Upgrade Toshiba M200: Do's and Don'ts

[pwwka]

Hi!

I have recently purchased a toshiba portege m200.
so far, i'm researching the upgrades on this machine and what i can put it
into it (bang for buck deal). This list is basically is what upgrades can
happen (or not) for the m200, please tell me if this is going in the right
direction for this issue.

Ram: 2 GB max
Kingston Ram is recommended for the m200
Part #KTT3311/1G (Amazon sells this thru 1 Arch Computer, kingston site discontinued it )

Hard Drive: I found a thread that recommends the WESTERN SATA Notebook Hard Drive WD1600BEVT,
but there is also the seagate and hitachi which is also good so choices are broader here.

Driver Issues/OS
Tablet XP Edition works well but Vista doesn't seem very friendly to the drivers.
A solution to this problem was upgrading to Win 7.
Aero works but transparency needs to be off.
Win 7 also has bugs which several threads have answered here for rotation and here for the win 7 issues

Again suggestions and advice is greatly appreciated on upgrading the m200. If I left out any other issues on this machine please reply.
Thanks

[pwwka]

Update:

CPU: I found a thread that talks about cpu upgrade from someone who found a m200 and wrote it up here.
Basically, the maximum that the m200 could be upgraded
to is e Pentium M 765, 2.1GHz (although he noted that it was hard to find).
Don't upgrade to a 533FSB CPU, 400FSB CPUs are okay.

In the thread, there was a list that exists in tabletpcbuzz site,
a huge list of the possible upgrades, hardware and software,
that M200 could have but most if not all of the links don't work since the site's move.

Again, don't be shy and reply to any successful upgrades that you had with your m200.
Cheers

[freewilly]

I'm running Win 7 on mine and, except for the 4 'soft' buttons and lack of aero, it sails along just fine. 1.6 GHz Dothan, I GB ram and a 60 GB HDD. I was thinking of upgrading to 2 GB, 2 GHz CPU and an SSD.. but wonder if it's really worth it. The only thing I really dislike about the Win 7 handwriting recognition is the constant substituting of a word I have written for one it thinks I SHOULD have written.

[pwwka]

@freewilly: have you tried using sd cards with your machine already? no problems?

SD cards: about the SSD card, i believe that win 7 won't
recognize the card without a vista driver to help it.
there was a link to megaupload that named a file C:\Windows\System32
\drivers\sdbus.sys that you copy and paste in your drivers foldera
...but that's gone
HP Secure Digital (SD) Bus Driver 6.0.4069.1 2000 is a program
mentioned in this here over at the tabletpcbuzz site.

It's also where the file mentioned above was a solution to the sd card reader problem with win 7.
Hope that clears up the sd card issue a little bit.
Drivers: A user Flo had bought the tablet pc and had successfully got everything working. Her drivers and other goodies can be found right here at tabletpcbuzz Flo's M200 experiment to successful upgrades

Pens: Compatible pens number to 6 pens, one is over at wacom
which is the widebody ultrapen for artz2. another one is at newegg, another wacom pen, the wacom up710e tablet pen.

M200 users speak out and tell us what good or bad experiences you've had with your machine
Cheers

[freewilly]

I totally forgot about the card reader. Nope, not workig at present.. but I read that it can't read HD SD cards 'n such, so it would be rather useless to me. I bought mine from a shop that repairs and sells old computers and he had a Win 7 USB install key. Should have asked him how he did it. Would like to have an Ubuntu live USB key that I could boot from. What would be even better would be an alternate bios sans all the bizarre restrictions of the one that's currently installed.
Right now I'm still up in the air regarding the M200 since the newer tablets have, in general, the wide screens with lower resolution.
One thing I'm still trying to do is get rid of the annoying pen lag when doing handwriting. That, and it changing my words around.

[Agent 9]

The lag in handwriting recognition is mostly caused by the Wacom drivers interfering with the handwriting recognition. The problem is if you use any programs like Photoshop, Art Rage, Corel Painter, or My Paint then you need the driver to have pressure sensitivity there (the Wacom driver is NOT needed for One Note, Sketchbook Pro, Journal, or for handwriting recognition, so if you only use those then you should be able to get rid of the Wacom driver via the control panel)

[freewilly]

Thanks, that's good to know. Would you happen to know how to get windows to stop correcting words when I write them? Let's say I write down 'blurg'.. when it gets converted to text it's been 'corrected' to 'blimp', or something along those lines. How incredibly annoying! I'd love to turn this 'feature' off and save myself a lot of spent changing words back to how I originally spelled them.

[Agent 9]

I hate that as well, and haven't yet found a solution other than not using handwriting recognition

I use all my Table PC's with Windows 7 so I would really love to know if there is a way to stop that 'feature' as the virtual keyboard is just slow and annoying with a pen -yet better than spending 20 seconds writing something out then the next minute correcting it!

[pwwka]

Hi guys, came to update on stuff.
I have everything working except sound. It looks like it's playing music but I can't hear anything. Can anyone help?
There is nothing muted, I checked if the dial was turned up and I downloaded the sound driver up from the flo guide above.
Did I miss something?

[thatcomicsguy]

Hi guys, came to update on stuff.
I have everything working except sound. It looks like it's playing music but I can't hear anything. Can anyone help?
There is nothing muted, I checked if the dial was turned up and I downloaded the sound driver up from the flo guide above.
Did I miss something?

Did you install the sound card driver?