Tangled up in Purple » m400

2GB Ram

nix — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:17:02 +0000

I upgraded my M400 to 2GB of ram this afternoon. I have debated with myself long and hard about whether this was a useful upgrade (up from 1GB) and in the end my geeky side won over my pragmatic ($$) side.

For people wondering where the ram sits on the M400 – it’s under the keyboard. Installation is fairly straight forward if you are comfortable inside a laptop. If not then I suggest that you get a techie to do it.

And the benefits? It’s definitely operating more smoothly. I’m noticing less stuttering on Vista but as yet I haven’t booted into XP. My Windows Experience Index rating thingummy is still only 3.1 (due to the integrated graphics on this chipset) but on the whole the tablet is happily allowing me to move between several applications.

Vista on the Tablet

nix — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:09:10 +0000

I have managed to install Vista Ultimate Edition on the M400 and so far I am reasonably happy with it. This is a cautious install – there are a few things that I’m uncertain about – so I have retained my Tablet Edition (XP) in a dual boot configuration.

Early impressions:

Good

Vista installed very easily.
Tablet functionality is excellent – a vast improvement on the earlier software. Handwriting recognition is much better.
Aero glass looks good. Even though the graphics score of this machine is only 3.0 it looks great.
I installed Ultimate Edition so I have access to Media Centre. Looks good – as above. I don’t think that my aging TV card will work under Vista. Might need to find a new one.
It seems to be more stable than XP. I hope that I am not tempting fate here!
Ready Boost – it’s happening, and I think I’m faster!

Bad

I have set Firefox to be my default browser but Vista doesn’t listen – I am not impressed with the fact that I can’t get IE7‘s new tabs to open in the background.
I haven’t got Remote Desktop ~~or Logmein~~ working to my server yet. I haven’t tried hard though.
Constant dialogue boxes and “are you sure?” questions could drive me demented very quickly.

EDIT: I am not impressed with having to go to the Microsoft Site and download the Mobilie Device Centre to get my iPaq Pocket PC to synchronise with Vista. That’s something that should have been sorted for RTM.

Indifferent

The sidebar. Not sure yet.
I haven’t got the power options sorted yet.

The geek in me wants the latest ~~and greates~~t operating system on my computer. The pragmatist knows that it’s really important to get my work done on a well functioning computer. At this point I won’t be dropping my XP partition anytime soon. Certainly I’ll get more work done on Vista because it won’t let me do my usual morning’s scoot through FeedDemon opening masses of links in the background for a later peruse . On the other hand I think it could be faster than XP and I haven’t had the annoying 20-30 second freeze that is an annoying ‘feature’ of Tablet Edition on the M00.

There are a couple of things concerning me about Vista – one being the DRM and content protection measures built into the operating system (read here). On the other hand, in my line of work I will be asked to support Vista reasonably early this year.

Reinstalling XP Tablet Edition

nix — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 04:09:33 +0000

I’ve had my Toshiba M400 for nearly six months now and in that time I’ve fallen out of love with the Tablet. I love the concept, but if having the extra functionality means having all of the extra bloatware then it’s not for me.

I have re-imaged it from Toshiba’s image several times but the sheer number of bits and pieces added in by Toshiba have alway annoyed me. The hardware is great – but the software to support that hardware is awful. Over the last week it’s been like woring through thick sludge trying to get basic tasks accomplished. Having a gigabyte of memory is useless if it’s swallowed up by seemingly redundant drivers and processes. I like to be in charged of what I run on my computer. They don’t call it a PC for nothing.
So this week I bit the bullet. After a search around the interweb I discovered a way to cleanly install XP Tablet Edition. I used nLite to create my own Toshiba flavoured version of the Tablet PC OS. Using Media Centre Edition as the base OS, I slipstreamed in the Toshiba Raid drivers. Then after tweaking it a bit for my own particular preferences, I made an ISO. I used Nero to burn the ISO to CD and voila – one Tablet Edition disk.

Last night I started the XP install process. I used the key that Toshiba used to install Windows even though it’s different to the one printed on the sticker on the notebook. I’m not totally certain about how kosher that is? It worked though!

After getting XP loaded, installing my anti-virus and testing the pen (to make doubly sure that I had done it right), I put in my Toshiba drivers disk – the one one that I made from the factory install. I loaded the wireless drivers and then headed straight out to Windows update. After that I headed to Toshiba’s support site and got the latest basic driver set. After making sure I had got all the drivers I started to load the additional stuff to run the stuff that I wanted to run.

I have loaded the hard drive protection utility but not the accelerometer (who in their right mind would want to shake a computer to start a programme?). I loaded the raid driver but not the additional systems because I don’t think that I’ll be using an extra hard drive.

I haven’t loaded the Toshiba Power Saving stuff because I’m hoping that Notebook Hardware Control on top of the default Windows setup will take care of my power saving needs. I haven’t loaded ConfigFree because, much as I like the idea of being able to change the network and proxy server information on the fly, it’s just too resource hungry.
At the moment I have a basic installation with all of the basic programmes that I use on a day to day basis. Firefox (and all my extensions – gotta love FEBE) is looking after my browsing and FeedDemon is taking care of my RSS. Office is installed and I’ve got Nero and WinDVD loaded. I’ve put VideoLan in for my media needs but I still need to load Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative to manage the extra codecs.

At the moment I am back in love with this little computer. It’s whizzing along beautifully with none of the lags or stuttering that have blighted things previously. For sure I have yet to put in PaintShopPro, Inspiration, KidPix or some of the other programmes that I use regularly. So far so good. Now I really need to find that Ghost disk!

Tablet @ Work – Day 1

nix — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 09:33:07 +0000

Today I took my tablet out for the first time. I was at Parakai School with the wonderful teachers who work there. First up, we were distracted by a powerline that had chosen today to snap and fall down just metres from my car. The teachers that I was working with, and I joined the support crew. When I realsised that my car was metres away from sparking and live wires, I decided to get my car keys and move my wheels away from the arc-ing lines.

I returned to the disaster scene with my camera.

And snapped some photos.

Back to work.

Day one with the tablet. Toshiba’s Config utilty allows you to set up different profiles to allow your laptop / tablet to set itself up in different networks. It was a snip to get through parakai’s proxy-server and get onto the ‘net.

I found that my screen resolution was too high to let the teachers that I was working with to see what I was doing. I was able to fiddle with the settings and get an 800X600 screen and centre the screen so that the others could see what I was doing. This was the ideal resolution to let the others see Kidpix – an essential tool in my line of work.

Other jobs. I found that I needed to set the tablet so that I could wake it from keybowad. During the day, I move between all sorts of things and the computer often went to sleep. It asw a serious pain to have to turn the computer on again. So I set t to allow it to wake up from the keyboard.

I bought an extended slice battery. This meant that I could use the tablet all day – I hoped. In reality the battery ran out at 4:15pm. Not too bad, but I hope that with conditioning I can get the unit to last an hour. the sl or so longer. For sure, I can set up profiles to make the thing go to sleep here and turn off this bit there and make the screen dim at this point, but really I just want a devcent 6-7 good hours out of the batteries.

The slice battery adds a sort of wedge under the machine. When you are in notebook mode it tilts it approximately ten degrees towards you. Quite usefull really. In tablet mode, it adds a bit of weight, but not uncomfortably. I was still able to work with the computer tucked into my elbow.

As my partner in crime describes it, “that computer is really quite dinky.”

Taking My Tablet

nix — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:30:55 +0000

I have spent far too long today setting up my new tablet PC.

It’s a Toshiba Portege M400 and very nice too. At the moment it’s very standard with just the extra slice battery on board have an extra 512 MB of ram on order to bring it up to a gigabyte.

I’ll try and report back here (if I find some time!) -Meanwhile this is my first ever post using handwriting recognition. It’s kind of cool but I think typing might be easier!