Tuesday, October 21, 2008

u810 xp tablet installation

I spent a whole day on the fujitsu u810. This post is going to be tedious as I made several mistakes approaching a reinstallation which will probably be disorganized and confusing so I'll list a simple summary in the end. It's my policy to have a clean install on any new computer as I've yet to see any computer with software that is not necessary and slows the computer down. Secondly vista will not work on a 1gb computer. Since the u810 cannot be upgraded beyond 1gb. There is readyboost for vista but the performance in some tests are only a few percent. A google search also reveal a less than perfect approach because of media compatibility with the existing sd/cf/usb readyboost drives along with the u810 chipset.

I moved ahead to an easy recovery disk install of windows xp tablet that is included with fujitsu u810 with vista business. The process was easy as I had a portable dvd drive. Ironically I was not able to startup u810 with an external usb hard drive, usb stick, usb floppy, and even sd/cf media... Maybe I did something wrong (I did add all options and put removed the harddrive startup option in bios). It was a success with the dvd but I noticed a second recovery? partition(shows as second drive) and adobe reader. This was when I started to get ready for a clean tablet installation from downloading software from fujitsu website.

This is when everything went to hell... I had a previous msdn subscription so I had tablet. The installation was successful and I was able to remove the recovery partition permanently but there is a keyboard that should bootup along with the logon screen. There was a border of the keyboard but it was entirely blank. Google search reviews nothing of what the problem is and I installed service pack 3 so I gave a call to a trusted engineer. I was than able to acquire a xp tablet disk and installed it fine with the full keyboard showing up. One headache gone till i hit another snag. It seems the software downloaded from the website is incomplete as I could not find the omnipass (fingerprint software) after installing everything. I also noticed an extremely annoying "SetSlate returned error. FjSetSlt is exiting" error after a reboot. A google search showed no solution but I realized what the problem was which will be explained later. Fed up with the error and omnipass I started a reinstallation with the fujitsu recovery disk for xp tablet 2005.

Success again with a fully functioning xp 2005 tablet installation. Now another self inflicted headache by wanting to update the 5 software updates listed on the fujitsu website. I installed the first 3 noticable files which is the audio, video, and o2micro mediaslot drivers. Huge mistake. I realized that the audio and video driver requires a complete removal, reboot and than install to get the new version. The mediaslot update however is worst of all because it completely inactivated my sd card slot. I did not realize this at first but it seems the driver simply made any sd card inserted detected for the first 1-2 seconds and than completely disappearing from the device manager. I even called fujitsu about this before identifing the problem with the software. All I can say is fujitsu is useless for any real technical support. Windows xp tablet have default drivers to access the sd card fine enough. I installed the updated u810_button utility which called the dreaded "SetSlate returned error. FjSetSlt is exiting error" on login. The fix is again to you have to uninstall BOTH the utility/driver and install the driver first. rebooting, installing utility second. Apparently it has something to do with some left over files that cause a conflict with the loading of the new utility. (Make sure you delete the program files/fujitsu/utility folder if an uninstallation did not solve the problem)

Everything runs perfect at this point with no paging file with updated microsoft update on 10/21/2008. Unfortunately no ominpass version 5 availble (it is available for vista on the website). You can edit the startup with msconfig or installing spybot to remove all fuji specific startup programs and it will save you 100mb of ram. Try not to install windows defender as that will take around 50mb from 2 processes. You can also save another 20 megabyte by removing tabtip.exe startup. All it does is enable a small box where you click your cursor expands to a keyboard(similar but not as obnoxiously large as the middle button which launches the keyboard) but I find it very useful so I left it on. I am running well at 400mb memory usage at startup by also removing relteck audio startup processes. It runs relatively well even running photoshop cs3 (no large files). I even ran inkseine somewhat well but because it is research technology it is not memory efficient as it is the only program that gave me a out of memory error.

So in summary:
1) Try to install xp tablet 2005 from recovery cd if you have vista business.
2) If you install from genuine tablet 2005, omnipass may be missing.
3) Installing updated software from fujitsu website wil require you to remove the software before installing the new software. You may also want to run driver installations first and reboot before installing it's subsequent utilities.
3) You may skip the Mediaslot_02micro installation if you have no problems with the sd slot.
4) Some vista files from fujitsu website will work in xp (example sys-extension-drv) however the omnipass will not install.
---5) An internet search actually turned up that omnipass 5 can be installed from software in the drivers cd shipped with fujitsu. Sure enough in the vista folder of omnipass folder it upgraded my version 3 to 5 (Unlike the wrong os warning downloaded from the website).

Thoughts:
1) Wondering if Omnipass should be uninstalled... The three services OPXPApp.exe (20M), scureapp.exe(10M), omniserv.exe(10M) seems a little high considering all I use the fingerprint for is to login which is in itself not that secure really.

Notes:
1. I'm not the smartest tool in the shed cause I did not notice that the tablet pen from the u810 actually extends an inch more if you pull the tip a bit.

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