Vista on the X41 Tablet PC

I just installed build 5384 of Vista on my X41 Thinkpad.  All drivers and hardware buttons are working perfectly. I can rotate, scroll, etc. The Finger Printer reader isn’t working yet, though. Vista on the X41 runs really, really well. My memory config right now shows 572 mb with no open apps and 53 running processes.

The first thing you should do is to make a copy of your IBM Tools and I386 directory before doing the install, especially if you plan on reformatting harddrive before doing the install. I did a clean install, but did not reformat. After the initial install, I had a several devices that did not work – wireless, etc. The first thing you should do is double click on the Setup Devices and have it download all the updated device drivers from Windows Update. I still had a couple that it couldn’t find, so I directed it to find the other drivers in IBM Tools Drivers directory. The Fingerprint driver got installed, but I have not figured out how to get it to work at this point.

After all the drivers were installed, my hardware buttons still would not work. So, I went to the IBM Tools / Drivers directory and ran the setup utilities under TBBTN, TBUTIL, and UTILITY. I rebooted and then everything worked just perfect – scrolling, rotate, etc. Rotate even works when I flip the screen from convertible mode into tablet mode.

I then launched the Access Control and found that nothing much worked from there: volume controls, enable / disable wireless, etc. I think if I hunted that down enough, I could get those things working, but I’m not too worried about those apps at this point. My main goal was in getting the hardware buttons and rotate working and I’m quite happy with the upgrade.

I’m going to install Office 2007 next week and begin producing some InkShows around Vista with Office 2007. Should be a lot of fun.