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UPDATE (Jun/05/2009): Windows 7 RC1 on the HP TC1100 and the IBM Thinkpad t42p

HP TC 1100

I've played quite a bit with the current (RC1, build 7100) version of Windows 7 on the HP TC1100 tablet. I'm pretty much impressed - the new version works quite a bit better than the old one.

Drivers

I installed (from the local filesystem) the same three drivers as with the previous (7000) build: the video, the Q menu and the button drivers. Note that at least the Q Menu installation must be run in SP2 mode / as an admin; otherwise, it'll display loading CPQ32.dll failed. (Please see section "2.1 HP TC1100 Tablet PC" in my previous article for more info.)

So far, I'm impressed:

- there's no need to disable D3D (video acceleration) any more. Video playback performance is approximately as good as under XP.

- multiple thumbnails are correctly displayed, even in Portrait mode. Sure, there certainly isn't any real visual effects - for example, dynamically showing the window of the thumbnail which the cursor is hovering over or dynamically showing on the thumbnail itself a miniaturized, scaled-down version of it.

- now, it sees the Windows XP partition previously invisible for build 7000. I keep XP on the first and W7 on the second partition. In build 7000, it remained invisible; in RC1, it's correctly mounted as D:

- there doesn't seem to be excess CPU usage when operating in battery mode. When doing the same on AC power, however, the CPU seems to be running at a higher speed, which results in considerable warming up.

- the headphones port works out of the box, without the need to install any driver - as opposed to past W7 versions. It works

- as far as mobile devices are concerned, I've encountered no problems accessing Windows Mobile (including running Pocket Controller Pro 6.02) and iPhone (including running iTunes 8.1.1) devices. With iPhone, the PdaNet USB server, QuickPwn 2.25 and T-Pot 1.1 works OK. Note: you should stay away from flashing new ROM's onto WinMo devices. Note I haven't tested the tips published HERE - they may work just fine. Also note firmware update and jailbreaking work just fine with the iPhone.

Problems:

- Recovering from sleep (suspend) still doesn't work reliably. Hibernation works flawlessly. That is, if you absolutely must use suspending, stay away. If, on the other hand the additional shutdown / bootup time of hibernation isn't a problem, this isn't that big an issue.

- the three hardware icons (rotate screen etc.) are not usable (albeit they certainly are visible to the button handler app - see Hardware and Sound / Set tablet buttons to perform certain tasks)

- rotate screen doesn't work when invoked through, for example, mapping it onto a hardware button. You must always go to Appearance and Personalization / Display / Adjust Screen Resolution and change the screen orientation there; I know of no shortcuts of doing this. Note: if you (un)dock the TC1100, the screen orientation changes accordingly.

- still no SD card reader support (PCMCIA card adapters and USB readers work, of course).

Note that one of my readers, Kieslar, in a comment under my initial article stated the following: "I was able to get rotation and D3D accelleration working on my TC1100 in Windows 7. After some searching online, I noticed that when the 84.43 drivers were first released, someone was having nv4_mini.sys related BSODs. Downgrading to version 82.12 fixed the BSOD for him, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I completely uninstalled 84.43. Then I downloaded 82.12 from http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/nvidia.htm and copied hpqvdisp.dll and the modified nv4_disp.inf (with Rotateflag instances changed to 0x40) to the same directory. After installing, it no longer crashed on D3D or movie playback! "

I don't know whether you can get better graphics acceleration performance (for example, to enable dynamic window thumbnails) using this driver than the one, sp27014.exe (HP's own driver), I recommended in my initial article. I certainly welcome any reader feedback on this.

On the IBM Thinkpad t42p, basically everything is OK. However, I've encountered problems with recovering from suspension (sleep) sometime - albeit in no way as often as on the TC1100. In about every twentieth reboot, I also run into the blue screen of death when trying to read the hibernated notebook state. This means if you do hibernate (or, suspend) your notebook, make sure you've saved everything before that, in case you don't manage to restart it. Nevertheless, I like Windows 7 on my t42p a lot, mostly because of the highly useful, graphics accelerated dynamic thumbnails.