This weekend I finally installed the final Vista on my tiny tablet. Which is an old notebook with (these days) unimpressive specs but just refuses to retire. Easy to carry, runs XP and VS 2005 quite well and so far behaved well under the Vista beta's. Beside Vista I installed the "Vista experience pack for Tablet PC and "Ink Desktop". Pen and ink integration were already quite good and now I have this:
Some observations
- Multilingual handwriting is installed by default. I run an English OS with regional settings set to Dutch. Both handwritings are recognized very, very well. I just wish my primary school teacher, with whom I had a continuing struggle on my handwriting, could see this. He was right, my handwriting is terrible. But Vista understands.
- Switching recognition language is in the menu of the input panel. The input panel itself is a big improvement over the one in XP Tablet PC edition. The two way interaction with any text input control is great.
- Ink desktop lets you scribble right on the desktop. The content is saved over sessions, no need for loose notes, just use the desktop itself.
- The equation writer not only recognizes individual characters but also their relative position in the equation. It requires a tidier hand writer than the input panel, as recognizes on a character instead of a word base.
- Vista requires a good graphics card. My old tablet does not have DX9 in hardware which shows off. No Aero is not the main point. The response of the machine is good but when it's busy the repaint of the desktop can lag behind for a very long time. The good thing is that Vista smoothly multitasks, the bad thing is that it really needs good graphic hardware.
