Digital Cents

I received the following email from someone just passing by my blog and I thought I’d share my response here as well.

I ran across your blog, where you wrote about installing Vista on your Gateway M275 tablet. I also own an M725 and am curious about how it worked out. You said that you got it installed and that it worked well. Were you able to get the Aero features to work? Did you have any trouble with features that require drivers (LCD Panel Multi-function Buttons, Intel Pro wireless, Card Reader, etc.)?

-Michael Fritsch

Michael,  

Hope all is well with you!  thanks for the email and perusing my blog… good that at least someone out there might be viewing it… although I have been slammed and not able to write even on the topics I set aside to write about…
Anyway,  the 275.  Great tablet!  I am still struggling fully committing to my Gateway M285 (next version) and parting with the 275 for a faculty member to test… Ahhh well…  
ok couple thing you need to know.  I have the 1.7mhz version of the M275 with 1gb of RAM (I upgraded with a 512mb chip when I initially got the M275).  The RAM is key here for Vista.  Less than a gig and Vista will not be happy.   I am still running Vista RC2 on it, as I only have a single license currently for the Vista RTM and I put it on the M285.  I have been using Vista on the M275 since Beta 1 with only minor issues (that the RTM might take care of).  All of the upgrades went in well regardless of whether I completed it as an upgrade or a clean install.  As an FYI, when I was sticking with a version for a while, I would boot from the DVD and do a complete clean install formatting the drive in the process.
I’ll start with the issues:

• Panel Buttons do not function other than the brightness. (Again might be cleared up with RTM)
  • Rotate Screen actually brings the tablet to the login screen like you are logging off…
• Panel Mic while picking up sound is VERY FAINT! to the point you can’t hear recorded sound.  if you plug in a headset that works just fine however.  
• Aero – Oh so close… The graphics performance is too low for full Aero panes.  It runs in Vista Basic – While this does do transparency for the Sidebar, the windows are not the full translucency of Aero overall.  Additionally, applications minimized in the taskbar only display the XP like topic message and not a miniature live window of Aero. (By the way this is really cool!  the M285 has scores of 2.0 for Aero and 2.4 for 3D and apparently that is high enough for the true Aero interface.  Frankly you don’t lose much not having Aero other than a bit of eye candy.  The screen is still bright (brighter than the M285) and crisp.

Pro’s

• Install was flawless, and quick!  20-30 Minutes with it patching from the Internet to get the latest updates.
• Overall performance is AWESOME!   Vista is much more lively and responsive than XP, and more capable when running multiple apps.  I typically have 10-20 apps/windows open (don’t know how that happens, but it does… I find myself closing all sorts of things when I am trying to drill down to my desktop.
• Speaking of the above.  There are two buttons in the task bar that allow for immediate drop to the desktop or to visually tile app open apps like below and then you just click on the one you want.

• Wireless capabilities.  Much easier and MORE secure wireless connection.
• Card reader and USB’s work flawlessly.
• Pen recognition is flawless in tracking and recognition!  With XP Tablet, I spoke with a number of MS reps who stated that they had clients who insisted that the tablet “learned” their writing… they said nope… but in Vista it DOES!  Both through training if you are somewhat bored (I have been) and go through the training, but there is also a setting you can check where it will learn through use.  the M275 got so good that I felt I could almost write with my feet
• Sleep mode and wake could not be easier.  It even appears to hold a lower power state when sleeping (I rarely shut down when I can avoid it.) and I get more battery life.

Ok, I could go on, but I thing I would dive off into more about Vista than on how the M275 works on Vista.  Overall, If you need to upgrade the memory do it, (it will only help overall – even staying with XP) then take the plunge I do not think that you will be disappointed.  the file system in Vista takes a bit tot get used to initially, but with the quick search feature, you might find that you are clicking start>all programs> less and just hitting start and typing the first few letters and letting Vista’s new search features take care of finding things…
Alright.  I hope that I am not too tired to blog on this later, but I have to tell you about this.  Yesterday, I was stuck eating lunch without my typical book or eweek mag to bide my time, so I was playing with the M285 Vista RTM, and thought about Voice Recognition… I thought what the heck I wonder what it will do.  I was amazed.  It immediately started a beautiful tutorial, that I decided to go through… it started out with the typical click to move on… then it said… your turn!  I walked through the remainder of the 10 minute tutorial via voice through the built-in Mic in the panel.  Native within Vista is a full feature voice recog system that will control ALL of the functions of the PC via voice command!  In addition to the standard voice recog in a doc or app…  AMAZING!  You talk, and it just well does… no training no getting used to things… I was floored.  You can train it to be more accurate but out of the box it was WAY COOL!
Well as you can see I am a big fan of both vista and the M275 and getting there with the M285 (trust me if the 285 didn’t have about 12 hours of battery life and a dual core proc, you couldn’t tear a Vista enable M275 away from me.

Hope this helps a bit, and if you have other questions, comments, or thoughts feel free to drop me a line.

More on Voice Command in a future post.