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.

Related posts:

1. Taking My Tablet
2. Vista on the Tablet
3. MS Vista

Of interest is that although the bios update is dated August 22nd, I don’t think that they released it to their site until at least a week later. What gives, Toshiba?

—-

Download here

Version 1.70 08-22-2006

* Incorporated Intel requirements to optimize chipset memory performance.
* Made a change to support up to the C3-State when “Enhanced C-State” is disabled.

Version 1.60 08-10-2006

* Added support for the Yonah-Celeron CPU.

Version 1.50 06-24-2006

* Added EvDO wireless WAN support.

Version 1.40 05-09-2006

* Corrected an issue where the system could hang when the power supply was turned on during a charge prohibited state of the Peak Shift Function.

Version 1.30 03-29-2006

* Incorporation of Intel’s chipset requirements.
* A change was made to automatically reset the hardware when a restart is performed on Windows XP retail platforms.
* A change was made to reduce power consumption when the Wireless LAN is disabled in Device Manager.
* A change was made to the HD Audio Verb Table for Windows Vista.

Version 1.20 02-08-2006

* Initial production BIOS for Portege M400 models.

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – One Week In!
2. Mysterious Moving Matter
3. Reinstalling XP Tablet Edition

When I arrived home I got my tablet out and set it up in notebook mode. The piece of dust was back inside the visible screen area. Now it’s about one third of the distance from the right hand side of the screen and approximately 10mm up from the edge. You can see it in the photo (and yes my family thought I was a bit crazy photographing the screen of my computer!).

This must mean that there is some sort of gap between the layers of the screen and that movement of the tablet flexes the layers sufficiently to allow the dust to move.

Yesterday when I made the call to Toshiba Tech Support the technician suggested that to have this issue I must be working in a dusty environment. I will admit that I hate housework but need to make the point that there is no dust trapped inside any of the other equipment that we have here. I could (almost but not quite) be described as anal with regard to the care that I take over my electronic equipment. I am forever brushing out keyboards and cleaning screens. I have an eighteen month old pocket pc here (with a carefully applied screen protector) and have had no issues with dust inside its layers.

Anyway, I am going to map the path of the dust over the next day or so and then take the unit into a service centre. It could be interesting!

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – 10 Weeks In
2. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
3. Taking My Tablet

However, (and there is always a but) there are a couple of fairly serious issues that affect my enjoyment of the computer.

1. The fan runs almost continuously. It’s not usually loud (except if you are in a silent room) but it is always there and something that I am always aware of. I use Notebook Hardware Control to keep an eye on the temperature and most of the time the CPU hovers around the 33-37 degrees celcius. That’s cooler than I am.
2. I get random pieces of dust and fluff inside the screen. Sounds crazy? This was a major issue with the Portege M200 and you would consider that it would be fixed three years after the M200 was released. I got a piece of dust inside the layers of the screen just ten days after getting my tablet. That machine was replaced under warranty. Since then I have had a stray hair appear (it disappeared after a few weeks) and tonight there was a piece of dust inside the screen layers. It too disappeared after I moved the tablet from my knee to the table in front of me. It annoys me that this happens. I don’t like to have a non-pristine screen.
3. I also have a problem with random blue screening. It’s happened probably five times over the last month. Not often but still enough to be a bit of a concern. The message that I get is the old “IRQ less or not equal to error“. In my experience this is an issue with a piece of hardware. With a notebook you don’t usually install extra hardware cards so it must be a problem with a built in component or perhaps with the memory chips. The event logs aren’t any help in tracking down the error so I’ll have to have a think.

Thankfully that’s all bad stuff (I think). Now the good stuff.

The pen makes drawing and digital image editting really fun. ArtRage is absolutely fantanstic anyway; the pen puts it into the sublime category. It’s easy to edit photos or digital images in Paintshop Pro or even humble old MS Paint. Unfortunately even amazing tools aren’t going to turn me into an artist.

I have become evry comfortable with the small keyboard (except for the fact that it has a single Ctrl key – I have mapped the Insert key to Ctrl so that when I’m using the tablet in keyboard mode I can use the Firefox shortcut Ctrl +/- to enlarge or reduce the text size). Using the pen is great. The handwriting recognition is excellent; after several years of using a Pocket PC it’s a real treat to have my scrawl recognised.

I’m using all my usual programmes but I have found a couple of exciting new additions.

I am seriously in love with OneNote 12. Although its a beta programme it rocks. I’m a great collector of information, ideas and scraps of stuff from all over the place. OneNote is a terrific place to store it all and be able to sort and sift later. I have set up note flags that correspond with my Outlook categories so that I can think through my own productivity system.

Speaking of Outlook (and I’m holding onto Office 2003 as this is my working machine), the tablet community introduced me to the best ever addon: Tablet Enhancements for Outlook (TEO) version 3. This little gem allows you to ink in contacts, tasks and appointments. The latest version also has a fabulous integration with Windows Journal. there is also a research feature which takes you straight to the Wikipedia. Everyone knows about how much I love the Wikipedia. You can take audio notes and the whole fandango synchronises with the Pocket PC. Which only makes Pocket Informant even more useful.

I also love the snipping tool (available through the MS Experience Pack and the Enhancement Pack) and the Send to OneNote tool (available in the Education Pack and and the Enhancement Pack). The Websearch Power Tool is great when I am surfing in tablet mode.

I’m playing with the screen real estate a little. I’ve (possibly temporarily) dumped the Quick Launch Bar for RocketBar. I’ve got it on the right hand side of my screen and on auto-hide. Very useful and it looks very sexy.

What else? There’s a lot more but in the interests of actually retaining some readers I’d better finish this missive now!

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
2. Tablet @ Work – One Week In!
3. Taking My Tablet

Lots of users report that the fan goes continuously and I have to report that yes, my fan goes all the time too. It doesn’t matter what alterations I make to the profiles the problem remains. On the positive side it’s not a noisy fan like the one on my Dell Inspiron. Perhaps there will be a BIOS update that will solve this issue. I hope so.

Another common issue is that the unit goes into hibernation and freezes. Mine doesn’t freeze but what I have noticed is that you need to actually flick the power switch to bring it back to life. That’s not ideal. Hopefully that too will be addressed.

I am grumpy about the number of Toshiba utlities that are installed. I have turned off the fingerprint reader and the RAID tool because of the memory overhead. Maybe it won’t be so bad when I ghave the full gig of ram. I sincerely hope so.

Now for the positives. I love the screen. It’s 1400 X 1050 and absolutely gorgeous. I have a microfibre cloth and I polish it regularly. Photos and HD movies look fabulous.

The keyboard is comfortable to use and I haven’t found it hard to go to the smaller size. I’m loving using the pen – which is just as well as it’s a major feature of the tablet.

The tablet’s small form factor is great. The slice expansion battery doesn’t add too much extra weight either. I’m getting around 3 hours out of the main battery at the moment – hopefully I can tweak the settings to get a tad more.

I’m pretty annoyed with Ingram Micro as my extra ram and the DVD drive are now not going to arrive until mid July. Some large order has pushed mine out of the way. While it’s not a major hassle to install from my backup removable drive, I would like to make a backup of the restore software and ghost my current setup.

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
2. Tablet @ Work – 10 Weeks In
3. Taking My Tablet

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.”

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – 10 Weeks In
2. Tablet @ Work – One Week In!
3. Taking My Tablet

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!

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – One Week In!
2. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
3. Tablet @ Work – 10 Weeks In