Blog:: Craig Pringle

If you are testing Vista Beta 2 then you may be interested in this:
"CA, Inc. (NYSE: CA) today announced an offer to provide Microsoft Windows Vista Beta customers a no-charge, one-year trial subscription to CAs eTrust EZ Antivirus. The distribution has the potential to reach millions of projected Windows Vista Beta 2 customers and can be downloaded starting today at: http://ca.com/windowsvistabeta."
The free subscription is valid for a year, including updates and web based support. Good stuff CA.

I'm home - in body anyway!
Had a great time in Singapore and I have much to blog about.
More Soon...

I've just arrived in Singapore.  I'm here for a few days - and I have some really cool activities planned.

Tomorrow I am going to visit Heulab to see their "Classroom of the Future" showcase.  I'm getting a guided tour and I'm really looking forward to it.  I have seen the Heulab products in action before, including the flagship product Fun with Virtual Classroom.  It is an amazing tool that allows teachers to empower students to colaborate without relequishing control.  Best of all it has been written from the ground up to take advantage of the Tablet PC.

Friday and Saturday I am attending Vista readiness labs being run by Microsoft for selected influencers.  I'll be blogging more about that later.

Sunday I don't fly out until 8PM at night so I intend to have a good poke around Singapore before I go.

On Saturday I blogged Telecom NZ to show tablets with EVDO
Now Vodafone and Lenovo New Zealand Partner to Deliver Embedded 3G Connectivity
One thing for sure, NZ is a great place to be a Mobile Computer user!
Via Geekzone

John Tokash has installed Vista on a Tablet kiosk EO.
the has two great posts. The first details how he installed Vista on an eo
In a follow up post he gives More about Vista on the TabletKiosk eo.
"It is very responsive! I dont have Aero running, of course.
I dont recall if I had to install the audio driver or if it found it without help, but its working.
When installing the digitizer, make sure to choose the b_stage driver from your D drive. A_stage doesnt work at all. Even b_stage, though, doesnt calibrate perfectly."

Toshiba and ZD are running a virtual symposium focusing on the Tablet PC on May 24^th (Eastern Time).

The tagline “Everything You Need to Know About the Tablet PC and Why Your Company Can’t Afford Not to Embrace It” sounds promising.

You can register here and review the program here.  Check it out.

Darryl Burling has a new Toshiba M400 and is Tableting. Darryl is a creative guy and has been known to make some really cool apps in the Windows Mobile space.
"I've got a nice new shiny Toshiba M400...
It arrived about a week ago, but I've only just had a chance to play with it in the last day or so. I started by installing Windows Vista on it - a late internal build. Very nice. "

Maurico over at Geekzone reports that Telecom is going to have notebooks and tablets with embedded EVDO modules on show at Convergence Oceania '06 which will be held at Te Papa in Wellington on the 25th of May.
"One of the notebooks being shown is the Toshiba M400 Tablet PC, embedded with Telecoms CDMA EV-DO Mobile Broadband cards, allowing users to do away with data cards and connect as soon as they turn their notebooks on."

I've just received word of a Wellington office user group meeting. Here's the details:

"Pizza and drinks will be provided, along with some great information.

When: Wednesday 24 May 2006, 6:00-7:30pm
Where:
Microsoft New Zealand
Level 12, 157 Lambton Quay
Wellington

Topic 1: Ryan Duguid, Microsoft Technical Specialist.
Microsoft Office InfoPath is a Windows-based application for creating rich, dynamic forms that teams and organisations can use to gather, share, and reuse XML based information. This session will cover the basics of InfoPath forms and look at advances in InfoPath 2007 that support the gathering data from email forms and browser forms.

Topic 2: Steve Schapel, Microsoft Access MVP
Where does Microsoft Access fit in? A brief discussion from the point of view of the user/developer, with some real-world example scenarios of where Access is found a niche.
This promises to be a very informative and entertaining evening!"
Convenor: Steve Schapel
www.woug.info

Jk links to BetaNews who are reporting that Samsung will be demonstrating hybrid hard drives @ WinHec next week.  From BetaNews

Hybrid hard drives eliminate the need for the disk to spin continuously, which would contribute to a longer usable life as well as less risk of data loss from dropping or jarring. This is due to the NAND flash memory acting as a cache.

Either a 128MB or 256MB cache would act as the first step in storing data. The hard disk would only need to spin to save data when this cache is filled, roughly once every 10 to 20 minutes. The cache could also assist in allowing a PC to boot quicker.

I look forward to these being widely available. I suspect that if you have an older machine you want to breathe a little extra life into then – in addition to more RAM – this will be a very worth while upgrade.

Well it was a small audience tonight - there were just 7 of us for most of the meeting (though an 8th did make it for the second half).

Still - the small size of the group did make for quite an interactive session.  It was also a bit of blessing as both Mauricio and I had a few technical issues with the projector.  I could not get my tablet into duplicate display mode of my video driver to work.  I was demonstrating inking into applications and you can't do that with extended desktop :)  As a result I did a couple of my demos on my tablet with people gathered around.

Links of note from the meeting - check out the Mi-Forms demo on available on the Mi-Corporation website.

Also refer to Mauricio's posts on Vista on the M205:

Running Microsoft Windows Vista (build 5381) on my Tablet PC

Windows Vista Defrag: dumbbed down interface

Managing Multi OS (Windows XP and Windows Vista) Boot: VistaBootPRO

Dchoung over at TabletGear links to a story about a Toshiba M4 that had a glass table shatter under it.  Perhaps the glass table was not designed to have something as substantial as the M4 sitting on it

Seriously though - the high end Toshibas have quite a few features hidden away that will increase their chances of surviving such a fall.  These include shock mounted drives, cruple zones in the case and an accelerometer that can detect the fall and park the head of the drive before it hits the deck.  Had it it the floor there is a good chance it would have been OK.