Jeff Winkworth’s IMM Blog

Now that I have a commute to work every day (30-50 minutes on the Go Bus each way), I decided to take a look at a portable computing device. Personally I’ve always been partial to a desktop environment; I’ve never had a need to “program on the go,” typically because I’ve never really had the time. Even with my commute to school (40-60 minutes in good weather, 60-120 in snow) each day for 3 years, I would be working from the lab PCs anyways during school hours, and working from my desktop when at home.

These days however, I’ve been a little more stretched for time and there are some personal tasks I would like to accomplish during my commute. For the last few months, I have been listening to and watching podcasts (stackoverflow, The Hollywood Saloon, Layers TV, and The Agenda to name a few), but have since found the desire to get some reading done on the bus. Not books mind you, but blogs and articles that have been bookmarked on my desktop for months, even years, that I originally saved with the intent of reading “one day.”

My original impulse was to look for a tablet. No keyboard, just the screen, the stylus and wifi. Unfortunately, due to my limited knowledge of tablets, I didn’t realize that the only readily accessible form of tablet (read: available at best buy or future shop), was in the form of tablet PCs. Having never really used a tablet before (I have attempted to play with a Wacom Graphire4 4×5″ in Photoshop and illustrator before, to varying degrees of failure), I really wanted to try one out, to see if it was the right thing for me, as most of what I plan on doing during the commute is reading.

After about a week of researching, I decided upon the HP Pavilion tx2500 line. Several sites gave it favourable reviews, stating that it more or less does exactly what I what I need it to do. After some debating I went with the tx2508CA, running Vista 32-bit, which was the deciding factor. Having never really utilized vista before (my girlfriend’s laptop the exception; which doing certain tasks while still accustomed to the “old way” of doing things proved difficult), I was prepared for some struggles, but with the exception of installing Visual Studio 2005 it seemed to go smoothly.

Before I began, I searched Wikipedia and MSDN regarding any problems with the install.

I found no issues.

My bad.

Turns out I should have looked harder. The install crashed about halfway, during the installation of MSXML6. After several hours of research online, I discovered that VS2005 crashing during install on Vista is not only a common occurrence, but it doesn’t always crash the same way. There is also no silver bullet to fix or avoid this.

The way I solved it was via a series of steps (Edit: link attached) involving installing a series of helper apps on the VS CDs (such as MSXML6) before running a repair install on VS. Then, apply the SP1 update, and the Vista update patch. The next time I have a clean install of Vista, I will attempt to install the helper apps first, followed by a clean install.

So how is it? As of day 4, excellent. The tablet functionality was exactly what I was looking for, with regards to reading. For those curious, I have installed Firefox 3 with Scrapbook and FireGestures, which easily allow for temporarily saving and reading offline content such as bog posts. I have yet to try programming on it (That will probably be tomorrow’s test – my mother has been after me to finish an inventory tracker for her that I started last July and put on hold indefinitely once “real work” picked up), but even if that doesn’t work out, I think I’m sold on this product. The stylus, while obviously taking some getting used to, is quite practical on the bus, and the added touch screen functionality (placing your finger on the screen pops up a “virtual mouse” that you can use for both right and left clicking) is great. I’m also a fan of Pen Flicks which (again, after some trial and error) allow you to page up and page down with simple gestures. I read several backlogged bookmarks yesterday without the use of any input device beyond my hand, which on the bus is fantastic.

I’m also working to master OneNote, a tool which I had seen limited use with back in college, but since reading up on it the other day, I now think is the greatest tool ever created – we’ll see how long that lasts. The laptop comes with a 60 day trial of Office 2007, which is really only a “open an office application 25 times or less” trial, which I think is a little hypocritical. I picked up Office 2007 the other day, but have decided to try OneNote out in trial mode first before I commit (I am currently writing this blog post in OneNote).

If you are looking for a lightweight PC for reading on the go, I would highly recommend trying out a tablet PC, specifically the HP Pavilion models. They’re small and lightweight, something that I have never liked about the recent trend of “portable desktops.” While sometimes the glare makes it a little difficult to read on the screen, usually just repositioning the angle fixes it.

Now I just need to master the stylus and track pad, two things I have put off doing for about a decade now.