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First Impressions of Windows 7 RC on an Older MotionComputing LE1600 Tablet PC

May 6th, 2009

Actually this is about very first impression.

After installing Windows 7 on the Motion LE1600 everything seems to work just fine. The many bugs and issues from the beta1 have gone. Overall it seems more stable.

The motion dashboard (the one for the LE1700!) comes up and the options do work:

Fingers can be easily enrolled:

But there is an issue with the fingerprint reader: waking the LE1600 Tablet PC from Sleep – mode works for everything but the fingerprint sensor. After sleep you need to logon typing your password. So for now you have to use the Hibernation if you want to use your fingerprints to logon.

The Windows Experience Index is a 1 due to the Gaming Graphics limitations. But the system responds just fine to all user input and interactions. Microsoft has build a very responsive operating system. I expected the RC to become slower with more features completed, but Microsoft seems to have optimized quite a bit for the better.

Windows 7 RC even(!) remembers the settings for task icons!

This post will be updated in a couple of weeks when I have more to report on the usability of the motion LE1600 in the field.

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Posted in LE1600, Motion Computing, productivity, windows 7

Installing Windows 7 RC on an Older MotionComputing LE1600 Tablet PC

May 6th, 2009

My previous post covered the installation of Windows7 Beta 1 on my older Tablet PC. My intend was to see whether I had to replace my older hardware with a new device or whether I could still use my beloved, aged Slate. From the high number of page-hits the other article receives – I guess I will cover the Windows7 Release Candidate 1 in more detail than the Beta. The Motion LE1600 was built for Windows XP. If you are interested about its’ hardware specification etc.pls read the previous post. I will not cover it here again. Also I won’t go about the differences between XP, Vista and Windows 7.
But I would like to mention here that it is a combination of drivers from XP, Vista and Windows Update that make the installation succeed.

The Release Candidate 1′s Installation at a Glance:

It installs in about 40 minutes. Then it takes quite some time to get all the devices up and running. I think it took about one and a half to two hours. But I did the installation of the drivers as an aside. Easily I got ALL devices up and running – which is much better than with the previous Beta1.

The Installation in Detail:

Step 1: Installing the Windows 7 RC DVD:

Windows 7 installed without any visible error. Looking into the Device Manager right after the installation finished brings some devices without drivers to our attentioin:

(click images to enlarge!)

In Windows 7 Beta I was never able to successfully finish the Windows Experience Rating (the LE1600 hung and I had to reboot.) – so I tried running the system performance index right away, before any Driver of motion could tamper with the results:

And here is the result of the assessment AFTER installing all the correct drivers (screenshot taken after step 11 below):

Correct drivers improve the Desktop Graphics performance to almost 2. But overall it remains a 1 because of the 3D graphics performance of the aged Intel Onboard card. But who needs 3D for typical management tasks or business applications anyway?! If you do CAD you would have never bought this Slate in the first place …

Step 2: Connect to the Internet and run Windows Update:

In this step I wanted to check the drivers’ availability over Windows Update. It would be great if all would be installed and setup automatically.

Windows Update finds two important and one optional downloads:

AuthenTec Inc Driver for the AES2501A , MotionComputing Tablet Button Drivers and the optional driver for the Network adapter.

After confirming a warning dialog to remove all fingerprint data before installing the AuthenTec fingerprint driver, Windows update presents a transparent overview of its’ results:

and the Device Manager shows the following status:

Step 3: Reboot & run Windows Update again

3 problems are still waiting to be solved:

And windows wants to reboot again after it downloaded a driver for the chipset.

Step 4: Reboot & run Windows Update again

I had the device manager look for a current driver. As it did not find any Windows 7 asked me wether I wanted to troubleshoot … So I gave it a try – and I have to say that I was well surprised how the Troubleshooting Assistant transparently and systematically went through all the problem devices. Congratulations Microsoft – someone has done his homework here!

After checking all the problem devices Windows 7 presents this overview:

It is transparent and informative! I like that! Deveice Manager looks like this by now:

The Grapics Adapter is still a generic VGA and some device remain unknown.

The list of installed updates reflects the issue which was resolved by the troubleshooting assistant:

Step 5: Manually Downloading Drivers

We have seen how we can get using Microsoft as a source for device drivers. Much farther than with previous OSes but not quite to the finish.

So we still need to get some drivers from the MotionComputing website for those devices which were not automatically installed by Windows Update all by ourselves.

Step 6: Installing the Motion Dashboard 5.0.2.8 & Reboot

I need to mention that I installed the Motion Dashboard from the LE1700(!), since the one for the LE1600 did not work for me.
But it brings no change to the status of unknown/ driverless devices.

Step 7: Installing the Motion Vista Driver for the Graphics Adapter

The first try fails.

When Windows 7 asks whether this program installed correctly answer no and try again with recommended settings. That works!

Step 8: Reboot & Update & Reboot

Checking the devices still show a missing Audio Controller and an unknown device.

Suprisingly Windows Update reports important updates:

These updates were for the Mobile Intel 915GM/GMS .. adapter and after the second reboot the drivers seem to have been installed ok.

Step 9: Installing the Motion TPM 3.0 & Rebooting

The TPM for Vista finally resolves the unknown device.

Step 10: Installing the C-Major Audio XP Driver on Windows 7

There is no driver for Vista and Windows Update does not recognize the device by itself. This is an error of the explanation on the Motion Support Site. But installing the XP-Driver from the Motion Website does the trick. It installs neatly and there are no devices with issues left in the device manager.

Last Step 11: Installing the IntelliSonic DX filter on Windows

The IntelliSonic / Knowles Acoustics – 2.0.1 could not be installed under Beta1. Now with the RC it seems to work just fine. You can select all the available options for the Microphone Speech Enhancements.

Overall it is possible to get the system up and running without any driver issues. That looks promising also for other older hardware. It shows that Microsoft is on the right path but also that Motion has developed solid drivers in the past. It would be nice if also graphic drivers for laptops could be obtained through windows update. Downloading these individually does not make sense these days.

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Posted in LE1600, Motion Computing, Slate Tablet PC, computers, windows 7

Tags: LE1600 Slate Tablet PC windows 7

Ubuntu vs Vista vs Windows 7 – 5 Tests Benchmarking

February 6th, 2009

I found a nice comparison of Ubuntu vs Vista vs Windows 7 over at TuxRadar.

Answers to the most often posed questions about performance of the OS’es: the amount of time it takes to install, required disk space, boot up and shutdown times, file operations and cpu-intensive tasks. It also compares the benchmark results of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the three operating systems.

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Posted in Ubuntu, benchmark, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 Humor

January 14th, 2009

For some fun The Onion shows the UserInterface of the Windows 7 future competition: Apple’s Laptop without a keyboard:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

There is a comparison between Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard features, too!

And here are the 20 editions of Windows 7.

Have Fun!

And please feel free to post links to other funny stuff about the new OS.

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Posted in apple, computers, humor, windows 7

Some Backgrounds on Engineering Windows 7

January 13th, 2009

On the Engineering Windows 7 (E7) Blog you can find background information on the ecosystem that has to be managed and tuned between developers, Microsft and industry partners. The E7 blog is written by Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product. If you are interested in the development of complex products – and you have a little experience in that field knowing some of the organizational questions that arize – you might enjoy that blog.

Windows 7 for Developers

At Channel9 developers can get a quickstart on the beta1 features like the Ribbon Deep Dive and the Scenic Animation Overview.

Windows 7 Installation and Download

At first when Windows 7 beta1 had been released to the public there were some capacity problems with the downloads. Now you can find Information on the Download and the Installation on the Windowsteamblog.

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Posted in Engineering, IT development, Software, Softwareentwicklung, windows 7

Windows7 on a Motion Computing Le1600 Tablet PC

January 13th, 2009

Microsoft promises improved usage of system resources for Windows 7 compared to vista.

I downloaded the public Beta 1 of Windows 7 in order to see what these marketing promises and hypes about the performance of win7 are worth this time. I used my old MotionComputing Le1600 for this purpose. That is a neat Slate Tablet PC with – well advanced in years – hardware: 1.5 GB RAM, an Intel Pentium M (1.5 GHz) and a 60 GB harddisk. For more details you can find the specifications of the latest version (1.6 GHz) here (pdf).

Motion Computing LE1600 with XP

The LE1600 was originally designed for and equipped with Windows XP. Everything worked reliable and smooth.
There is nothing to add except two hardware issues: the SD-Card reader would not work reliably and from time to time the LE1600 openend the “Addjust Date/Time” dialog due to some electromagnetic interference.

Motion Computing LE1600 with Vista

As Vista hit the shelves I really wanted to benefit from the improvements Microsoft had built into it for Tablet PC users. Praise Motion! They were one of the first who had devolped drivers for their older tablet pc generation on time. That is not something you should take for granted these days!

Vista did not make real problems on the LE1600. It worked better than I expected, but not quite as well as I hoped it would. Vista used so much resources that even with 1.5 GB of RAM there was not much left for more than 3 programms in parallel at a time without significant performance degradation. LE1600′s Graphics (Intel 915GMS s. GMA 900) is a technology from the days before Vista was released. The LE1600 does not support Vista AERO. Vista Basic works. When using more applications at the same time like Microsoft Office 2007 (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio) and two or three Webbrowsers and some Open Source Software you are really waiting for the responses of the applications. Especially when switching between them.

So the benefit of Tablet-PC improvements in Vista were completely neutralized by the bad overall performance.

Then there was one really annoying driver problem with Vista: the fingerprint sensor would not work. Once you became used to logging on with your finger, then you won’t ever again want to type your credentials on a screen with a pen. The latter takes too much time, attention and is a security risk, since everyone standing around you in a conference or a meeting can easily see what you tip.

XP drivers would not work under Vista (like the XP-sound drivers which were a requirement if you wanted to hear sound under Vista). Motion provided an upgrade for Vista, trial-version of the Softex-Omnipass solution. Even though I bought the full version and I spent an incredible amount of time trying to reslove the issues with the support of Motion and Softex the Omnipass software never got to work! My impression was they only had Level 1 support.

Vista also opened the the “Addjust Date/Time” dialog due to some electromagnetic interference from time to time …

Motion Computing LE1600 with Windows 7

Installing Windows 7 is much like installing Vista, unspectacular and I won’t go into any further detail since that topic seems to be covered all over the Internet. Windows 7 seems to be Version 7 of Windows 2008 Server …

Hoping that this time Microsoft would be serious about the planned biometric support (s. Windows 7 Blog) with the Windows Biometric Framework I looked for a driver for the fingerprint sensor. I wanted to avoid Omnipass. The company that produces the fingerprint sensor is Authentec and they provide a beta-driver here: http://www.authentec.com/win7beta32.cfm. And guess what! It really works!

It seems you can use all other Vista Drivers for the LE1600 for Windows 7 too.

To hear sound of the speakers from the LE1600 with Windows 7 you need to do some manual steps to install the Sigmatel XP drivers. You can find more details on how to install Vista on the Motion LE800 here. These tricks work in analogy for the LE1600 on Vista ans Windows 7 beta1. As stated for the LE800 I recommend deleting the registry-key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\igfxcui in order to get the right click to respond immediately.

I installed the LE1700 version of the Motion Dashboard because then you can configure sound and video from the dashboard in Windows 7.

The only device I could not get a driver for is the infraret-port. So I deactivated it in the bios.

First Impression of Windows 7 on the LE1600

The Motion LE1600 is significantly faster and more responsive to user interaction than Vista. Well, that is not too dificult. The important things: switching between several Office Applications works instantly. No waiting for applications or redraws. Impressive. At first glance more responsive than XP.

During installations of Office, Opera and some other applications Windows Explorer crashed several times. But the crashed process is automatically restarted and you can continue to use the tablet pc. And hey – it’s only a beta one.

From time to time Windows 7 also opens the the “Addjust Date/Time” dialog due to some electromagnetic interference…

I will post an update once I have more on Windows 7 beta 1 in daily operations.

Links Windows 7:

Antivirus Utilities for Windows 7: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/antivirus-partners/windows-7.aspx

Performance Comparison von Windows 7 mit Vista und XP http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236&page=2

Read about installing the Windows 7 RC on this machine and the first impressions of it.

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Posted in Motion Computing, Slate Tablet PC, mobile technology, pen computing, productivity, windows 7, windows vista

Tags: LE1600 microsoft pen Slate Tablet PC Tablet PC touch computing vista windos 7 windows xp