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 Enblish (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

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

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 ...

other observations

• Menus seem hard to find (eg: in Internet Explorer and Explorer)
• 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?

Installing Software

• Office: Phil says that we have Technet licenses for Office 2007

• I want to change the default View to display extensions ... where is that?

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.

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"

-- LawrenceFolland - 20 Dec 2006