Dell Announces Fix for Latitude XT Issues, Addresses iTunes and More

Wow – it looks like Dell has been doing some major behind-the-scenes work with their Latitude XT Tablet PC. After hearing from me, as well as bunch of other users, they have finally announced some fixes that were being caused by iTunes, as well as some video card updates:

You may have seen reports from some folks  like Engadget and  Rob Bushway, or from Dell customers like  manquaman and jloudoun, about issues  they’ve had  with the digitizer and  iTunes or things like video driver crashes.

Many of you have reported to us on your Latitude XT where the digitizer stops working after installing iTunes. Dell has been working closely with Gear Software, one of the vendors powering iTunes. We were able to nail down the cause of the problem together with Gear, and they have released an updated driver—download it here from Gear Software. We expect that this driver will be integrated into a future version of iTunes. I’ll update this post when that’s the case.

We have also released updated ATI Video drivers which address several issues, including video driver crashes and issues with Pen Calibration. The ATI drivers can be found here on support.dell.com

Soon we will be releasing updated N-Trig digitizer driver bundles. These bundles will have improvements in the Multi-Touch Gestures support introduced last year as well as a number of issue fixes and performance improvements.   Check back for details.

I’m on Windows 7 right now, and still experiencing issues, so I’m looking forward to giving these updates a try. Thank you, Dell and Gear Software!

Update: I’ve tried to install this update three times on my beta Windows 7 installation on the Latitude XT, and it won’t install. I may have to go back to Windows Vista in order to test this fix out. This is not the fault of Gear or Dell, just the nature of beta testing OS’s.

Update 2: Looks like the 4th time was the charm. The update from Gear finally installed. Testing continues…