So I have this old Averatech c3500 Tablet PC, manufactured in 2005. Now I will tell you strait up that I got this as a vanity toy (with the justification of being more productive) back when because Tablet PCs where going to be the next big thing in computers. Because? Well because Microsoft wrote an operating system just for them for one thing (addon to be honest). For those that may not be familiar with the term or the OS: Tablet PCs are a basically a computer with a touch screen/pen interface. You can click here for more information.

As the situation stands now Tablet PCs in this form have never really taken off as a practical choice of actually doing what they were designed for, or more honestly pitched for. The pitch was, as far as business use, this machine would be your electronic note pad for meetings. It could work just like a regular note pad in that you could scratch out notes and diagrams and even color a purple cow when the meeting got really lame.  The reality is using an actual note as it turns out has the advantage of never running out of battery power, freezing up when when the OS decides it has some back ground task that it has to take care that is more important then whatever it is you are doing, and well paper note pads don’t get really hot. Most manufactures chose to produce machines that were and still are heavily short on CPU power for energy conservation so using as both pen and paper replacement and an actual productive laptop left consumers with few options in this area.

This particular machine was one of the best as far as CPU power but the end result was that it quickly retired as a “work” machine and became a portable web browser. After IE 7 and XP SP3 the lag form back ground OS operation became such an overhead that the pen would not even function as a usable device. I was reluctant to do a fresh re-install the OS with an XP SP3 or SP2 release because the manufacture, Averatec, had not upgraded the drivers since release, and you had to do few “extra” things to get the Tablet PC edition stuff during installation. Wasn’t worth the time, so the machine has had the OEM install of the OS which became slower and slower with every Windows update. I have upgraded the ram to 1 gig up from 500 meg.

So 4 years on and Tablet PCs looked to be a thing for the history books. Vista had all but killed this a generation in this market. Even though Vista has all the functionality of the Tablet PC features built in. But you could not find an machine with enough horsepower to run it. Windows 7 to the rescue of the tablet for some of these old single core machines?

I heard about the PDC demo where a netbook was used to demo Windows 7 and since then everyone is seeing how low they can go with installing Windows 7 on these smaller machines. So I had to give it a try. I knew I could expect problems but again with the role that the machine was currently playing I had little to loose other then perhaps time.

First issue was that the manufacture no longer supports that device or even acknowledges that the device even exited according to their website. So finding a compatible device drivers was very likely to prove to be a show stopper here. This also meant that I wanted to back up the current drive so I could reverse everything should it prove unusable. Second major problem was that I had no good way to get Windows 7 on the machine. Even though the machine has a DVD player its one of those that fails to properly read DVD-Rs. I have 2 gig thumb drive but alas Win7 comes in a 2.43 gigs on the 32bit version.

So I had a little planning to make this happen. First I wanted to back that old hard drive up so I could reverse it if I had to. Fortunately Windows 7 on my main rig and a laptop IDE to standard IDE converter gave me everything I need to do this. One of Windows 7 new tricks is that you can create and mount VHDs out of the box and here’s a good opportunity to put this to use.I will need to remove the hard drive for the laptop and mount it as a drive on my desk top/bench machine. Fortunately most on most laptops this is pretty easy to do.

Now I wanted to back this thing up verbatim so I could restore should I need to. The VHD (virtual hard drive) is the perfect solution for this.  So first I created my VHD through Computer Manager:

I’m going to select a space out on a network drive where I have at least as much space as the actual physical space of the laptop drive. I’m also going to chose Dynamically Expanding  disk option which will take up as little space as necessary.

Now I am going to mount it that VHD as one of my system drives.

Above I have chosen to attach the VHD I just created. We can see in our drive layout that the system sees it and if we go to My Computer it looks like a normal drive.

Now I simply use Robocopy to copy the full contents of my laptop drive on to my new VHD. The following comand should copy over all partition and hidden files as well. Just about this command though, I have had problems with coping dynamic disk in this manor. 
ROBOCOPY X:\ Y:\ /e /efsraw /copyall /dcopy:t /r:0
Where X is the source and Y is the destination. As the information is copied over the file of the VHD will expand to meet the contents of the source drive. So once the information is backed up I can detach that VHD until I need it to restore the drive or if there is information I need to get off of it a I can simply attach the drive, get what I need and off again.

Now that I have my laptop drive backed up I free to clear off that drive. So I delete the partition. Now as I said before I have a problem because, for what ever reason, the DVD drive in the laptop will read my burned Windows 7 disk. So I create a 2.5 gig partition on the drive and make it active. Using robocopy once again with the switches above I copy the full content of the DVD to the laptop hard drive. Now I simply remount the laptop hard drive in the laptop and boot the system and Windows 7 install will come up and I can begin installing Windows 7 on the remaining un-partitioned portion of the drive.

The install went very smooth until it became time for the Windows to reboot the machine and boot off the newly installed Windows. For some reason the installer could not “set” the BCD which tells the machine how to but. So the Windows installer failed then kicked back to the original begin installation screen. One of the choices on this screen is to repair Windows, so… I ran it. I tells me that it found the problem and repaired it. I reboot the machine and Windows 7 begins to boot. Cool.

So after going through all the initial first run information I’m in Windows and I first go to device manager to see what devices Windows doesn’t recognize. On the shit list are both the WiFi and wired NIC cards, the audio card and the video card along with another device that I expect is the digitizer. Pretty much what I expected. It really sucks to not have network card up by the way because if you can’t get online then you can’t check for driver updates;  one of the most useful tools I have found for just this situation is my Linksys USB NIC. That, coupled with the USB drive with my NICs driver makes life much much easier in getting new machines up and updated.

Ok I’m online, I go to the unrecognized devices hit update drivers, fully expecting for this not to work from my many years experience <***chough*vista*cough***>, and what do you know; one by one the drivers are found for each device. Coolness!

I did have and still do have a problem with the Video drive (SiS m741). Whenever I install the new device driver here I get a black screen. This seems to be a trend problem with Windows 7 in multiple display cards and I’m not sure its in symptomatic or some sort of underlining short coming but I had the same symptom occur on my desktop with first run. It went away with the installation of Nvidia’s new driver. No such luck the laptop but still works ok with the generic VGA drive.

And the bottom line, this machine is running better with Windows 7 then it did under XP. The tablet potion not only works but woks better then it ever did under XP as I have no lag with the cursor keeping up with me moving the pin.  There are some down sides right now however. First is that the screen will no longer rotate because of the video driver of course and the system dose not recognize the front panel controls used when in tablet form. These are not likely issues to be resolved on my part soon as a said the OEM no longer supports the machine but no biggie. The biggest gotcha however is that the machine will not sleep, disabled for some reason, and I will have to resolve this. I still have a better web surfing machine then I did under XP and a usable tablet. Yea Windows 7!  Apples to apples may not be completely fair as I said this is a machine that had an OEM OS install still on it. So maybe I will blog again in 5 years on how this old girl is running then.