps.
January 17th, 2006 at 9:22pm
System Performance Boost Found
To help increase system performance don’t use Windows XP TPC 05… but if you do, be sure to install this patch because if you don’t your system perf. will degrade over time.
Per MS WindowsUpdate.com:
Update for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (KB895953)
Download size: 722 KB , less than 1 minute
Install this update to address an issue resulting in a gradual decrease in available system memory in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. This loss in available memory causes a decrease in system performance. This gradual loss of available computer memory is caused by an issue in the tcserver.exe service. After you install this update, you may have to restart your computer. Details… “
January 9th, 2006 at 10:25am
Just posted Toshiba new Wi-Fi display Tablet PC & DLNA article in main blog - cool stuff.
December 21st, 2005 at 1:18pm
LABEL YOUR PEN!
So this past week I was at the client working and somehow my pen got legs in a conference room while I was drawing on my tablet and now I am PENLESS!! (play horror music in background). I managed to to survive but throughout the process of getting the pen realized just how much I used it to convey ideas/thoughts and also to mark up documents for work.
Anyhow, the main point of this entry is label your pen. It isn’t tethered, and just like your dog, has legs and sometimes will decide to use them (with or without your assistance). I simply added a label on mine with the text: “IF FOUND PLEASE CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx”. Simple enough, and the same process saved me $450 when REI kept my telemark boots after mounting my skis. I thought I lost them, but they just kept them accidentally (was in the spring and I didn’t look for the boots until winter). Some guy in the shop called me up about 8 mths later since he was going to try them on and saw the duck tape with my name and phone on it and thus called me.
Parallel to the song and statement: “wear sunscreen”, “label the stuff you don’t want to lose” (not as good of ring to it though… Happy Hols. Z
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:15pm
Forgot to mention that last week Mike and I tried the shared One Note session. I thought it was very cool, but Mike wasn’t so impressed. What I liked about it was the ability to talk with someone on the phone and draw real time on the same piece of “paper”. Combine this with the Verizon wireless card I have and this is VERY helpful. I could be talking with someone who has the same technology and we could collaborate visually instantly. If MS makes sharing this easy (was a snap with One Note) with the rest of the Office products and more people can access the web anytime anywhere things become very interesting from many POV’s.
November 29th, 2005 at 8:20pm
I upgraded my RAM today to 1GB (up 512MB). When I boot it takes just as long (as suspected), however once up and running I do have better response times from my applications as well as the OS commands. I attribute this simply to less disk access/caching as the disk is what it is - s l o w. If anyone hears of a 1.8″ laptop drive which is greater than 4200 RPM please comment here as I am curious if such technology exists (in which case IBM is just plain dumb for not putting in a faster drive for the X41), or if the technology/drive simply doesn’t exist.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:45pm
Using the IBM Auto-Update tool I updated my X41’s drivers etc. (including the hard drive driver) and things seem faster now (HD was slow!!! see below).
November 14th, 2005 at 1:21pm
Relativity (Comparison):
20051111 SLOW hard drive update:
After I checked out the X41 1.8″ drive spec’s vs. other laptop (non-1.8″) drive specifications (with faster rotations (7200rpm vs. 4200rpm) and larger buffers (8MB vs. 2MB) it made much more sense. I also looked for 3rd party drives in hopes they’d provide something with better performance specs - no luck. This article confirmed that there’s no hope for a faster HD at the moment, HOWEVER as the article also states, RAM can help the cause. Per the article, overall the X41 received a good rating.
Thus far I have used the Motion Computing LE1600TC w/ Btooth, wi-fi, integrated biometrics, etc. and the IBM X41. The LE1600TC: The poor aspects of the tablet I have are that the keyboard is USB attached - not attached all the time… which would be nice as I sometime want to type and annotate with the pen. The pen it has also doesn’t have an “eraser” but it’s still fairly easy to erase items. Again, from my experience, people get out of the the Tablet PC’s what they put into learning how to best use them… kind of like the Crackberry’s of today - not everybody had the fastest thumbs in the west initially… but now DCI has some of thee fastest.
The X41: This laptop is leaps and bounds above the LE1600TC. First, it has a very nice LCD which can swing around in pretty much any direction as it is attached via a central pivot point. You can actually convert between “notebook” mode and laptop mode VERY quickly as well as use it in laptop mode and still “ink”. It’s great. The downsides to the X41 is the hard drive seems slow for some reason (vs. other laptops I have been used to using) - it’s a 4200rpm drive. I’d also recommend 1GB of RAM (vs. the 512) and a larger drive - e.g. 60GB vs. the 30GB we have. This recommendation comes from having used the TPC with the following apps usually open and running:
Outlook, Firefox (avg. of 3-10 tabs open), OneNote (or some other pen app), PowerPoint, MindManager Pro, an Explorer window or 2, and Trillian (and sometimes WinAmp). This all adds up in terms of memory usage and thus hard drive cache usage.
Tips n’Tricks:
inDirect - customizable gestures/shortcuts for TPC
Quick tips from Medical land… (e.g. press and hold pen for “right click” functionality)
Best TPC Blogs
Student TPC
JKOnTheRun
Links:
tabletpcpost.com Applications / Add-ons
M$ Tablet PC Site
TPC Applications:
Evernote (loaded on my machine)
MS OneNote (loaded on my machine)
MS Journal (comes with TPC OS)
Corel Grafigo (loaded on my machine)
Mindjet MindManager Pro 6 (loaded on my machine) - great MM blog here
Overall Pros:
shared sessions
useful for interviewing persons - less awkward for them, ALTHOUGH it is harder to turn into “mineable” data
useful for annotating docs and decks for feedback
many of M$’s apps are “inkable”
architecture conceptual/brainstorming meetings and quickly getting digital copy to team
marking up decks and sending the comments back to the owner
much easier to communicate ideas of what I am looking for on the slide
easy to send ideas/slides to Kumiko/DCI publishing and get back quick results (vs. faxing)
managing my notes - it keeps track of them by date and i add metadata to each set of notes so it’s pretty easy to find later on meeting
taking graphical notes and distribution of them immediately (vs. copying and/or drafting up in Visio or whatever)
two USB slots - one on each side of the keyboard - useful for “odd” sized/shaped USB devices
Overall Cons:
SLOW hard drive - see 20051111 update for more
no built-in projector, but check THIS out…
having to still carry around two “pens”
no broadband card built in (unlike the Sony Vaio laptops) - need to be connected everywhere
screen blanks out after I re-open it and have to hit Shift+F7 sometimes to get it back
maybe one for you, I don’t find it so bad - 1 PCMCIA slot
trying to mine data (e.g. “Find”) in your notes - if you have bad handwriting, forget it
character recognition - not so good, I leave most stuff in my “native” handwriting vs. having the machine trying to recognize and convert on the fly
What mod’s did I make?
wipe and recover using ibm
remove franklin covey
remove zinio
migrate mail
migrate files
migrate settings (via office import/export tools)
Applications on my machine:
Office Suite 2003
Front Page 2003
Visio 2003
Project 2003
Firefox
OneNote (poor quality app for editing, but good sharing capabilities)
EverNote (much better, not as good of organizing capabilities though)
Winamp
PGP
Winrar
Trillian Pro
Contivity (Standard Ins. req.) VPN client
Acrobat 5
Norton Antivirus
Diamond Stuff:
NetMotion
Certs
Notes
List of manufacturer’s:
1. Fujistu
2. IBM
3. Toshiba
Microsoft keeps a list of company’s that make the TPC’s on their website.