LT1423p and Windows 10

With its bad image at launch, the LT1423p wireless model is now on sale dirt cheap. I bought it new for $299 a few days ago at Amazon, imported from Germany.

Now the quest goes to how to make it work with Windows 10.

For owners of the wired model, there is good news. Lenovo has updated the latest displaylink driver and Windows 10 is supported for the wired LT1423p model. It seems that Lenovo hasn't dropped the product completely yet.

The wireless model? Not so much. The wireless model plays nicely with Win 8.1 (if you follow Lenovo's instruction and install the latest 5G driver for the USB dongle) and I have get both touch and pen working smoothly in wireless mode at 5G band (well, latency still exists, but very minor).

Now that I've upgraded to Windows 10. Lenovo's software does not work on Windows 10. So I can only use the wireless model wired. If you are a wireless model owner and is looking forward to Windows 10, I wonder whether we could petition Lenovo for an updated driver.

 

From my previous experiences, the lag in OneNote 2013 desktop in 2.4G wireless mode is not acceptable. Did you get any improvement when going to 5GHz?

Anyway, since Microsoft has implemented pen remoting in windows 10, and if the lag is small enough, I can discard this thing and buy a ThinkPad 10/Stylistic Q555/Surface 3.

 

The problem with pen remoting is that the remote host cannot be used as an extension to your tablet screen at the same time, unlike an penable external monitor. However this might be solved by software, it's up to MS or third party to make pen computing work on network connected screens. Until then, I would still prefer a penable external display that gives me extra screen estate.

The 5Ghz connection may or may not help. But I was able to get 150Mbps maximum connection speed and good signal as seen below.



Here is a youtube video I uploaded, showing some pen/multi-touch operation in wireless 5Ghz mode. The display was wirelessly connected to a Surface Pro. As you can see, there was no cable hooked.



It is definitely smooth enough for me to jot down notes, stream videos or play some touch enabled games. But the video is limited in frame-rate so it won't show the minor delay you can feel when actually using it.

 

Yeah, it often surprises me that it's cheaper to buy a tablet/laptop than to buy a touch/penable monitor. The cost for a penable, multi-touch monitor is at least $500, but a tablet of $500 can do so much more. If only Microsoft can implement the necessary software to bridge the gap. Like mouse without border, how about screen without border? I would love to see all my devices' screens as extension to my main device.

 

Well, this is not the real problem to me, since once you patched the Termsrv.dll or use the RDP Wrapper to allow concurrent multi-sessions in RDP, you can use your tablet "independently" as another monitor, i.e., you just log in again under the same user and have a new desktop. The real problem to me is that, I cannot open/edit the same file simultaneously on my mobile workstation and the tablet. For example, if I open a Word file on my laptop, and remote into my laptop using a tablet, on the tablet where there is a new concurrent session, if I open the same file again, it shows that "file in use", and the best thing I can do is to open the file in read only mode. But the worse is that for OneNote, it is just impossible to open because the entire OneNote cache folder will be locked so that I cannot open OneNote on my tablet if it is already opened on my laptop. This is possible if I use LT1423p or Wacom Cintiq, since I can just open another OneNote window and drag it to the penabled display. RDP is not designed to do that, instead, it just creates a complete new concurrent session. This is quite annoying since I usually have at least 2 opened OneNote windows.

 

Looks like you are lucky. My experience in OneNote inking through wireless mode is bad, the lag is really unacceptable.

 

That's what I was saying. You cannot use it as a real extension to your main monitor. That's because even though you can log into a different session under the same user, you can not easily move open applications and share clipboard across screens. The productivity under multiple sessions is less optimal than a real extension of the desktop under the same session. I use RDP Wrapper a lot btw, but I used it mainly to run heavy calculations on the desktop.

There are many third-party software like the one used in the following youtube video to extend your desktop to any computer with a screen using a remote protocol. I haven't used one so I don't know whether pen and touch is supported on the remote screen or not. I doubt that. If pen is supported, it will be equivalent to MS's pen remoting. I typically find third-party remote solution not as fluid as MS's RDP. By the time MS implement pen remoting, we'll probably find third party desktop extender capable of pen remoting as well.

 

Yeah, I've seen this before and it looks great before I actually try it. It is very slow, my cursor on host computer just keeps flashing and the CPU usage jumps up. And the worse thing is that the touch is not fully supported, e.g., if I open OneNote and drag it to the extended screen on my tablet, single touch and move cannot be recognized as panning, only two fingers zooming works. This is not the case with RDP, where touch works flawlessly in windows 8.1. I haven't installed Windows 10, so not sure about the performance of pen remoting. But if Microsoft want, this kind of screen extending shouldn't be too hard to implement. The problem is perhaps that there is no apparent commercial value of this so that they can make more money, then they don't want to waste time and money on it.

Hopefully Wacom can make a thinner and lighter cintiq companion powered by the latest atom processor in the future.

 

Looks like TeamViewer is much better than the splashtop. But it looks like Pen Remoting is still restricted to Windows RDP, at least according to their blog. If Microsoft really makes pen input as fundamental as keyboard and mouse, pen remoting should work in ANY remote desktop software.