After much spare-time work, I’ve finally gotten approval to publish a tool that helps you install the TouchSmart 4 software on previous generation hardware. It’s currently available through the  TouchSmartDevZone.com site. You can find it here in the downloads section. HP had previously published a similar tool, but pulled it from their website after about a month or so.

This tool is unsupported by HP, so use it at your own risk. It did receive some testing, both by HP and a few customers, so I have reason to believe it will work properly for you. Also, in order to use it, you have to accept the license agreement that is displayed when you first run it.

Why write a blog post about it? I want to give a little detail on what it does in case things don’t go as smoothly as they’re supposed to.

The tool basically does these things in order:

• Check that all prerequisites for TouchSmart 4 are fulfilled, including hardware checks
• Installs the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 if needed (a few hosted apps need this)
• Downloads all officially published softpaqs from the HP support website
• Installs the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 if needed (the TouchSmart “shell” needs this)
• Installs all downloaded HP TouchSmart 4.0 software components

Should Windows indicate that a reboot is needed “right off the bat”, clicking a corresponding button in the tool will make sure that the tool is automatically restarted after the reboot. The tool will also automatically restart after potentially installing .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4.0. No reboot is necessary after the remainder of the software has finished installing. If User Account Control is enabled on your system, the tool will prompt for permission to run each time it is launched.

Here is a sequence of screenshots that show the tool in action (captions beneath pictures):

Installing .NET 4.0

Installing the TouchSmart 4.0 “shell”

Preparing to install other softpaqs

Removing older versions of Music/Photo/Video apps

Installing softpaqs

Install progress after third softpaq install

Hosted app registration happening during install

Once all software is installed, the tool gives you an opportunity to burn the downloaded file to a DVD, along with the upgrade tool itself. This will speed up install on other systems a little, since installing from DVD may be faster than downloading from the Internet. Most people probably don’t need this DVD, but it may come in handy, should you want to rerun the upgrade in the future (after a system restore, for example.)

All software finished installing

After clicking the button to prepare a DVD

Windows Explorer window opened with files ready to burn to DVD

Notification that files are ready to be burned to DVD using the Windows Explorer window

The only thing I’ve seen go somewhat awry from time to time is that the download of a softpaq may get to a 100%, seemingly, but not finish. I think this might be caused by the server(s) that hosts the downloads, but I’m not sure. Since the tool is written to perform its operations to full completion at each step before going to the next, it may get stuck and not allow you to close it in this situation. Should that happen, you can hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard while clicking the red button with the little “x” in the upper right corner to close the tool. This will terminate the incomplete download and delete the partially downloaded file. When you run the tool again, the downloads will resume with the not completed download first, and hopefully complete the downloads this time around.

Depending on your Internet connection speed, downloading an installing everything can take several hours, so it’s best to do this when you have that kind of time available.

I hope this tool is useful for some of you.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Windows 7
9 Comments »

A few weeks ago I attended Microsoft’s BUILD conference to get ready for what’s coming in Windows 8. As I was sitting in the first day’s keynotes and big picture sessions, I couldn’t help but think back on the work HP has done with its TouchSmart software and notice areas where the TouchSmart software pioneered ideas that Microsoft is now building into Windows 8 for the new Metro style of programming and the new touch-first Start screen. I decided to dig a little deeper and give you a brief tour of the history of TouchSmart and highlight some of the ideas now in Windows 8 that we put into the TouchSmart software a long time ago. I’ll put a [+Win8] marker by the ideas as I go along. Let’s get started!

TouchSmart 1, aka SmartCenter, aka LaunchPad (January 2007)

The first version of TouchSmart was not called that. It was named SmartCenter and shipped with the very first modern all-in-one touch-enabled PC, the HP TouchSmart IQ770.

This machine was one of the so-called “Dream PCs” for Microsoft’s introduction of Windows Vista in January of 2007. I’ve written about this version of SmartCenter before, so I won’t repeat much of that here.

Touch-first [+Win8]

Of course, the main point of even embarking on a project such as the SmartCenter software was that Windows wasn’t even remotely ready for touch interactions. Every app on the Windows Desktop requires the precision that the mouse pointer provides. Fingers and touch can’t hit the tiny controls accurately enough. So SmartCenter was designed with that in mind, and as a result had large targets all throughout its user interface. Here are some sample screenshots:

Note that all buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, scrollbars, etc. are large enough to be easily tapped with a finger. Note also that, for example, the on-screen keyboard that is used for entering a ZIP code in the Weather app defaults to the correct layout, i.e. the numeric one.

Live app data in shortcuts [+Win8]

This idea wasn’t really all that new, of course. Snippets of live app data displayed in a mini-view of sorts had been introduced with Windows Sidebar gadgets and other widget-like UIs on other operating systems, but SmartCenter was the first to use live data as part of the shortcut that launches an app. You could say the shortcuts were more like mini-versions of the full app. Live data is of course hard to demo with screenshots, so here is a small video clip of the SmartCenter home screen (or start screen, if you will), showing shortcuts that update their information as time passes:

This major version of the SmartCenter software was delivered with four total releases: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.4. Towards the final delivery of version 1.0, it became clear that a standardized way of getting the live information from the apps was needed. This became a major area of investigation and investment for the next major version of the software.

TouchSmart 2 (June 2008)

The second generation of TouchSmart software, 2.x, was introduced with IQ500/IQ800 series hardware. These two hardware models marked the beginning of the monitor-like appearance of the TouchSmart PCs. The IQ770 was a “multi-volume” chassis – these new models had a “single volume” design, supported by the “easel” style feet that were used in the follow-on generation as well.

The 2.x series of software was released in three versions: 2.0, 2.5 and 2.8.

Fixed layouts for apps [+Win8]

With SmartCenter 2.0, we introduced the concept of fixed sized layouts for the TouchSmart apps. We initially picked three: small, medium and large. You can see two of the three illustrated by this screenshot:

The Tutorials, Canvas and Calendar apps are shown in medium size, while the remaining apps are shown in small size. By tapping on an app, you would go to the large size:

This layout is purposely not called full screen, since there is a reserved area at the top of the screen for navigation, app name/time and music playback controls.

Tiles concept [+Win8]

In order to make it clear that the app representations in SmartCenter were not just icons, we decided to call them tiles, or rather “live tiles.” This term was used in the developer documentation that was produced to help other people plug their apps into SmartCenter, and so we had “small tiles,” “medium tiles” and “large tiles.” For each tile size we gave guidance about how to use it appropriately. We introduced the term “layouts” to suggest that each tile size should use a different layout of basically the same content or information. As you notice from the screenshots above, when the Weather tile is small, it shows only basic information. In the large tile, the information is more full-featured and also provides access to settings for the Weather app. The medium tile for Weather looks like this:

As you can see, this layout for Weather includes only the current conditions and the forecast for the day.

With TouchSmart 2.0, a big investment was made to produce media consumption applications: Music, Video and Photo (often shortened to “MVP”) as well as a WebCam and DVD app. The screenshot above shows other apps that were published later (Netflix and Recipe Box, for example), but that just goes to show that following development guidelines has benefits: newer apps can work with older SmartCenter versions…

Other changes from the 1.0 version include the top and bottom row of “tile scrollers” and the music playback control set (aka. “media plate”) that I already mentioned. The tile scrollers had two different behaviors, depending on how full they were. If enough tiles were present, the scroller would become an infinitely looping container. If not enough tiles were present, it would have “snap-to” endpoints.

The TouchSmart 2.0 software was unveiled at a big press event in Berlin, Germany. Several of my colleagues were invited to attend to make sure everything went smoothly from a technical perspective. The most nerve-wracking part was that the TouchSmart IQ500 was to come out of a pedestal on stage after sitting inside said pedestal for an extended period of time before its unveiling. People were not sure the thermals were designed to handle as little exchange of air as this posed. Here’s a video from the introduction to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about (skip towards 1:18 or so to see the pedestal and the TouchSmart lifting out of it):

As you can see, everything worked out pretty well. This was the biggest introduction ever made for a TouchSmart PC line. No event after that had that much effort put into it.

TouchSmart 3 (October 2009)

With the third generation of SmartCenter, we piggybacked onto the 600/300 series of hardware. The enclosures still used the easel stand design with three feet for support, and the exterior was tweaked a bit along with the screen aspect ratio (now 16:9 instead of 16:10).

Generally, though the concept was largely the same, except for the software. A big investment was made to produce more apps for the TouchSmart software suite, and this brought us apps like Canvas, Twitter, Hulu, Live TV, Link, Movie Store, Recipe Box and a bunch of others. The TouchSmart software development guidelines were augmented with more of a proper SDK with app samples, installer samples and more guidance.

New layout

SmartCenter 3.0 introduced another layout that we called wide-interactive. You see, in SmartCenter 2.x there was no way to interact with the medium sized tiles in the upper tile scroller (except for in the browser, but that’s a small detail). In this version we wanted to provide interaction with the app in the upper scroller. In order to do that properly we needed a bigger size tile and a new layout to have enough space for interaction to make sense. Here’s a screenshot of 3.0 (running on a 16:10 screen, not the aspect ratio it was designed for – so circular elements are “squished”):

In SmartCenter 3.0 the touch scrollers no longer “looped” infinitely, but each had a “snap to” end regardless of how many tiles were present; each wide-interactive tile was given a colored title bar to add a little splash of variety and visual interest. In addition, the “media plate” and other control elements on the home screen were redesigned to appear a bit lighter than before. Also, standard button glyphs were introduced for closing and minimizing SmartCenter. Oh, and the clock was moved around and given a day of the week display. Phew – at least the Personalize button stayed almost in place…

The final big change was that tiles in the bottom scroller no longer used the small layout. They were simply icons to launch the app into large layout directly. This was done to improve performance and load less stuff at the startup of SmartCenter.

TouchSmart 4 (September 2010)

Okay, so here we are, almost at the last chapter of this brief history (which is turning out not so brief after all…) TouchSmart 4.0 was introduced with the TouchSmart 310 (and 610) series of hardware. These departed from the easel-type stand and went to a single-foot design (I know there’s a better term for it, I just can’t think of it at the moment).

TouchSmart 4 didn’t see much investment in new apps, but focused on new capabilities provided by the SmartCenter framework.

Infinite Canvas [+Win8, sort of, on the Metro Start screen]

A major goal of the SmartCenter framework software had been to provide an almost limitless space for apps to live in. With SmartCenter 4.0 that goal was finally realized. Not only did the framework provide for an infinitely expanding space for hosted apps to live in, it also did away with the upper tile scroller and let the apps be positioned freely on the canvas. This is what TouchSmart 4.0 looks like after initial startup:

And once again, things were moved around on screen: The clock from lower left to lower right (and it was given a function: click to show a mini-calendar), personalize from lower right to lower left (and the word personalize removed). The “media plate” music playback controls were removed and put into the music app instead. The volume control was separated out from the media plate and put in the upper left. The bottom carousel was redesigned and had the infinite looping re-introduced (to allow for a bit of visual and interactive playfulness). Tapping a tile launches the corresponding app:

Apps can be moved around freely and the carousel shows a colored highlight for each running app:

If you look at the above shot closely, you’ll notice the Weather app in what looks like another layout. What’s happening there is not a new layout, though. It’s simply the wide-interactive layout, shrunk down to an “inactive” size. Thus we called it “shrunk layout” or “shrunk view”.

The button next to personalize in the lower left can be used if the app you’re looking for in the carousel is hard to find: QuickLaunch is sorted alphabetically:

Parallax background [+Win8, sort of, on the Metro Start screen]

Scrolling the canvas (or panning it, if you prefer) is done by grabbing empty space (with mouse or touch) and moving from side to side. To add a little visual interest to this, and to demonstrate the departure from the 3.0 tile scrollers, we added a parallax effect to the background to give you the illusion of looking into the distance on your screen. Several sets of parallax backgrounds were developed for variety’s sake, to be picked in the personalize area.

Magnets

Another major feature of SmartCenter 4.0 was the introduction of something we called “magnets”. These represent active content that originally came either from an app or from SmartCenter itself (in the case of Graffiti magnets). Magnets eliminate the need to start an app when you want to enjoy a favorite piece of content, be it a photo, video or some music you want to keep handy for quick enjoyment. Here are a few magnets placed on the canvas (they can be “pinned” so they always stay visible or “unpinned” to scroll with the canvas):

Here’s what it looks like after panning a bit (while playing the fireplace video):

You can see the pinned magnets haven’t moved and the background looks slightly different (the islands have moved at different paces to give the illusion of depth as they’re moving).

Okay, let’s see what it looks like in action:

TouchSmart 5 (September 2011)

And that brings us to the latest generation of SmartCenter (as of this date), i.e. 5.0. This version of the TouchSmart framework software was brought to market with the just recently introduced 520/420/320 series of TouchSmart PCs. The exterior of the machines has been updated once more to keep up with design trends, but otherwise the single-volume enclosure is still the chosen form.

Integration of Windows apps, desktop icons

The biggest change in SmartCenter 5.0 regards the blending of the two environments that were previously separated: SmartCenter and the Windows Desktop. This means you no longer need to exit the SmartCenter environment when you want to run Windows apps. Here’s a screenshot of SmartCenter 5.0:

Note that the Windows 7 taskbar is fully visible and that you can use it for launching apps and seeing what apps are running. The SmartCenter app carousel now has the icon highlight turned on permanently and only shows a short animated starburst as an app is launched. You also see all your desktop icons represented on the SmartCenter canvas. As you can see, the magnets overlap the desktop icons, which can be a bit of a clutter issue. No worries, you can turn off the desktop icons via Settings, if you don’t like them on the canvas. Or you can rearrange your magnets so they occupy different space:

In general, SmartCenter 5.0 attempts to bring the touch-first environment of past generations together with the traditional, mouse-centric desktop. That’s a value-proposition you don’t have in Windows 8, which is most likely not available until sometime in late 2012 anyway…

Automatic panning/scrolling

One additional thing SmartCenter 5.0 does is automatic panning of the canvas/desktop whenever an app is launched. This removes the need for you to have to rearrange app windows frequently when you want to switch from one app to another. The canvas pans automatically to make more room for every app you start. To return to an app, you just click on it in the taskbar or the app carousel. Another video might explain it a bit better:

This behavior can be turned off in Settings as well, in case it’s not useful to you. There are many, many areas that I haven’t touched on in this post, such as all the personalization and customization aspects that SmartCenter contains and how they changed over time. Or the fact that you can make your own parallax backgrounds (not documented anywhere, unfortunately, but pretty easy to figure out for enterprising souls). Or the easter eggs, oh yes…

Let me make some general remarks about the last four generations of SmartCenter: Any apps written to observe the guidelines of SmartCenter 2.0 are able to run on SmartCenter 2.0 through 5.0. A nice compatibility feature. Of course, older versions of apps needed updates as new SmartCenter functionality was introduced (or removed, as with the media plate removal in 4.0), but as you’ve seen, the Netflix app (which was published with SmartCenter 3.0) runs just fine in SmartCenter 2.0 and 5.0 as well. What’s more, if you know what you’re doing, you can have all the versions of SmartCenter 2.0 – 5.0 running on the same system. That’s how I was able to collect screenshots and videos for this post. Oh, and the technology underlying all these versions of SmartCenter is Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0. The various apps were written in anything from compiled-to-native-code-Python to WPF to Adobe Flash. The software development process used since about SmartCenter 2.5 is anchored in Scrum, an Agile software development framework.

This concludes my brief history of the TouchSmart software. As you have seen, Windows 8 definitely picked up a lot of the features that the SmartCenter framework pioneered: Live tiles, fixed layout sizes for apps, parallax scrolling with an expandable space and touch-first design. Until Windows 8 is available, the TouchSmart 5.0 software suite is most likely the best alternative for touch – combined with new thinking on how to add something more to the the desktop environment – that you’ll find on an all-in-one PC anywhere.

Categories: Agile, HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Opinion, Software, Software development, Windows 7, Windows 8, WPF
22 Comments »

I’ve written about this topic a couple of times before. But it seems like another post is in order since my main box is now running Windows 7 and I’d like to share how Windows 7 has changed in the area of SMART monitoring.

I keep all my “data” on a separate physical hard drive so that in theory it’s easy to swap out the OS drive or upgrade it without too much fear of losing information. This also makes it easy to migrate the data to a bigger drive when I inevitably run out of space. Some time ago I did just that, switching to a 1 TB drive from a 500 GB model.

It had been running well for about a year (I think), when I looked at the SMART data and saw that the reallocated sector count was dangerously close to the limit value. I didn’t think I needed to worry about it quite yet, so I left it alone.

But a few days ago I got a call while at work: “The computer is saying something about a hard drive going bad, and I don’t know what to do.” Oh boy. So I dropped everything after finishing up a meeting and bought a replacement drive (1.5 TB this time), ready to deal with the worst.

As it turned out, things weren’t in too bad of a shape. Windows 7 itself seems to be doing a much better job at monitoring SMART status than Windows XP did:

Just for kicks, I started eventvwr.msc and looked at the System events. Sure enough, there were a couple of entries mentioning disk issues:

For more detail, I looked at SpeedFan’s output:

Yup, the reallocated sector count had reached its limit.

Since Windows 7 ships with the excellent Robocopy command line tool, I decided to use this to copy everything from the failing drive to the new one. I thought I could use a USB-to-SATA adapter I had lying around the house, but after some time I concluded the adapter must be flaky. From time to time the drive connected to it would act funny when looked at with Windows Explorer. Folders wouldn’t refresh when asked to and sometimes folders that were supposed to be on the drive didn’t show up in Windows Explorer. Also, the copy process seemed fishy when looked at with Process Explorer:

Looking at I/O Bytes History, I saw big initial spikes of traffic, then a weird drop-off, followed by a long period of inactivity between each file copy operation. Too bad I don’t remember when I bought that USB-to-SATA device, because it definitely needs to go back for a full refund or replacement.

Anyway, I ended up hooking the new drive up to a free internal SATA port inside the computer, and from then on the copy went quite smoothly. The I/O traffic pattern looked much more evenly distributed.

After finishing the copy, I checked the drive manufacturer’s website to see if the drive was still in warranty. Their online systems couldn’t tell me for some strange reason, even though I typed in the model and serial number correctly, and even the failure code that their test tool spits out. A quick call to their warranty department confirmed that it was still within warranty, and so I initiated the exchange for a fresh drive.

The final step in this was to erase the content of the old drive, just to be sure nobody could get to it, should the manufacturer’s promises of destroying the drive not come to pass. For that I used Eraser, a free tool that has many, many options for overwriting the entire drive with random data patterns, making it pretty much impossible to recover anything.

It’s always a bother when hard drives go bad, but sometimes it is possible to avert complete disaster. Windows 7 is much more proactive than its predecessor XP in terms of early detection of problems. This gives you time to move important data in time.

Of course, should a head crash happen, this would be useless, so I also have an alternate backup. No longer at Mozy, though. With my amount of data and their recent pricing changes, I decided to go with CrashPlan, partly because of their option to ship me a drive for the initial backup so I don’t have to wait for months to upload everything. The other part is that they still offer unlimited storage. And I need that.

Categories: Hardware, Software, Windows 7
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This is what I wanted to see:

Instead I got error messages, followed by a rollback of the uninstall I was in the middle of.

Why did I need to uninstall QuickTime and iTunes? Because after finally upgrading my last Windows XP machine to Windows 7, iTunes wouldn’t start properly.

I searched the web for a while to see if I could find good information about the problem, but all I found was useless, generic “use control panel to uninstall” stuff and google-spam-gamed links advertising some complete uninstaller tools.

So I decided to take matters in my own hands. I fired up an elevated command prompt and regedit and dug through the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Uninstall) to find the uninstall string for removing iTunes. I ran that, and – to my surprise – it worked! All I had to do now was uninstall QuickTime, so I found the uninstall string for that, and kicked it off. I got a warning about uninstalling my Pro Key and confirmed that I wanted to do that. Things seemed to progress nicely, but then the rollback happened. Ugh. So I fired off the uninstall once more, this time adding logging:

MsiExec.exe /I{E7004147-2CCA-431C-AA05-2AB166B9785D} /l*v log.txt

It failed again. Good, now I had a log of the failure. Digging though the log, I found this error:

DEBUG: Error 2769:  Custom Action RemoveQT7ProKey did not close 1 MSIHANDLEs.
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2769. The arguments are: RemoveQT7ProKey, 1,
Action ended 13:58:03: RemoveQT7ProKey. Return value 1.

“Okay, so if that action causes issues,” I thought, “let me see if I can remove it”. To do that, I looked back in the log for the cached MSI file that the uninstall uses:

MSI (c) (F0:B4) [13:57:50:043]: Package we’re running from ==> C:\Windows\Installer\100f740b.msi

I then changed the security descriptors on that MSI so I could modify it and used Orca to drop the row that invokes the custom action that attempts to remove the Pro Key:

MSI (s) (84:6C) [13:58:00:119]: Doing action: RemoveQT7ProKey

I saved the modified MSI, ran it again, and lo and behold – QuickTime uninstalled properly!

Categories: Microsoft, Software, Windows 7
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To mark the release of the TouchSmart 3.0 SDK, HP has a goodie to give away at the Microsoft PDC 09: A super-slim 2 GB USB memory stick (embedded in a hard-plastic business card with a nice imprint). It contains the new SDK and a few documents about a software development partner program HP is starting.

If you see me at PDC, say hi, and I may be able to hand you one of these puppies. I only have a limited supply, though. 15 to be precise.

Check out the pictures:

Front of the card

Back of the card

Back of the card with USB memory stick flipped open/out

Front of the card with USB memory stick flipped open/out

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Software, Software development, Windows 7, WPF
1 Comment »

(Update 2009-11-05: Looks like one more application is now made available for IQ500/800 customers: Twitter)

(Update 2010-02-05: The “shell” has been updated from 3.0.32.0 to 3.0.35.0 on HP’s support site. I’ve updated the link here as well)

I can’t get into every detail of the upgrade process (how to install Windows 7, drivers, etc.), but I thought I would list the HP TouchSmart software applications that are currently available for download and suggest a good order of installation to you. This is all just interim, personal information until something official is made available.

So what’s currently up there on the HP support site? Here’s the list (as of the time of this post) in the order that would be good to follow when installing (again, this may differ from whatever official guidance may come out later; it’s my personal take on it as of right now):

• HP TouchSmart 3.0 itself (the “shell”/the “foundation”), called the HP TouchSmart Application Update 3.0.35.0 (15 MB)
• Music/Photo/Video 3.0.2.3228 (158 MB)
• Notes 3.0.3462.28879 (19 MB)
• Calendar 3.0.3476.32189 (6 MB)
• RSS 3.00.0006 (5 MB)
• Browser 3.00.0008 (3 MB)
• Clock 3.0.3572.25998 (2 MB)
• DVD 3.0.1.3123, called HP MediaSmart DVD (not sure why) (64 MB)
• Weather 3.00.0001 (3 MB)
• Webcam 3.0.1.1903 (61 MB)
• Netflix 1.0.29.0 (4 MB)
• Hulu 0.9.7 (4 MB)
• Twitter 1.0.3541.23899 (6 MB) (new 2009-11-05)
• Live TV 3.00.1924 (46 MB)

Note that the Live TV application only works with a certain set of TV tuner models. I snagged the links in this post (which may get outdated over time) from the updates page for the IQ527. Since your model may be different, the Live TV app may not work for you. That’s partly why it’s listed last.

So there it is, a refresh to work with Windows 7 for all the original applications that came with the IQ500/800, plus three new ones (Netflix, Hulu and Live TV.) A total of 390 MB of new software. All for just the cost of download bandwidth and your time to install everything.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Windows 7
49 Comments »

Just in case you’re wondering (yeah, I know, you probably AREN’T) what you’re missing by buying a new PC (such as the HP TouchSmart 600xt – hint, hint ) with Windows 7 preinstalled, here are some pictures of a Windows 7 upgrade DVD that recently showed up at my doorstep:

Not only is more “happy” coming with Windows 7, as Kylie is fond of saying, if you buy an upgrade, it also brings you a lot of “shiny”.

Categories: Personal, Software, Windows 7
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PCMag.com:

This third-generation TouchSmart PC is boosted by Windows 7′s gesture support, but HP’s custom multitouch software is even more impressive.

But as with the earlier models, on the TouchSmart 600 it’s HP’s custom software that really shines. Version 3.0 is a significant upgrade, offering touch-friendly versions of Hulu, Netflix, Twitter […]

And the HP apps now multitask, letting you hop back and forth by sliding them around with a fingertip. The interface is responsive, and is the benchmark for upcoming Windows 7 all-in-one PCs from Acer, Asus, Dell, Gateway, and MSI.

 Engadget:

[…], but more important is what HP is doing with its own TouchSmart application. It’s added panes for Hulu, Netflix, Twitter and an HP Music Store powered by Rhapsody, which work in nicely with the rest of the touch-friendly apps onboard and a bit of underlying Microsoft technology keeping things humming — like a nice big handwriting pane for quick Rhapsody searches. There’s also a voice controlled recipe app that can capture recipes from popular recipe sites and read them out loud to you, and the photo app can hook up with a phone over Bluetooth and pull off photos.

Gizmodo:

But to really take advantage of the system, you’ll want to use the TouchSmart interface and the wonderful, custom apps.

The one downfall here is that HP has designed TouchSmart to run all of the bundled apps at once. You’re truly multitasking, and that means stacking HDTV, Hulu, Netflix, photo editing, a browser, Twitter, and even more video playback. The system generally handles itself admirably, but the TV tuning definitely tips the scales on occasion (just watch the video for interface stutters). If I were to use the system as my DVR on a regular basis, I’d probably cut down the fat on HP’s apps and buy myself some resources.

I want to love the TouchSmart 600, but I just really, really like it a lot. The functionality is all there; no one can question the full media suite of apps, like Netflix, Hulu, and Twitter, let alone the full Windows 7 OS sitting right behind HP’s optional software. It’s the light performance hiccups coupled with a less than 100% touch interface that stop me from screaming at the top of my lungs, "YOU SHOULD BUY THIS RIGHT NOW OR GIVE UP ON LIFE COMPLETELY."

CNet.com:

While HP has clearly borrowed from Sony in its wall-mounting and video input capabilities, the software designed for its touch interface is unique and just as compelling.

As promising as we find HP’s new touch programs, Recipe Box in particular, we found the touch interface unresponsive at times, and the main touch software carousel can be slow to load.

Neither Sony nor Gateway have put as much effort into their respective touch software as HP has.

You might also appreciate the numerous video tutorials included with the system to help you navigate the new touch software.

Howtohackstuff.com:

HP continues to put its TouchSmart user interface on top of Windows 7 and it is one of the best I have seen. The new stuff comes in the way of applications; there are now loads of new third party applications, including Hulu, Twitter and Netflix. The interface is as smooth as a baby’s bottom and the main set of tiles fan across the screen and you can easily flick to toggle them. Again, check out the full review of the TouchSmart 600 to get a glimpse of how it really works. HP may just have a method to its touch madness.

Laptopmag.com:

Not only is the touch interface on the refreshed tx2 much better than anything else we’ve used on a notebook, HP is adding cool new apps like Twitter and Hulu, with more to come.

What makes the “new” tx2 stand out is what it does with touch.

Unlike the very limited MediaSmart software HP bundled previously, this machine has HP’s full TouchSmart treatment, which means it has the same slick tile interface and nearly all the same applications. These include photos, music, weather, notes, games, a touch-friendly Web browser, and more. Just like on the desktop, you can move smaller menu items to the main menu by dragging the tiles up, or vice versa.

ChipChick.com:

HP has released two new TouchSmart All-in-one PCs and these latest models come preloaded with an  impressive, and very much improved upon set of built-for-touch applications.

GottaBeMobile.com:

HP’s new all-in-one TouchSmart PCs come with an improved touch interface and some new apps. I really like Recipe Box, an application that organizes all of your online recipes. The application can be controlled with your fingers or through a Bluetooth headset. I rarely cook, but I’d probably be willing to spend more time in the kitchen if I had something like this.

The new TouchSmart PCs have a touch interface that’s a lot more lively than previous versions.

The new TouchSmart PCs come with touch applications for Hulu, Netflix and Twitter. Consumers may have fun with these applications, but I found the business applications HP had on display much more compelling.

Edit [adding more stuff just because]:

CrunchGear:

I will hand it to HP and Sony: their interfaces are gorgeous. The HP interface I saw last week has a number of simple tools – a recipe box, for example, that can take recipes from the web and import them into a private database – as well as the standard stretch’n’drag photo and note-taking applications that make touch actually compelling.

I’m sure there will be more, and there will be more criticism too. Developing software is always about trade-offs, and sometimes customers want other trade-offs to be made; that’s why software is never “done”.

But these first few reviews make me feel it was worth the time, working on the TouchSmart software. And yes, the “shell” that hosts all the various applications is still written in WPF. WPF rocks!

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Windows 7, WPF
5 Comments »

How old? How about a laptop shipped in 2000, a Dell CPx H450GT:

Obviously this is from before I started my current job… One of the benefits of my current job is being able to verify soon after RTM that the Windows 7 bits you can obtain “out there” have not been messed with. Anyway, let’s see how it looks:

There’s no display driver for this system’s ancient ATI Rage Mobility M1, so it runs in standard 800*600. Thus the black frame inside the physical bezel. On to the desktop:

No sound driver, either. I think it’s an ESS Maestro 2 or something. I haven’t really spent a lot of time looking for drivers. This system used a Xircom RBEM56G-100 multifunction Ethernet/Modem CardBus card for network connectivity, and as you can see there’s also no driver for that (“x” over the network icon in the notification area.)

Okay. On to some system specs:

A 450 Mhz Pentium III. 256 MB RAM. Naturally, Windows 7 wouldn’t normally install on something as low end as this, but there are ways around that. They involve making a bootable USB drive, copying the Windows 7 install files onto it and then messing a little with a hex editor and winsetup.dll.

Now the most interesting part: actual performance of the system:

Not too shabby. Only 28 processes and it’s able to run with 256 MB with 87 MB Available. The processor curve looks pretty normal too. Mind you, this thing probably won’t be able to run much else than a browser, but since I didn’t look for network drivers I don’t have Internet access from this system anyway.

Well, there you have it. A really old laptop, running Windows 7. Pretty cool. Great job, Microsoft!

I was going to try this on two other systems I have lying around (collecting dust) as well, but one of them failed with an ACPI Stop error 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0×50434146,…) which, after some digging, turned out to mean that the BIOS on this system didn’t follow the ACPI specs of the FACP table. More digging into the BIOS showed that the length entry in the table (and the table length itself) is supposed to be longer than it is, although it actually is as long as the table entry says. The other system is so old that it doesn’t have the ability to boot from USB, and the CD drive is unable to read CD-R discs, so it’s more trouble than it’s worth. It’s only got a PII 400 MHz and 192 MB RAM, too. That would be really interesting to see running Windows 7.

So, maybe Windows 7 really can breathe new life into old hardware. This may be a little extreme, but anything from within the last five years should probably do just fine. If it follows the ACPI specs and can boot from USB or CD/DVD, that is.

Categories: Experiment, Hardware, Software, Windows 7
2 Comments »

A lot has been written about how Windows Vista Ultimate was a major disappointment. First it was billed as the version that would “keep on giving” in the form of Ultimate Extras – cool new features that would be exclusive to Ultimate customers. When those extras finally materialized most people were underwhelmed. The extras were mostly Language Packs, DreamScene (with a few content packs) and a game or two. And for that, people paid a hefty premium over the Home Premium edition.

Now Microsoft has published special early upgrade pricing to entice people to rush out and get Windows 7 “while supplies last”. And they’re at it again. Guess what the upgrade price for Windows 7 Ultimate is:

Yup.

$219.99!

Sorry to shout there. At least this time there’s no promise of “Extras”. Only BitLocker and Language Packs (in addition to the Professional features). Not sure that’s worth $120 over the Professional Upgrade or $170 over Home Premium (even considering XP mode.)

Oh, and you can’t do an edition “downgrade” from Vista to 7. You can buy the upgrade package, but you’ll have to use it to do a “custom install” (i.e. clean install) and then reinstall all your programs and data. Despite that inconvenience, I’ll go for the Home Premium upgrade, thank you very much. I’m done being an Ultimate customer. Or is that Ultimate fool?

(And just for the record, Windows 7 is a fantastic product in my opinion. I hope Paul Thurrott is right when he says it may be the next Windows NT. Unfortunately he also seems to be right about how Microsoft can mess things up with their pricing)

Categories: Microsoft, Software development, Windows 7
1 Comment »