Windows 7 on TC1100... Very impressed

[enneract]

Has anyone been able to get the taskbar window 'popup' to work? The taskbar is utterly useless without this feature, as there is no other way to select which window you want to go to?

[jwfisher]

Excellent and very well done review of Windows 7 on your 1100!
I'm running it on my 2510 and wouldn't go back. I'm an absolute defender of Vista over XP for Tablet PCs, and 7 is even better yet. A very nice progression by Microsoft over the years.
I didn't have a single driver problem, and it also works perfectly with my HP WHS.

[danagin]

Ok, Ive just got my tc1100 last week, the guy sent it to me with a tweaked vista install which actually worked pretty nicely. The SD card reader of coarse didn't. But after hearing all of the glory here and other places for w7, I thought I would give it a go.

Since you cannot download w7 from ms any more I went ahead and registered and got a key, the found build 7057 and installed.

I let windows install the SD Card reader, and it works, between reboots and all.

I don't guess I have everything tweaked good enough yet, the fan runs almost all of the time after it warms up, even with only a web browser open. Maybe someone could enlighten me here a little on what I can do, it didn't seem to act that way with the vista installation that came on it. Thirty minutes on the battery with vista was probably pretty close, where as thirty was more like 15 in w7, turning the brightness way down helped of coarse but...

When UAC blacks out the screen and asks "ARe YoU FREaKinG Surr3!!!" the pen goes all wacked out on the screen, jumping all over the place, you have to use something else to make your choice, I just used the side scroller.

I get the same problem everywhere when I try and collaborate with the tablet pc options in control panel. It's kind of hit or miss where on the screen I can use the pen, so I just deleted the collaboration and deal with the very slight off set that is there by default.

I will have to test more 3d applications but movie play back with VLC media player seems to work just fine, since I don't like to install codec packs, this will be my primary video player anyway. Anyone want to through something out there for me to test the 3d ability with with the latest build?

Volume control using the option in Qmenu does nothing. Maybe it just doesn't work, anyone know of a work around?

The sleep issue remains, I assume it is probably something to do with the video card, but that is only a wild guess. My 1.0ghz, with 1gb of mem will Hibernate in 25 seconds, and get me back to the logon screen in 20, with no major applications running while going into hibernation.

[jwfisher]

I'm up on 7057 now, and still have no issues - although Win7 did tell me I had to go to an Intel site to get the infrared drivers. Otherwise all is good, including the precision of the pen on the screen and the touch screen feature.

7057 is not an official build, and it is not the RC build, so there is no telling what works/doesn't work. I know on one machine I have it keeps going into screen saver mode after 5 mins, even through screen saver is turned off. It didn't do that in the beta and I know it won't in the final product when we get that (summer?).

It's hard to know how to proceed when you have issues like yours... not knowing exactly where you came from. What do you mean by "tweaked" Vista? It sounds like you are having driver issues galore... you could go back to the original XP I assume the machine came with (hopefully you got the install disks too), but currently as I understand it there is no upgrade from XP to 7 supported. I may be wrong on that. I am assuming it would be better to start with an absolutely clean machine and then try 7057 again. Or, why not go back to the original Win7 beta? There are a few things it doesn't do, but there is a large community of experience with it and there has got to be other people who have put it on an 1100.

And good point about the codecs packages... I find it hard to trust those. I'm not sure entirely what is needed in Win7 anymore, since MS bumped up codec support considerably. We all would have liked to see more of those a lot earlier, but there are legal issues that have to be handled before those can go into a legal product.

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (Jun/05/2009): Windows 7 RC1 on the HP TC1100 and the IBM Thinkpad t42p

HP TC 1100

I've played quite a bit with the current (RC1, build 7100) version of Windows 7 on the HP TC1100 tablet. I'm pretty much impressed - the new version works quite a bit better than the old one.

Drivers

I installed (from the local filesystem) the same three drivers as with the previous (7000) build: the video, the Q menu and the button drivers. Note that at least the Q Menu installation must be run in SP2 mode / as an admin; otherwise, it'll display loading CPQ32.dll failed. (Please see section "2.1 HP TC1100 Tablet PC" in my previous article for more info.)

So far, I'm impressed:

- there's no need to disable D3D (video acceleration) any more. Video playback performance is approximately as good as under XP.
- multiple thumbnails are correctly displayed, even in Portrait mode. Sure, there certainly isn't any real visual effects - for example, dynamically showing the window of the thumbnail which the cursor is hovering over or dynamically showing on the thumbnail itself a miniaturized, scaled-down version of it.
- now, it sees the Windows XP partition previously invisible for build 7000. I keep XP on the first and W7 on the second partition. In build 7000, it remained invisible; in RC1, it's correctly mounted as D:
- there doesn't seem to be excess CPU usage when operating in battery mode. When doing the same on AC power, however, the CPU seems to be running at a higher speed, which results in considerable warming up.
- the headphones port works out of the box, without the need to install any driver - as opposed to past W7 versions. It works
- as far as mobile devices are concerned, I've encountered no problems accessing Windows Mobile (including running Pocket Controller Pro 6.02) and iPhone (including running iTunes 8.1.1) devices. With iPhone, the PdaNet USB server, QuickPwn 2.25 and T-Pot 1.1 works OK. Note: you should stay away from flashing new ROM's onto WinMo devices. Note I haven't tested the tips published HERE - they may work just fine. Also note firmware update and jailbreaking work just fine with the iPhone.

Problems:

- Recovering from sleep (suspend) still doesn't work reliably. Hibernation works flawlessly. That is, if you absolutely must use suspending, stay away. If, on the other hand the additional shutdown / bootup time of hibernation isn't a problem, this isn't that big an issue.
- the three hardware icons (rotate screen etc.) are not usable (albeit they certainly are visible to the button handler app - see Hardware and Sound / Set tablet buttons to perform certain tasks)
- rotate screen doesn't work when invoked through, for example, mapping it onto a hardware button. You must always go to Appearance and Personalization / Display / Adjust Screen Resolution and change the screen orientation there; I know of no shortcuts of doing this. Note: if you (un)dock the TC1100, the screen orientation changes accordingly.
- still no SD card reader support (PCMCIA card adapters and USB readers work, of course).

Note that one of my readers, Kieslar, in a comment under my initial article stated the following: "I was able to get rotation and D3D accelleration working on my TC1100 in Windows 7. After some searching online, I noticed that when the 84.43 drivers were first released, someone was having nv4_mini.sys related BSODs. Downgrading to version 82.12 fixed the BSOD for him, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I completely uninstalled 84.43. Then I downloaded 82.12 from http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/nvidia.htm and copied hpqvdisp.dll and the modified nv4_disp.inf (with Rotateflag instances changed to 0x40) to the same directory. After installing, it no longer crashed on D3D or movie playback! "
I don't know whether you can get better graphics acceleration performance (for example, to enable dynamic window thumbnails) using this driver than the one, sp27014.exe (HP's own driver), I recommended in my initial article. I certainly welcome any reader feedback on this.

On the IBM Thinkpad t42p, basically everything is OK. However, I've encountered problems with recovering from suspension (sleep) sometime - albeit in no way as often as on the TC1100. In about every twentieth reboot, I also run into the blue screen of death when trying to read the hibernated notebook state. This means if you do hibernate (or, suspend) your notebook, make sure you've saved everything before that, in case you don't manage to restart it. Nevertheless, I like Windows 7 on my t42p a lot, mostly because of the highly useful, graphics accelerated dynamic thumbnails.

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (somewhat later, the same day):
1.) in the meantime, I've found out there is also an excellent Wiki article dedicated to setting up Windows 7 on the HP TC1100 HERE. It should be the most important guide you follow when updating.

So far, I've tested the following (and found them all working):
a. video driver. By getting the 82.12 installer and, after executing it, it decompressed itself to a directory. I've copied the two hacked files, as is explained, into the directory where the 82.12 installer decompressed itself. After the installation, resuming from sleep started to work. Excellent!

b. the "Mail" button hack. After the recommended Registry hack, it indeed started working; both short- and long presses are registered.

c. the screen rotation hack via the Hardware and Sounds / Tablet PC Settings / Go to Orientation link (it's a link, not a button BTW). After the hack, screen rotation started to work when assigned to a hardware button. (I still need to find out how to make the three "soft" buttons work on the front.)

2.) I keep you posted when I learn something / test stuff. Currently, I'm installing Windows 7 on my IBM Thinkpad a31p to see whether the D3D problems are gone on it too and running the CPU voltage decrease tests on the TC1100 to reduce heat / ventilation.

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (Jun/7/2009) : I've played a lot with undervoltaging my HP TC1100 and IBM Thinkpad t42p as is explained at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=235824 (and recommended in the above-linked TC1100 Wiki).

I have GREAT results. I've managed to decrease the voltage with more than 0.2V on the Pentium M Dothan-based t42p and slightly less on the Pentium M Banias-based TC1100.

On the TC1100, the cooldown advantage I've managed to get is about 2C degree at full CPU usage. (The TC1100 uses the Pentium M ULV CPU, which already is, as you may have guessed, running on lower voltages.) Nevertheless, this already means the fan "kicks in" far less often. With a protective case on (which doesn't let the TC1100 cool down, except for the two fan openings) and only browsing Web pages with Opera, without the Flash plug-in (which is a real CPU hog, even when running in the background; this is why I don't let Opera install the Flash plug-in but just copy the URL of a page I want to see its Flash content into IE) installed, it only started after about 30 minutes. Without the case, the fan has never kicked in.

I've got even better results with the t42p. The CPU running at 2 GHz and 1.32V, the maximum temperature I recorded was 82C and the average 77-79C. The CPU undervolted to 1.1160V (which is two selectable values more than the already-unstable [Orthos displays a computation error] 1.0840V; 1.1000 would have resulted in 60C), I got the maximum of 61C. That is, about 20C less than in the default case!

I was pretty lucky with decreasing the minimum voltage (at 600 MHz). Instead of the default ~0.98V, I've found out 0.7320V is still sufficient. (Going even lower, 0.7160V, has resulted in Orthos displaying a computation error.) VERY impressive!

Note that, under Windows 7, when returning from hibernation, it will auto-start in the background. It also displays an icon in the lower right corner of the screen (hidden by default in Windows 7). It might be useful to disable it (right-click and Hide) to further reduce CPU usage.

I can only recommend the RightMark overclock app - it will REALLY cool down your notebook. The CPU consuming considerably less power (and dissipating far less heat) will not only resulting in major battery life savings, but also a much more silent notebook. And, of course, it's easier to work with a notebook that doesn't overheat - even if fan noise or higher power consumption isn't an issue with you. For example, the IBM Thinkpad t42p has the fan in the lower right edge of the notebook (unlike, for example, the, in this regard, better-designed IBM Thinkpad a31p, which has the same in the upper right edge). The notebook running a CPU-intensive task makes working pretty hard: everytime you let at least part of your hand drop from the notebook, you'll almost burn it in the stream of the hot air. With undervoltaging in place, this effect is far less pronounced - after all, the stream of air itself is about 20 degrees cooler.

Three screenshots of my TC1100 and t42p undervoltaged. Note that, with the TC1100, I fine-tuned all the voltages - not only the highest and lowest (for 1 GHz and 600MHz, respectively). With the t42p, I used the automatic computation, based on the manually-set and checked highest and lowest frequency values, compute them. Of course, I've tested their stability (as on the TC1100) by disabling the highest-frequency checkboxes in turn, one after another.


TC1100


T42p

Still another remark: if yours isn't a Core (2) Duo CPU (but, say, a Pentium M Dothan or Banias), then, in the "Advanced CPU settings" tab, there will be almost nothing you can en/disable, unlike with later CPU editions.

All in all, I can only recommend undervoltaging. It's well worth the effort and time.

Some other benchmarks I've made, showing how the heat buildup depends on the voltage:

At 2 GHz:
1.2280V: 68C
1.1800V: 66C
1.1480V: 64c
1.1160V: 61c
1.1000V: 60c

At 600 MHz:
0.7800V: 43c
0.7640V: 42c
0.7480V: 41c
0.7320V: 40c

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (12/Jun/2009): after reading a dedicated post of a msnews.microsoft.com member, I've also played a bit with external monitors and the usable resolutions.

Under XP, using HP's above-linked official driver, the maximal external resolution is 1600*1200 and there's no way of using 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios (only 4:3):



Under Windows 7, if you do use the hacked video driver (see the first update above on installing it), you can select anything up to 2048*1536, including 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios:



These high resolutions do work (I've tested them up to 1600*1024; my TFT monitor only being an SXGA (1280*1024) one, I couldn't test higher resolutions).

This is another advantage of switching to Windows 7, particularly if you have a non-4:3 monitor / projector or one with a resolution higher than 1600*1200 (UXGA). Nevertheless, it might be possible the new driver can be used under XP too, offering the same, additional resolutions and aspect rations. It's just that the official HP driver doesn't.

A caveat: sometimes I couldn't see these resolutions. I had to switch to Portrait (on the primary, built-in one) and remove / reinsert the VGA cable to be able to see them. That is, if you don't see them, don't despair: do the same as I've done.

[excogitation]

Thank you very much, Menneisyys.

I just finished installing 7100 (RC) on my TC1100 and I Iove it!
For me the Softbuttons do work though.
Also SD-cards work (SDHC may not).

Now I'm trying to find out where to set the initial screen orientation (I'd like it to start in landscape).

Also 56°C seem a bit high running at 600MHz (0.7320V) - need to look into that.

The writing tool just died on me - no idea why it doesn't translate my writing to text anymore ... hopefully a reboot fixes that.

Another thing - I can't run the performance index test - why might that be?

[NamelessPlayer]

Not to bump an old thread, but now that I've finally beefed up the TC1100's hard drive (40 GB 4,200 RPM Hitachi TravelStar to 160 GB 5,400 RPM Samsung Spinpoint M5 HM160HC), I have plenty of space for Windows 7 (and maybe Ubuntu or some other Linux distro) along with XP Tablet.

So far, it works pretty well...except for one thing.

The Wacom drivers (from the Wacom site) don't work properly.

If they're installed, then my cursor will be constrained to the upper-left corner. Furthermore, the system can't tell that the pen is in range.

If I just use the Windows 7 drivers, then it works okay and I still get pressure sensitivity in Windows Journal and especially SketchBook Pro 2010, but the soft buttons don't register and I can't alter the pen button to allow hover clicks (I don't like having to hold it down and then tap the screen for a right-click).

Does anyone know of a solution?