Useful Little Things

Since purchasing my X41 Tablet PC from Lenovo in 2006, I noticed a peculiar behaviour.  The mouse pointer will occasionally jump to the bottom of the screen.  This wouldn’t be too annoying if it didn’t move the focus with it.  This happens most often when I’m typing something.  And, since I don’t touch type, I don’t realize that I’m no longer putting anything on the screen until the next time I look up.

Of course, it’s my own fault this has never been fixed.  I let the warranty expire, knowing there was a problem.  In my own defense, it doesn’t happen all the time.  It’s somehow tied to the humidity, static, or temperature.  Whatever the cause, I haven’t figured it out.

So, today, I discovered a workaround.  I disabled the Tablet PC Input Service.  I can always reenable it later, if I need too.  Thanks to MalekTips for the clear instructions.

Now, the cursor (thankfully) is sitting right where I leave it, every time.

I noticed today that the volume control buttons across the top of the keyboard aren’t working. I checked the Lenovo site for drivers, but didn’t see anything that looked promising. Actually, I tried the “Tablet Button Driver” for Vista, but it didn’t work.

If you have any ideas, post them in the comments.

After reading a few blog posts about installing Windows 7 Release Candidate on the Lenovo X41 Thinkpad Tablet PC (which I happen to own), I decided to try it out. After all, I still have all the media to roll it back if I don’t like it.

It was amazingly easy. Everything appeared to work right out of the box, so to speak. Pen support is built in to Windows. The system seems fairly responsive.

The video card showed up as a “Standard VGA Graphics Adapter.” But it works fine, so I’m not complaining, yet. I like the Windows 7 pen calibration utility better than the one that came installed on the Thinkpad, though both are effective.

I timed the boot sequence before and after the update. With Windows XP Tablet Edition (with all the Lenovo add-ons), it took 2 minutes and 6 seconds to load the desktop. After that, it took another 3 minutes and 16 seconds for the CPU to drop below 10% utilization. Those of you who have one of these PCs know what I mean. The mouse is nearly unresponsive and jumps dysfunctionally around the screen for the first five minutes after a cold boot; I think it may have something to do with all the Lenovo software.

After installing Windows 7, it took 2 minutes and 12 seconds to see a login prompt. About the same as Windows XP. After that, the CPU only pegged for about another 60 seconds. In short, I regained about two minutes of my life every time I cold boot. This alone is probably worth it.

Got any questions? Post them in the comments.

Update: Since posting this article, I have installed Ubuntu 9.04 in place of Windows 7.  This is mainly due to performance seeming to go down hill with Windows 7 over time.  I am happy to report that Ubuntu is holding up well.