Lawrence's Vista Installation Notes on the HP TC1100

Initial installation

• went smoothly, booted off an external DVD drive with the Vista x86 Installation DVD
• chose to overwrite the existing drive (after making a Ghost backup of my XP installation)
• gave our technet Vista Ultimate serial number
• set it for English (Canada)
• Let 'er rip

First Impressions

• Looks very pretty
• cool "Gadgets" feature - looks a lot like the Mac's
• hard to find the Command Prompt
  • in the end, I did a search for 'command prompt', found it and assigned a hot key - Ctrl-Alt-D
• finds my network card ok, but not the wireless card
• video driver very basic and doesn't support screen rotation
• I think I need to go back and install original HP drivers
• When I re-install Vista later, I had a hard-wired connection that allowed it to download all the necessary drivers - that seemed to work better.

Adding Drivers

• tried running the driver installation CD that came with the TC1100 -> no good
  • it says that the Installation software is not compatible
• Tried installing the Wireless Driver for the new wireless card (HP wireless LAN W400-W500)
  • seemed to go ok, but didn't see any change. Tried rebooting ...
  • no good ... Device Manager sees Unknown Ethernet Device
• Found something that works!
  • right-click on the Unknown Device, click on "Update Driver Software"
  • click "Browse My Computer"
  • make sure the driver CD is in the drive, then have it browse the CD drive
  • that worked to install the Wireless LAN card (HP WLAN W500) and the Pen Buttons! (using the original "Driver Recovery CD")
  • I've seen a number of people report problems getting the buttons to work - they're working for me now!
• Q-Menu installation worked right from the Setup option off the CD
• I tried force-loading all of the drivers off the Drivers CD to see if I could get wireless working - that completely killed the system so that it would only boot in Safe Mode - so I re-did the whole installation
• Ok, the problem with wireless seems to be that the wireless "switch" is off - I just don't know how to turn it on electronically!
• The following two downloads fixed the problem!
  • Q-Menu software installation from HP
  • Button installation from HP
• Video - I spent a bunch of time trying to get the Nvidia setup back to how it worked in XP. I used the Docked/Undocked profiles when I put my TC1100 on the docking station. But I couldn't find any of that. I eventually discovered that it is available in the Control Panel under "NVidia nView Desktop Manager". It complains about not being fully compatible, but it did seem to work. What I miss are all of the Nvidia options that used to be available under Advanced Display Settings. I can't seem to find a way to make those re-appear. I tried downloading various drivers from the Nvidia website, but the Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go 32M barely seems to be acknowledged anywhere on the web site, and was not recognized by any of the drivers I downloaded.

Windows Update

• tried running Windows Update
  • "Check for Updates"
  • "Windows could not search for new updates" -> Error(s) found: Code 80072F8F
  • I tried turning off the firewall - didn't help ...
• This worked much better the second time I did the installation - bottom-line: have a network connection while you're doing the installation!

other observations

• Menus seem hard to find (eg: in Internet Explorer and Explorer)
  • Found out where to turn them back on by default:
    1. Explorer -> Organize -> Folder and Search Options -> View
    2. Check "Always show menus"
• Security - seems to be good about asking for permission to do "System" things
• Internet Time - couldn't get that to work - it always says an error occurred. Could it be a firewall issue?
  • No, it was a date problem - I was on the wrong side of the date line! (I had the date off by one day - always messes up the synchronize when that's the case. The error message could be more helpful, though ...)
• While the Gadgets are cool, beware how much CPU they can suck up. I set the clock to display the Second hand - I saw later that it was taking a nearly constant 5% CPU. I turned that off and it went down to between 00% and 02% (when it updated the "Feed Headlines")

Installing Software

• Office: Phil says that we have Technet licenses for Office 2007
  • Need to download ISO from TechNet site using our login/password (ask Phil)

• I want to change the default View to display extensions ... where is that?
  • In any Explorer window: Organize -> Folder and Search Options

Additional Software

• Notetab
• Thunderbird
• Firefox

Networking setup

• So, where's the list of devices? Now that I have my wireless card (I think), where do I see it? It does show up in the Device Manager now.
• I think the problem here is that it isn't turned on. I don't have the option to turn Wireless Off or On in the Q-Menu. The little wireless light isn't on, so nothing seems to see it, except the Device Manager. NetStumbler sees it, but it detects no networks.
• This was solved by getting the right Q-menu software installed (see above)

Security

• My user is setup as an Administrator, but it doesn't give Administrator privileges automatically - it prompts for them - at least, for programs that know to do that. An older program (NetStumbler) didn't give me access to my Administrator privileges, but I solved that by using "Run as Administrator"

Other users' experiences

• http://steves.blogharbor.com/blog/TipsandTricks/_archives/2006/11/24/2523047.html
  • Follow Steve's notes on fizing the buttons and display options!
• http://www.tabletquestions.com/windows-xp-tablet-pc-newsgroup/6320-vista-release-version-not-rtm-tc1100.html

-- LawrenceFolland - 20 Dec 2006