Sat 10 Feb 2007
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I’ve been able to successfully install Vista Home Premium Edition on my X41 Tablet, and am REALLY liking the experience so far. I’m writing an article to help people decide if they’re ready to take the plunge, but in the mean time, I’ve gotten a lot of hits on my other X41 Vista post, so I thought I’d point people to a very helpful post I found.
Give Our Abilities Time has a great article on a couple of the pitfalls of installing Vista on this machine. Most notably, the relatively hard to find ThinkVantage Fingerprint Software v5.6 which is required to get the fingerprint reader working.
All in all, things are working pretty well, and I’m very happy with the overall experience.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:32 pm |
hi there,
I just bought my first ibm x41 tablet. I have only used ibm laptops in the past, i currently use a T60p and i love it, thinkpads are work horses. Anyways i just got this tablet which was pre-loaded with xp tablet edition and it was horrible. very slow and sluggish, i thought i was using a pentium 1.
So i decided to install vista home premium. I have no external cd drive and i didnt know how to boot from a usb thumb drive so i just installed it though XP without formatting. Hardly no correct drivers where installed, so i went to ibm’s site and got everything i could see. I was having issue with my display drivers and a few other things. But the strangest part was that i had no software on it, the tablet function with the pen was working but the software called “Tablet Input Panel” that comes pre-loaded with Vista was no where to be found. No keyboard would pop up when i needed to type. i had no windows journal, basically no software. I thought this was kinda strange since Vista says it comes with all that software. Did you have any issues like this? Well now i went out to buy a external cd drive so i could boot up and format the main drive and then load vista to see if it was a bad install. If you have any help to why this happened or any information that could help me, please let me know.
thanks
Mark
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:25 am |
Wow, that’s really a bummer. It does sound like Vista either didn’t install those extensions or hasn’t started them for whatever reason.
You can see if they are installed by going to the Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services, then look for “Tablet PC Input Service” and “Tablet Service”. If they are there, try starting them, or switching it to “Automatic”.
If they are NOT there, try going to Control Panel->Programs and Features->Turn Windows Features On or Off and find “Tablet PC Optional Components”.
Those things might take care of the issue. I can’t seem to find the place where Vista lets you add/remove windows programs right now, so let me know if either of those things fixes your problem. If not, I’ll search around some more.
Good luck!
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:23 pm |
Hey thanks for the reply.
Ok basically what happened was, I got a copy of vista home premium online and then I used a product key that was from a Toshiba laptop that I bought for my wife which came preloaded. I removed her vista and loaded xp so this key was unused. However, for some reason it only loaded basic stuff. I had hardly no working drivers, no tablet software, no defender, no media center, etc. I mean all that was on was the os, ie7 and windows media player. Strange.
Anyways I got another install copy of vista and used a different key and now everything is working properly. I love this new os but I think it’s still a bit flaky.
When I go to my system in control panel, it shows I got a windows experience score of 1.0. which seems to be low. What is your score? I have 1.5 gb of ram and will defiantly upgrade to 2gb. I have a 60gb hard drive. This is my first tablet and so far I like it. It takes long to load into windows and the graphics card seems to be suffering but it’s not as bad as xp tablet 2005.
Are there any tricks or tips you can give me that will give me much better performance with vista? I was told online that you can plug in a usb thumb drive and can use the ram to work with the OS. Is this true? And if so does it work?
I have the SD card reader on the side, if I put a 2gb or 4gb card in it will that also work in sharing the RAM?
Are you happier with vista vs xp tablet 2005 for the x41 tablet?
Are there any thinkpad programs that you know of that have problems with vista?
Sorry for all the questions.
Thanks so much for taking time.
Mark
January 24th, 2008 at 9:19 am |
Yeah, it sounds like you ran into Vista’s copy protection. Fairly commonplace unfortunately.
The experience score is limited by the lowest performing part in the system. In the case of our X41Ts, it’s the graphics card. There is no way I know of to remedy this, and this also means there will be no way to get Aero running on this tablet.
As far as I know, 1.5gb is the maximum amount of memory you can install as well. The system has 512 soldered into it, and there is only one memory expansion slot.
If you get a fast enough SD card (ie: Sandisk’s Exteme III line) you MIGHT be able to use the Readyboost in the SD card reader built into the tablet. I don’t have any SD cards that are fast enough to test this functionality though - so make sure you get a receipt. I’ve read mixed results on this technology. It seems to make the biggest difference on devices with less than 1gb of memory. It may not be worth it for you.
Really, the biggest thing that could be done to improve speed on this tablet would be a solid state hard drive. But that would cost you more than you probably paid for the tablet itself - so that’s a hard sell.
I’m definitely much happier with Vista on this tablet. The tablet bits alone are worth any other issues I’ve run into. It is simply more robust at handwriting recognition, and there are a lot of little additions that make it MUCH easier to use in tablet mode than XP. Specifically, things like the tick boxes next to files in the file browser to add to the selection. Those little things add up to a much more user-friendly experience.
I haven’t had any issues with the thinkpad software. Just make sure to download the Lenovo Software updater and install everything it finds. I’ve had good experiences with all of it.
There are a number of sites online that talk about tweaking vista. Google would probably be the best starting point for that - there are a HUGE number of opinions in that field and it goes beyond what can be shown in one place. Just be careful - a lot of the tweaks have side-effects for tablet users that might not be worth it.
Oh yeah, if you haven’t already - get One Note 2007 - it’s an indispensable tool for these things. I can’t imagine living without it.
February 4th, 2008 at 2:35 pm |
I recently acquired an x41 tablet … i tried both vista (ultimate) and XP te …
vista seemed a bit sluggish on boot and shutdown, but had better overall performance.
XP te seems to be a little quicker to boot, but the speedstep on the ULV chips is very agressive - most of the time my 1.5 ghz processor is running at about 300 mzh.
while docked, it seems to be a bit better.
Windowblinds would let me do transparent borders and bars on XP - but on Vista it was still disabled. even with 1.5 gb of ram.
now if i could just find a linux distro that supported the tablet stuff without hours of tweaking and compiling.
May 26th, 2008 at 2:56 am |
So, Vince, how did Vista work out on the x41 since Feb 10?