X41T pen calibration issues...among other things...

[J.]

Hi,

Ok, I'm poor or at least not rich enough for the £1600 for an x200 and just recently got myself a S/H X41T in perfect condition for a good price. After googling, found this site and specifically the "speeding up your x41t" thread.
Reformatted, reinstalled, left off most of the extraneous IBM software like wifi, etc. as recommended, but did reinstall the power management as it (claims) to make the battery last longer. Oh, and got a 1 gig memory chip from, and as recommended by, Crucial.

So.......after all that, I still have a laptop that's a lot more sluggish than my previous P3 1.2G non-centrino Dell c400.
The main problem seems to be the disk drive...every time there's disk activity, the machine temporarily freezes.
Also I would guess that the sluggishness is down to the 59 processes running compared to my Dell's 29, but so much seems to be pen and tablet drivers running...sigh.

Ok, so that's not soooo bad, I can at least use Sketchbook and it runs smooth.

My main complaint though, is that the pen calibration seems crap. I have the wacom talet drivers installed, so there are now 2 calibration pages...grrr.
And as I say...crap...I actually have to spend ages pissing about putting the pen in the WRONG places at the corners of the calibration page to get a decent accuracy. Doing it the way it appears you're supposed to...ie. pressing the stylus on the cross at each corner leaves me with the calibration going out weirdly at the corners...

In the end I've had to give up and just try to fudge it as best as possible just so I can do a little drawing.
Maybe the damn things just aren't that accurate. All I want is to have the cursor directly under the pentip when viewed from above...that would be good enough and I can deal with the parallax as I come to it.
At the moment though, without pissing about for ages, the cursor is high right in the top right corner, high left in the top left and not too bad at the bottom of the screen. Also the cursor jitters when up at the top near the battery.
This is while in landscape mode with the battery at the top, away from me.

Anyone got any suggestions, or is this pen inaccuracy normal?

Thanks.


PS. I've been doing a thread of political cartoons with it, that can be viewed on the rinf alternative news website. Click the thumbnail cartoon on the left (at the moment it looks like a crossword...and yes, that's one of my cartoons...you'll have to take a closer look...

[John Hill]

You shouldn't be having that much problem with the calibration. One of the things I've seen is the people don't always hold the pen like a pen - they touch the tablet as if they were using a lance. Not saying YOU are doing that but it is common. I find myself tapping the calibration marks slightly below and to the right so my pen tip and fingers don't obstruct the location where the mouse shows up. I am not sketching, thought, so this may very well be different for you.

BTW, to prevent spam, users with less than 15 posts aren't allowed to post links but I've upgraded your account so we can see your sketches.

Welcome to the Buzz.

[J.]

Thanks for the input and for adding the link in my sig.

I guess the calibration is fine for ordinary mobile use but yes, when sketching it's very hard to get close to my liking.

I was thinking that maybe it was to do with there now being two calibration pages, the original and the wacom tablet driver verson.

Seems there's not much I can do in which case, just fudge it like I have been. The jittering up near the battery end is weird though, which is the bottom of the screen in normal laptop mode.

Could anyone tell me if 59 processes running is normal on a machine like this? That's before starting any programs like browsers or sketchbook. As I say, many of them are things like TSMresident, TPscrex, TPONSCR, which all seem to be screen/pen related.

I am using comodo firewall and avg free, but I can't really disable it from the net as it's my laptop too now, the Dell having been passed on to a friend.
The only really extra process I have going is 'Tabtip tamer', designed to smooth the pen in art programs by reducing the handwriting recognition, I believe...anyway, it does seem to help in photoshop 7 for me...

Anyway, I guess I just have to wait for the day when I can afford one of the newer dual core versions.