From a couple of people at touchsmartcommunity.com comes a report of the Weather tile always reverting back to "Cupertino" after closing and re-opening the HP TouchSmart software. Until a proper fix for this can be published this is a series of steps that can be taken to get the Weather tile settings to "stick" and not revert back:

1. Close down the HP TouchSmart software completely. You may have to go to Personalize - TouchSmart Settings first and uncheck the QuickLaunch option to ensure everything closes down completely. If the QuickLaunch option is checked, the Close button behaves more like a standby function in that it hides the HP TouchSmart UI but keeps things running in the background for faster re-opening.

2. Start Windows Explorer, for example by using the Win+E keyboard hotkey combination, or by using the Vista Start Menu to open the Documents folder.

3. Type %LocalAppData% into the address bar:

(4.) and then press Enter on the keyboard.

5. Now navigate into the Hewlett-Packard folder:

6. Now navigate into the Weather.exe_Url_* folder (the cryptic letters after the _Url_ part will be different on every system, on my system it looks like above):

7. If you have two folders as shown above (particular folder names are not that important), delete the one with the smaller version number. In the above example it would be the 1.0.3106.17497 folder. Alternatively you can rename it to start with anything but a digit.

From now on any setting changes you make in the Weather tile should be remembered properly.

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Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software
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Check out the interview with some of the HP TouchSmart folks on .NET Rocks! It just went live earlier today.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=399

The parts for developers are mostly in the first 15 minutes. I have some PDF slides that might illustrate things for people who are just looking for a quick visual and not a whole lot of depth. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll post them here.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software development, Tech Toys
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Lots of people find that once they’re outside the touch optimized environment that the HP TouchSmart software provides, things in Vista are not all that easy to use with touch.

This is something we addressed with what we called a “Touch Optimizer” on the IQ770 (our first TouchSmart series). On the IQ500 series we initially left this program out of the factory configuration (the reasons would bore you, trust me.) Now we’ve brought it back as an update that you can get at the HP Support website: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=pv-66423-1&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&os=2100&product=3752240

This utility will increase several “non-client metrics”, as they’re called in Windows developer lingo, to sizes that make things easier to hit with your finger. If I remember correctly, the tool increases scrollbar, close/minimize/maximize buttons and taskbar quicklaunch icon sizes. It also turns on single click for desktop icons so you don’t have to double-tap to launch programs from the desktop anymore.

Until Windows 7 arrives with better integrated touch in the whole OS, try this tool and see if it doesn’t get you 60% of the way there. Maybe even 80%.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Vista
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