My Digital Life

In place Win 7 upgrade of my Fujitsu U810

My in place upgrade with Windows 7 from Vista went smoothly on my Fujitsu U810 and I am typing this post on it using Word 2007. That said there were 5 issues, all related to drivers when the upgrade was completed:

• The mouse stick was erratic. I had to uninstall the Alps pointing device driver in the control panel. I need to find a solution.
• The pen`s calibration was out whack. I tried to use Fujitsu calibration, which did not work. I had to use the Win 7 calibration; start/search calibration for calibrate the screen for pen or touch input.
• OmniPass Control Center would not start. The fingerprint sensor driver installed correctly and the Windows logon works fine. In order to make to run the OmniPass application you need to set compatibility mode to Vista. This is done by going right clicking on the application, clicking on Properties and selecting the compatibility tab. I do find that when I run OmniPass it does seem to hog the CPU, so I use sparingly.

• Fujitsu buttons under the screen did not work. You need to remove the Button utility and driver. Then reinstalling them by setting the compatibility mode to Vista on the setup utility. The catch is that you must do this after the downloaded file from the Fujitsu web is extracted. This means that once the install routine starts (after the extraction) you must cancel the install. Then you need to open file explorer to C:\drivers\BUTTON-DRIVER_FUJITSU_V2.0.1026.2006_XPTPC,VISTA_CA40701-S725 and change the compatibility setting for setup to Vista and check run as administrator. You can then double click on setup to install the driver. Do the same for the button utility setup under C:\drivers\BUTTON-UTILITY_FUJITSU_V7.00.0910.2007_XPTPC . Reboot and voila, although I have not gotten the screen rotation to work yet.
• Auto screen rotation did not work. On my to-do list, but the work around is manual screen rotation.

 

The U810 has a lot of weaknesses most notably the lack of memory and 800MHZ processor but for Word and IE it works quite well. I use a 1GB Readyboost SD card and always have the power settings at to maximum performance. The battery lasts a little under 4 hours which works for my use.

Windows 7 clearly helps this little UMPC in performance and disk usage (I gained 7GB after Vista). It is not the best experience but for the 1.3lbs small package it works while traveling. I use suspend and hibernate to make the startup process as fast as possible, but always plan on 3-4 minutes to get started and plug in every chance I get. With my iGo charger I can pretty much charge anywhere I have access to power (AC, car and plane).

Here are some good links. I still have some debugging to do and will update this post. The bottom line Windows 7 works very well and I am not going back…

http://forum.pocketables.net/archive/index.php/t-1651.html

http://katastrophos.net/andre/blog/2009/01/03/installing-windows-7-build-7000-on-fujitsu-u810/

http://support.fujitsupc.com/CS/Portal/supportsearch.do

Back from my 2 week hiatus

 I thought I would blog during my vacation but I never found the time or inclination to write...It did give me a chance to ponder what my upcoming blog posts should be about. Here are some of those thoughts:

The big announcement while I was away was the release date and specification of Apple's 3G phone. I still have not watched Steve Jobs keynote, but from all the blog posts, I have perused, it looks like it was mostly about the price and 3G performance. On the price side, I found the new agreement with AT&T to subsidize the 3G iPhone very interesting. Finally someone at AT&T has realized that they were not going to stop the hackers, you have to change the economics to make it less appealing to SIM unlock the iPhone. In the end, Apple does not care, they get their money one way or another. It also looks like AT&T made sure that the T-Mobile USA 1700 3G network band was not included. Even if I forgo the economics of signing a contract with AT&T and terminating it, the fact that I can't use the iPhone on the T-Mobile 3G network is a real negative. In the end I will have to wait for July 11th to see all the fine print before making any decision. All that said, at $199, this device is going to fly off the shelves. It was to bad that there was no announcement or inkling of any MID type computer.

I used my Tilt with the HTC Windows Mobile 6.1 ROM update extensively (I found it very stable) during my vacation and found it to be very stable. I had my iPhone with me but never really used it. I was in France for 10 days, purchased an SFR (Vodafone) pay as you go SIM card. Windows Mobile 6.1 detected the 3G network instantly, although the APN was wrong. It was configured as SFRWEB when it should have been SFRWAP. With the SFR pay as you go plan, you only have access to a subset of the Internet, however I was able to synchronize with Exchange via ActiveSync. I ended up not using data very much because of the cost. All in all it was convenient having a local number but with the Dollar's exchange rate it is more of a luxury than a necessity.

Every hotel we stayed at had free WIFI. This made accessing the web to synchronize my email and watch some US news (via SlingPlayer) from the Tilt a breeze. Another valuable benefit was using HotSpot@Home with my wife's T409. We were able to call back to the US for free. We were able to do this at 2 of the three hotels. I kept getting a connection failed at the one hotel. In the two hotels we were able to use HotSpot@Home, the connection at one was much better but at both hotels the service was usable. I can't emphasize how great a feature this is even if it is not 100% stable.

My other pet project while on vacation was to use my new Fujitsu U810 MID Tablet PC. I mentioned earlier that I ended up not using the iPhone I brought with me. I think the biggest reason was having full browsing access on the U810. With the current iPhone's ROM version, what makes it appealing to use is that it is fun and that Safari works very well. If you take that away, other than having iTunes, I had no real need for the device. Obviously the 2.0 ROM and all of the potential applications will be a game changer. The other piece of my project was the ability to easily transfer pictures from my camera which I will blog about later.

My review of the Cellpoint Flamingo Music earphones was published on pocketnow.com while I was away.