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