Blue Onion Software

I’m one of those lucky blokes that got a tablet PC at PDC 09 last year. It’s a nice little laptop with good battery life and a bright screen. I’ve not used the touch interface much. Windows applications feel a bit too uncomfortable on a small touch screen.

I’ve been running Visual Studio 2010 RC on my laptop for a while now. It seems to have a somewhat strained relationship with the tablet features.

One issue I was having was that I could not open several dialogs including the File Open Dialog and the Add References Dialog. The former was annoying but the later was down right intolerable. Whenever I tried to open any of these dialogs, all I got was a brief flicker of the program frame. No dialog. Total bummer.

I’ve come to find that the issue had to do with the Tablet PC Input Services. I had disabled this service (Microsoft’s recommendation) to work around a crash in intellisense. Later on the dialog issues started. I didn’t connect the two events because of the lag between the time I disabled the service and the dialogs not working.

Enabling the Tablet PC Input Service fixed the issue with the dialogs. I’m sure there’s a logical connection to why this should be but it’s certainly not obvious from an end user perspective. Anyways, I thought I would relay my experience in case anyone else encounters this issue.

I’ve had this weird problem on my new laptop where the Bluetooth mouse stops working. Sometimes using the scroll wheel reactivates it but most of the time I have to turn off, and then turn on the Bluetooth radio (FAIL). I was sure it had something to do with the power management on the mouse. After a few hours of fiddling I found that it was indeed a power management setting, but for the Bluetooth adapter, not the the mouse. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to disable the power management for Bluetooth devices on Windows 7.

Right click on “Computer” on the desktop or in the start menu and select properties. You should see a something similar to below:

Select Device Manager (yellow highlight). Expand the Bluetooth Radios item and select the Bluetooth device.

Uncheck the “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”

It’s likely the dialog windows on your computer will be slightly different than the ones pictured here but the general idea is the same.

IE8 has this annoying habit on my wife’s computer of not working with some Web sites. Same computer, same Web site using Opera or Firefox works fine. She prefers IE8 so after a few moments of poking around I discovered that I had to enable session cookies. Here’s how:

Open the IE Options dialog, click on the privacy tab and then Advanced.

and then enable session cookies.

This cleared up the problems although I don’t know why. Maybe someone can explain what’s happening and what the risks are if any?

I’ve been running the RTM version of Windows 7 for about 2 weeks now and I have to say it works so smoothly as to be boring. I’m actually having to “just use” my computer. No tweaking, no tinkering. What’s a “Dyed in the wool” geek like myself suppose to do?

There are plenty of articles out there about all the features so I won’t repeat them here. However, there are a few tidbits I’ve come across that are worth mention.

• Search – Just drop dead on. Fast, accurate and topical. It’s Google for your desktop. I don’t feel the need to use launchers like (the very excellent) Launchy.
• Shutdown progress – The process of shutting down shows you the status of programs as they close. I can’t find a screen shot of this but it’s emblematic of the subtle and useful touches found everywhere.

My Bluetooth headset has never worked better, music sounds better and stuff, well, just works. I could get use to just “using my computer”.