Tonight I installed Windows XP Tablet Edition on Arwen’s mom’s old PC. It’s pretty cool, but trying to “write” using a mouse isn’t exactly optimal. I was doing some reading about the Tablet stuff in WinXP, and everything was talking all “Oooh, you can only get Tablet Edition with a Tablet PC, and it won’t work on anything else.”
Here’s the thing: TE is just XP Pro with handwriting & voice recognition on a second disc. I know this because I ran the installation once without having burned the second disc, and since I didn’t put that in, I ended up with a normal XP Pro install.
Next up, I’m going to get an old Wacom tablet, and see if I can’t get some sorta mangled version of what you’d have with a “real” tab.
Of course, it’s not like it’d be portable or anything, but hey, the idea of voice and handwriting transcription is kinda cool to play around with.
Also, I told Frank about Cerberus today. They’re still using the great opensource OneOrZero Helpdesk (OZH) over there, which made me feel good, since it was the one thing I did in the year that I was there that I really felt like I brought to the table on my own, from outta nowhere. Cerberus is $300/Domain or something, but if the demo and the quick installation I did here on the home server are any indication, it’s the sorta thing that’s well worth the bux.
And now, it’s about 1am, and I’m burnt, so I’m going to bed.
Alsoplus, the tablet edition just crapped its little digital pants, so I’m going to go reboot that. I’m pretty sure that one of two things is happening:
1) The hard drive in the machine is foozled.
2) The Intel WiFi NIC is confusing the bejezus outta XP (it’s intended for laptops, and then wrangled onto a PCI card: UG-A-LEE.
