Lately I'm convinced HP is the king of writing stupid software.  I've been evaluating a HP 2710p tablet pc for a couple months now, and not terribly impressed with it.  One big negative is HP Update. I installed this assuming it would grab the latest drivers for me, and make life easier.

It didn't.

In fact it's updated itself three times now, and each time the only updates were for… HP Update.  Two security updates for HP Update, and the latest release 4.0.11 which fixes "minor defects".

That's fairly annoying, but it seems that a "minor defect" also included an update to HP Health Check.  As far as I can tell, HP Health Check is totally useless.  What the new version does is bind itself to the Ctrl+Shift+C hotkey combo.  If you use Outlook a lot you may recognize this as the Create New Contact keyboard shortcut.  There's no doubt in my mind that I'd rather run a Health Check on a laptop 4 or 5 times a day than create a new contact.

Lessons for Application Developers

• First off, don't use global hotkeys.
• If you insist on using global hotkeys, allow the user to change or remove them.
• If you're not going to allow the user to change or remove a hotkey, allow the user to uninstall the offending program.
• Periodically check out the Google Search results for the name of your program. If they're all complaints or mostly negative, perhaps it's time to address some issues.
• In the same vein if there are a large number of results for "Your Program's Name useless", pay attention.
• And never, ever bundle new applications with an update for different software.

Removing HP Health Check

There's no option to remove this crap from Add/Remove Programs, the start menu, the program's directory, or in any of the HP utilities.  Luckily I never deleted \swsetup\ from this computer after I installed everything, and I was able to find the HP Active Support Library installer in c:\swsetup\sp36082 and another copy (huh?) in c:\swsetup\sp39157.  The uninstall works for both of them.  Reboot, hit Ctrl+Shift+C again and acknowledge that the target of a shortcut is missing and should be deleted.  After that you'll be able to create new contacts with the hotkey combo in Outlook again.

UPDATE:

Per Brad in the comments, there is an easier way.  Find the shortcut for HP Health Check and get its Properties. I'm no longer running my HP Tablet, but aside from the name the properties dialog will be the same.  Click in the Shortcut key text box and press the Delete key to clear the hotkey combo.  Click OK and you should have freed up the Ctrl+Shift+C hotkey combination.

I actually love OneNote, but this window has me confused.  Perhaps someone from the OneNote team could shed some light on what the progress bar is measuring?  It popped up after hitting CTRL+2 to tag an item and steadily reported on the progress of some nameless task for about 5 minutes.

I've been evaluating Tablet PCs for a few months now, and prior to returning the wonderful Motion Computing LE1700 I used the Vista Migration Wizard to backup all of my settings. In reality the only thing I really cared about was the handwriting recognition settings. Since Vista learns from your writing and corrections this represented many, many hours of work.

I just received a spiffy new-ish Lenovo X61 Tablet PC to evaluate, but when I launched the Migration Wizard (technically it's called Windows Easy Transfer or WET) I received a nasty surprise. You're given a prompt to restore from a network drive, USB flash drive or external hard drive. Since I was using a USB flash drive, I naturally chose that.

Then I received an error message that read:

Please insert the first disk to read into the drive you have selected.

Huh?

I tried restarting WET a few times without any luck. I copied the .MIG file to the root of the C:\ drive and tried opening it from there and received a new, yet equally annoying message:

Please select a valid file where your data can be restored from.

A few Google searches reveal that this is a common problem, there is no way to browse the contents of a .MIG file, and WET is a piece of crap that you shouldn't trust with your valuable settings and documents.

Not willing to give up I ran WET one final time and chose External Hard Drive as the source. Success! A few minutes later and all of my settings were restored. Oddly enough after it worked once I was able to open the .MIG file directly and have WET recognize it, or choose USB Flash Drive as the source without any issues.

What worked?

For the most part everything I asked WET to save transferred. My wireless networks did, but oddly enough none of the WEP passwords. Saved network passwords did transfer. WebDAV-synced OneNote notebooks and settings also transferred.

Over the past couple months I've started using OneNote 2007 for meeting notes and general to-do lists. If you haven't used OneNote before, definitely give it a try. It's one of the nicest tools (yes, I consider it a tool, just like my paper notebooks) I've used for managing unorganized piles of notes, and it's driving me towards picking up a tablet pc. More on that later as the evaluation units pour in over the next couple months.

Two sites that have made it into my RSS subscriptions are GottaBeMobile and Daniel Escapa's OneNote Blog, and recently a GottaBeMobile forum member posted a video comparing Vista's handwriting recognition to OS X's Inkwell.

Sadly there isn't much of a comparison. Vista's handwriting recognition has come a long way since XP, and it's pretty obvious InkWell isn't a priority for Apple, at least not yet.

Take a look at Vista's Ink on a Toshiba R25 Tablet and Leopard's Inkwell on a Mac Pro with a Wacom PenPartner tablet:

View on YouTube