After getting the Windows 7 RC off MSDN last week, I installed it on the WindTop. Because it had XP on it, there was no choice but to do a clean install. I was hopeful that the new touch integrated features would make it shine, but also concerned over drivers. I had the system recovery DVD that I created during my initial unboxing so I had nothing to loose. Installation of Windows 7 is pretty straight forward, I did decide to use the “Advanced” tab in the hard disk target screen to format the drive first.
It took less than an hour to complete and reboot. I immediately went to the device manager and was pleasantly surprised to find that there were no unrecognized hardware items. Another nice surprise was how well the system looked and how snappy it was. For a netbook class machine, Windows 7 ran with little delay and even had Aero active.
After mousing around, it was time to try those “touch” features. Unfortunately when I pressed on the screen the pointer would activate someplace else, making it impossible to use via touch. I went to the control panel and found a myriad of settings for touch and tablet, one of which was calibration. I ran the calibration and it worked fine, confirming everything 100%. I went back to the main desktop and no change in behavior, weird and now frustrating. I tried the old “reboot”, which didn’t change anything either. I was beginning to fear that the touch screen driver, although recognized, was not compatible.
I popped in the XP driver disk that came with the WindTop and found something that looked like a touch screen driver of some sort. With it, I was able to get the manufacturer of the device; IdeaCom TSC. Searching on the web did not find any results for Vista or Windows 7 drivers. I decided to install what was on the WindTop XP disk. To my surprise there were no warnings when it installed and instead of a driver, it ended up being a calibration program. I ran the calibration and it worked as expected. Anxious, I went back to the main desktop and it still did not working correctly.
After throwing things around, I went back to the Windows 7 control panel for touch screens and calibration. I noticed that there was a “reset” button, I though “what the hell” and clicked it. I went back to the desktop and SUCCESS! The touch screen was fully calibrated and responded perfectly. Crossing my fingers, I rebooted and it came up and was still behaving perfectly.
Now with everything working, I began to try and use the system without a keyboard. The system was responsive on Windows 7 and whenever you touched a field that required keyboard input an on-screen keyboard would appear. Typing was straight forward and easy. I decided to try out Media Center, it responded well to the touch screen and really made the system fun to use when browsing media files. No need for the software that I felt was lacking when I did the first review. All in all, Windows 7 did what I was hoping it would do, make this $500 AIO touch nettop “sing”.
Although that should have been enough, I thought that now that I have Aero and Touch working why don’t I try and install the HP SmartTouch software (with some modified config files). SmartTouch installed and this time it ran fine, even on a 1 GB system. So now I had everything working that I wanted, multi-touch would be nice, but for $500 this is now the system I was hoping it would be.
Posted by techstauf4 
