OmegaMan's Musings

As of 11/11/2012 Acer does not support the Iconia 6120 for windows 8 either by its Windows upgrade assistant or via any downloads for the notebook in its support section. All drivers are a year old and only for Windows 7. Windows 8 can be installed and it works, but the lower screen, nor the specialized keyboard button (on the side of the laptop) does not bring up the keyboard. Making the tablet ineffective as a Windows 8 platform.

I recently began my Windows 8 journey by installing the developer preview on an Acer Iconia 6120 or more commonly know as the dual touch screen laptop or touchbook as they have named it. My goal is to learn the metro style programming and experience the wave of the future in application development on tablet and smaller items. I am primarily a C# Silverlight developer so it is fundamental that I understand exactly what the pro’s and con’s of creating applications to the next version of windows will entail. The following are some of my initial thoughts on what I have run into as I have begun this journey which can be read by developers and non developers alike.

Souping up the TouchBook

I had purchased the Acer off of Ebay from a company which claimed they used differing laptops for demos for roughly a week, no more than ten hours of usage promised, and would sell them in a non new condition.. Long story short is that I didn’t have to pay MSRP on this gem so technically its used, but that is fine for my purposes.

There are many reasons purchasing this Touchbook which I will speak to, but the primary was for its cool factor of dual touch screens.  But I must admit that while waiting for shipment (which was delayed for a week unbeknownst to me from the seller (grrr)) my loathing began to take hold. I wondered if the dual screens would be functional within Windows 8 and thus would end up being a nice door stop for a future unknown open door draft choice in my house?

I also knew that Acer ships it with a Windows 7, so the possibility of bricking both screens felt remote and that the tablet is up to Microsoft’s specs for the minimum for Windows 8 screen resolution wise was 1024×768 and the screens on the Iconia are both 1366×768.

On the downside one of coolest features found on the Iconia would probably not be there on Windows 8. That feature is where a user places his or her palms (see virtual keyboard) on the lower screen, hence bringing up Acer’s full sized virtual keyboard and yes it did not come over for Windows 8. As of this writing I am still unaware of how to get the target software to bring up Acer’s virtual keyboard which does come up in the bios actually. THe windows virtual keyboard does make its appearance as designed for Windows 8 albeit smaller form factor than the Inconia’s.

The machine I choose had to be one where I could actively develop upon it and had to have more horse power than most of the tablets out there and the Acer fit that bill for dual usage. The fact that it came with an Intel Core I5 chip with four gig of ram meant that I could develop metro apps on Visual Studio 2011 preview, which requires 64bit at this time, and have a peppy machine to boot.

Alright you ask, what did you do to soup it up?

Once I got the laptop, I took off the backing panel of the Acer and removed it’s 640 gig Western Digital (5400 rpm) hard drive and gave it some real power with a Kingston SSDNow V+100 solid state drive. Its capacity is only 96 gig which is fine for a development machine to hold the OS and tools. I actually have one it in my primary work machine, a Dell XPS 17 Core I7 laptop, which I use on a daily basis, so it was a no brainer to use the Kingston again for the Acer. The above windows experience of 4.2 with the SSD is no barn burner it really does the job.

My Touching Windows 8 Experience

Now it is obvious that Microsoft has an Alpha version on their hands here but frankly the experience has been anything as such. I have yet to blue screen or have any major problems. It is apparent that Windows 8 builds off of Windows 7 for all drivers I have installed have installed without problems. The following are the problems or situations I have encountered using the Dual screen

Extended Windows Not Behaving as Expected

1. Since the Acer is a Frankenstein dual screen tablet and a single screen the OS wants to treat the lower screen as just an extension of the top screen and it just doesn’t flow right.
   1. Only one screen is the full Windows 8 experience while the other screen is always the Windows 7 experience. When both screens are the seven experience, when dragging a window by touch to the lower window, the non touch area stops the window and the menu bar (the part which needs to be touched to have it moved) is stuck in the upper window and there is no way to flick it down to the lower window and a mouse must be used instead.
   2. Touching the lower screen also sends touch notifications to the upper screen. I believe this is a bug and hopefully will be fixed in upcoming versions.
2. When working with a third screen attached from the HDMI port there is no way to have all three screens active in any configuration. So I have had to leave off the bottom screen when I work with an external monitor. The situation is shown below in the screen shots when trying to get all of them to work. The left picture shows the Iconia running with both screens while the right screen show s the monitor configuration I have to deal with while having the lower Iconia screen inactive. (Note even though the lower screen is inactive when using the other monitor the touch is still active on the screen and its actions are sent to the upper screen. Big bug.)
    

General Observations

1. Most of the default Metro apps do not work on either of the Iconia’s screens! One touches them, the title splash screen comes up and eventually a blank screen of the default background color of the apps tile is shown. This situation, not related to the Iconia, has been reported to Microsoft (see When I click on an application tile, nothing happens. How can I launch the Metro applications?) and the answer was that the apps were running in less than 1024×768 resolution. For the Iconia this is not the case and should exceed that threshold by being 1366×768. In summary:
   1. Most apps fail on the Iconia’s screens and do not properly load.
   2. Most apps run on the third connected screen when the Windows 8 experience is brought to It.
   3. No error message is shown to the user.
   4. Developed apps (at least the few I have done), using the developer preview of Visual Studio 2011 work on the touch experience.
2. Windows 8 doesn’t play well with non touch monitors. Sometimes the Windows 8 experience jumps on to the monitor and the program is expecting touch (?) actions and one has to force the windows 7 experience back to the monitor.
3. IE 10 sometimes incorrectly reports a URL of another tab than the page being viewed when multiple tabs are being used.
4. No Aero experience with Windows Key-Tab under W7 experience and if done under the W8 experience it is a single view change.
5. Microsoft Virtual Keyboard needs to adapt to larger screens to give the full keyboard effect. The slimmed keyboard is frustrating to use when typing in passwords with numbers or symbols and one has to click over to show a different layout. If the screen real estate is available why not use it, or at least allow the user to configure it.

Summary

The touch experience of Windows Eight is still a long way off from being a reality. Frankly there needs to be a way to lock the experience of Windows 8 or Windows 7 to certain screens depending on the screens needs. It is a nice to have in certain situations say a true tablet experience, but the laptop or touch screens will want the older Windows 7 experience for the most part. I suspect that need to be accommodated by Microsoft as the versions evolve over time. So far I can use the Acer Iconia 6120 for my development purposes, but a true stand alone Windows 8 platform it is a long way off from being a useful stand alone experience.

This article discusses the pitfall of simple sharing in XP and why it may fail when one tries to browse the share from Windows 7 or even Vista.

I had two events which conspired against me. I updated a shared resource (hard drive) on an XP SP3 machine and updated my primary computer to Windows Seven. On my XP machine I turned on sharing and opened it up.

When I went to browse the share from Windows 7 I got this message:

Network Error 
Windows cannot access \\OMEGA\Terra
You do not have permission to access \\OMEGA\Terra. Contact your network administrator to request access. For more information about permissions, see Windows Help and Support

It stumped me for awhile until I realized that my previous hard drive was setup long ago and the sharing was the advance share. I also vaguely remember years ago thinking simple sharing was a crock…but that was a long time ago.

The new hard drive used the simple sharing, why I don’t know,  and it frankly falls short. Here are the steps I took to get XP to be viewable from Windows 7 and Vista. All on the XP machine:

1. Windows Explorer-> Tools menu –> Folder Options –> View –> (Scroll list down til you see) Use simple file sharing. Uncheck it and close the dialogue.
2. In Windows…Right Click the Computer Icon (maybe on desktop or will be on Start Menu) and select Manage.
3. Open Computer Management –> System Tools –> Shared Folders –> Shares and open the folder to list the shares.
4. Find the share in question, highlight it and right click and select Properties –> Shared Permissions.
5. In the Share Permission it should have the group Everyone listed. If it is not there add it and check all three permissions: Full Control, Change and Read.

Once done go back to Windows 7 and browse the share. HTH

I have just upgraded my DSL to an advertised connection of 1536/768 from ~660/~250. The two different tests I did showed this result:

Sigh…As a side note, I have been with PCI Systems for over ten years. (Now Precision) I recommend them.

Update

As of 4/6/2014 here is the latest

Note that upgraded to Qwest as ISP and DSL (now Century Link) back in 2010 roughly to speeds of 12MB and now 20MB and receive 14 out of the 20.

In starting a new job, I was given a Hyper-Threaded machine with Windows XP, and the OS was not utilizing the hyper-threaded aspect of the PC. I just knew that was wrong! So in searching the web I found the top article after a google search which gave information on how to enable hyper-threading on XP. That link is at the bottom of this blog. The document was not a user friendly document and I was documenting this for other co-workers to update their machines. Because of that I decided to publish what I wrote up.

What is hyper-threading?

 Hyper-Threading is basically a sofware solution, in the OS, but an internal hardware solution on the chip, which creates two logical processors on one physical processor. If the chip was designed for hyper-threading, it will allow for the CPU to work on more items in a multhi-threaded environment. For more info check out Hyper-Threading Explained.

Do I have Hyper-Threading Currently?

Check out the Task Manager Performance page (right click on the task bar and choose Task Manager, then open the performance tab). If you don’t see two running cpu boxes, then either your box does not have hyper-threading, or it is not enabled.

Enable Hyper-Threading

To enable HyperThreading do these steps.

1. Set a System Restore Point for safety.
2. Find the file Protected System Operating file boot.ini at the very top level of the C:\ drive and make a copy of it. You may have to uncheck Hide protected operating system files in the options of Window’s Explorer, to see the file in Explorer’s list.

   

3. Update your copy of Windows via the Windows Update Site. (May have to reboot and recheck until all updates are completed. If you don’t have service pack 1 you may not find the files needed).
4. Search for these two files, using Windows Find Tool in the windows directory on the hard-drive. Take the latest version of the file found:
   1. ntkrnlmp.exe
   2. halmacpi.dll
5. Copy the two files to the System32 folder found in the Windows (or WINNT) folder.
6. Change boot.ini system property to be writable.
7. Edit the Boot.ini file and remove the option /NoExecute=OptIn.
8. Where you removed the NoExecute add these options and do not add a newline to the line:
   /kernel=ntkrnlmp.exe /hal=halmacpi.dll
9. Save boot.ini and restart. Upon restarting it will discover the new logical processesor as a new device and immediately request a restart. Do the restart.

At this point you should see two logical processors after the second restart. If you don’t check your bios during boot-up time. Some bio’ses have the hyper-threading option turned off.

If you system has problems, go back to the original boot.ini file and restart.

This article is based off of Enable Hyperthreading after upgrading motherboard