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    X60 Tablet: Ditching XP Tablet for XP Pro?

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by derangedsheep, Aug 27, 2008.

  1. derangedsheep

    derangedsheep Notebook Enthusiast

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    I recently picked up a Thinkpad X60 Tablet for an awesome price. It has XP Tablet Edition installed (obviously) but it didn't come with the digitizer pen. Since I won't be using the tablet functionality anyway I'm not going to buy one. It also needs to be formatted so I was going to wipe the drive and reload it with just XP Pro because the tablet stuff is useless without a pen.

    My question is will I have any problems with putting XP Pro on a tablet PC or will it be just like any other laptop? Will run into any issues with the hardware for the pen input being weird in regular XP.

    And, does anyone know how to install XP Pro from a flash drive? As I understand, you can install Vista from a flash drive by basically just copying the entire contents of the install disc onto the drive. Is it the same way with XP Pro?

    Thanks,
    Steve
     
    derangedsheep, Aug 27, 2008
    #1
  2. derangedsheep

    derangedsheep Notebook Enthusiast

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    Bump. Anyone?
     
    derangedsheep, Aug 28, 2008
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  3. Tom-

    Tom- Notebook Enthusiast

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    At the worst if you will gave a ! in device manager,
    You don't have access to a usb cd drive,
    That would make it easy
     
    Tom-, Aug 28, 2008
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  4. stewie

    stewie What the deuce?

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    You can install the regular XP on the X60 Tablet PC and use it as a regular laptop, but you will lose all the tablet functionality.
     
    stewie, Aug 28, 2008
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  5. msb0b

    msb0b Notebook Consultant

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    It will work but why would you do it that way? I would check if the utility partition is still on the machine and use it to restore XP Tablet. The license is already paid for so use it. XP Tablet is a superset of XP Pro so you are not losing any functionality.

    A replacement stylus is only between $30 and $50, should you decide to replace the stylus.
     
    msb0b, Aug 29, 2008
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  6. derangedsheep

    derangedsheep Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have an enclosure to make an internal hard drive into an external one which I could and have used to make an external cd drive. But I'm at school and my extra drives and everything are 5 hours away at home and I don't want to buy one. All my friends have laptops too so I can't even borrow one from someone's desktop. I do have a couple of USB flash drives though.


    Honestly, I have no use for a tablet pc. I prefer to use a keyboard as I can type a lot faster than I can write and the whole tablet thing seems like more of a novelty to me than something that's actually useful. I used a friend's tablet before and I wasn't impressed. Plus I don't really want or need the extra stuff that comes with the tablet edition.

    The partition doesn't show under My Computer but I think it's still there. The hard drive is a 60GB and Windows reports total size as 51.2GB. A 60GB drive, if I did my calculation right, should report around 57.2GB.

    I'm downloading the ThinkVantage recovery software now. It wasn't instaled before. I don't know why anyone would uninstall it, but we will see what happens.
     
    derangedsheep, Aug 29, 2008
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  7. msb0b

    msb0b Notebook Consultant

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    It has been a while since I have went through ThinkPad's recovery process for XP. I don't recall if the utility partition shows up as an EISA partition or completely hidden in the disk management.

    Having the RnR installed in XP has no bearing on the utility partition. Try to press the blue ThinkVantage button when the X60t is on the ThinkPad screen during the boot process. If all goes well, it should boot from the utility partition, in which you can choose to perform a factory restore.
     
    msb0b, Aug 30, 2008
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  8. Enduct

    Enduct Notebook Consultant

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    Enduct, Aug 30, 2008
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  9. derangedsheep

    derangedsheep Notebook Enthusiast

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    It did have a recovery partition. I checked in Disk Management and it was showing in there. When I would press the ThinkVantage button on boot though, all I got was a menu where I could do the following:

    Press ESC to continue booting
    Press F1 for the BIOS
    Press F11 to choose a boot device

    So I installed the RnR software because I thought maybe that could access the partition. I shut down after install as it asked me to restart but I had another gig of ram to install. So I put that in and turned the computer back on and hit the ThinkVantage button to check that the ram was recognized in the BIOS and instead of taking me to the short menu, it took me to the RnR software where I had the option of doing a factory restore.

    So I did a factory restore. I uninstalled all the tablet stuff that I could and it's more or less exactly the same as XP Pro. Is there a way to make the on-screen keyboard stop popping up on boot and shutdown? Or is there a way to get the button for it out of the taskbar? It really takes up a lot of room for something I won't use.
     
    derangedsheep, Aug 31, 2008
    #9