Tablet PC Blogs

Building the Community One Blog at a Time.
Welcome to Tablet PC Blogs Sign in | Join | Help
in
Home Blogs Forums Photos

MiniMage Again - Short Tablet Takes

Hopefully this will be the blog that has short, frequent entries about doing the TabletPC thing.

If you like any of this, I welcome you to check out my general tech blog at http://miniaturemage.blogspot.com/

Connection Between 4.82-9 Wacom Drivers and the TIP?

Most TabletPC enthusiasts know about the notorious memory leak issue associated with Windows XP TabletPC Edition 2005’s Tablet Input Panel (TIP).  Just today, I was reading a post to the Microsoft TabletPC newsgroup, in which someone requested a status update regarding the fix that Microsoft programmers are developing.  It occurred to me that for some time (weeks? months? I am ashamed to admit I don’t know), I have rarely had to run the little batch file that some of us Tableteers use as a work-around, and I wondered why.  I recall that my memory upgrade made the problem occur less frequently, but that only meant running the batch file fewer times a day, not practically eliminating it altogether.

Months ago, I installed the 4.82-9 version of the Wacom Penabled drivers. It didn’t take me long to discover that response at the top of my tablet screen was negatively impacted, but it wasn’t until a few hours ago that I finally re-installed the 4.79-4 version of the drivers.  Within a couple of hours, I noticed my machine was sluggish; a look into the Task Manager showed my TIP using up 80% or more CPU.  I had to resort to my clearink batch file again.

I wonder if this is just coincidence, or if the newer Wacom drivers were somehow making my TIP behave. If there were a connection, someone else would have noticed…right?
Published Sunday, June 12, 2005 2:48 AM by minimage

Comments

 

Layne P. Heiny said:

I tend to reboot so often that the memory leak is not an issue. Birdie, though, complains about the Acer being slow after she has been using it for awhile. I'll have to ask her to check the driver version and maybe you are making a good point and others should check their driver versions.

Anyone else?
June 12, 2005 10:48 AM
 

Warner Crocker said:

Interesting supposition/inference, MiniMage. I've been alternating between the workaround and the reboot issue so I haven't noticed the problem. I'm like you though, I would have think we would have seen something posted somewhere about this if others had noticed the issue. Did you post this over on the Buzz. Not sure Dan Tower has made it over here yet, but he seems to be quite quick in getting issues with the Wacom drivers looked into.

WC
June 12, 2005 1:52 PM
 

Texas said:

I have the 4.82-9 driver, and the memory leak problem. I use a Toshiba M200 and it got so irritating that I uninstalled SP2. That was the only way I could get acceptable performance. I reboot every day too. My problem was that it was unpredictable. I would be in the middle of a meeting taking notes in OneNote, and all of a sudden my pen would slow to a crawl. Words would show up 10 seconds after my scribbling. That made the tablet useless. I tried lots of stuff, rebboting, clearing the TIP.exe file etc. I finally just reverted to the old TIP and everything works wonderfully. I'm anxiously awaiting a real fix from Microsoft.
June 13, 2005 7:55 AM
 

minimage said:

Looks like it was just wishful thinking on my part. I haven't seen any other TIP-related problems, and I'm still on 4.72-4.

I didn't get my quick response at the top of the screen back either.

I'd really like to know what did make my TIP start behaving.
June 19, 2005 2:01 AM
Anonymous comments are disabled
Powered by Community Server, by Telligent Systems