My dad just gave me his CX200S that he just boug

RangerXXX · 02-18-2006, 02:45 PM

My dad just gave me his CX200S that he just bought in December because it never worked right and he just didn't like the size of it. I'm having all kinds of trouble with the pen.
The accuracy is bad even after calibrating it.
You have to push so hard to write anything i'm afraid i'm going to break the glass.
The cursor jumps around when you have the pen pushing on the screen, but aren't moving it.
Sometimes the lower part of the screen will automatically start clicking really fast on whatever the pen is floating over, usually the start button or system tray icons.

Wondering if there's just something wrong with the laptop or if it's setup wrong. I've tried cleaning the screen.

Big Wes · 02-18-2006, 11:55 PM

Sounds like to me it could be a problem with the pen. Since it's under warranty, Gateway should ship you a new pen for free. I would try that first and if there are still problems, get the computer serviced by Gateway.

TBSUSER · 02-19-2006, 06:36 AM

The pen could be the problem ..but there are other things to consider.

First before jumping to any resolution ..what is the specs of your machine? A CX200S suggest that you may be running a machine with a celeron ..something I've come to learned is not a good idea ..no matter what your plans are for the machine.

In addition ..when you use the machine with some graphics program ..you'll notice that every time you use the pen the CPU usage spikes. So another issue is ..just how much applications are you running in parallel? Do you have 3,4 spyware, antivirus running along with 2,3 applications? Are they necessary?

Finally, I really think this machine will not work well until you have over 1G memory, especially if your using it to run resource heavy applications.

Its not yet a perfected technology ..I believe .. so in my mind its never good to run this thing even close to its limits..give yourself as much margin as you can. If your not online ..close the spyware and virus apps. Close the unnecessary apps ..and boost the memory if you can.

TknoGeek · 02-19-2006, 08:50 AM

quote:Originally posted by RangerXXX

The accuracy is bad even after calibrating it.
... The cursor jumps around when you have the pen pushing on the screen, but aren't moving it. Sometimes the lower part of the screen will automatically start clicking really fast on whatever the pen is floating over, usually the start button or system tray icons.

These are all indications of a bad pen. Really. If the unit was just purchased in December, call Gateway and request a new pen.

quote:You have to push so hard to write anything i'm afraid i'm going to break the glass.

This means you haven't cleaned the screen well enough. Search this forum and you'll find many similar complaints, but they all seem to boil down to "clean the screen".

Accuracy may take many calibrations to get "just right" - mine certainly did.

Good luck in keeping the unit after your dad sees you've got the issues resolved! :-)

bmhome1 · 02-19-2006, 09:37 AM

Something else simple to try is by adjusting the stlyus input parameters control panel. Even though my tablet uses the Wacom digitizer, I also found very spastic, skitterish stylus responses with the factory's default settings. Everything was set on hypersensitive.

By carefully choosing the opposite settings, i.e. having the stylus actions nearly set to be too slow and undersensistive, pen drawing smoothed out and lost the hyperactivity and runaway clicking.

My input panels (OS and pen) have a great number of settings to customize and some will interact with each other, the whole pen input feel and response can be significamtly modified this way to suit style. I found the slower reactions and less features enabled the better.

Just be sure to write down all the current numerical settings before starting to return easily back to the original settings if desired.

And more RAM helps to smooth out other ragged stylus responses also, especially during high CPU demands, identical to the same slowdowns noticeable with a mouse and cursor actions.

Big Wes · 02-19-2006, 01:41 PM

quote:A CX200S suggest that you may be running a machine with a celeron ..something I've come to learned is not a good idea ..no matter what your plans are for the machine.

I have the CX200S with the Celeron M processor and I find the performance just fine for my uses. I mainly run Office 2003, Windows Journal, OneNote 2003, and do light Photoshop and InDesign tasks. I did, however, bump the RAM up to a 1 gig (512 MB x 2). The Celeron M performs pretty closely to a Pentium M of the same clock speed. The main differences between the two processors performance wise is that the Pentium M has 2 MB of cache (to the Celeron M's 1 MB) and a faster front side bus (533 mhz to 400 mhz).

You're probably not going to notice a big difference in performance unless you are doing more advanced multimedia work, serious multitasking or gaming. I routinely have Outlook 2003 (running an imbedded instance of Word as the email editor), multiple Windows Journal files, multiple PDFs (using Adobe 6.0 Pro as the reader and editor), and various support apps running simultaneously with no noticable slowdown. The added RAM really helps here, and I would suggest a RAM upgrade for your machine if you can afford it.

The major difference is that the Pentium M supports dynamic speed-stepping, which allows the system to reduce clock speed when idle. This saves quite a bit of battery life and can extend runtime by around 20%. This, not performance, would be my major reason to recommend the Pentium M over the Celeron M.

It could be a lack of system resources causing your problems, but it sounds more like a mechanical problem to me because the cursor movement is so erratic and registering phantom input, not simply lagging and freezing. A simple thing that I forgot to mention: have you tried removing and reseating the nib of the stylus? It might be worth a shot...