Jonathan Hardwick : Tablet PC

Startup processes on a Toshiba M400

jonathanh — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:58:00 GMT

Or, "What is all this stuff doing on my computer", part II.

I've just finished switching my portable life over to a new Toshiba M400 Tablet PC. Gig of memory, Centrino Core Duo, life is good.

At least, it was good until I looked at the process list in task manager. Then it was that same feeling of horror all over again. The situation was bad on my old Toshiba Portege 3500. But this is worse.

Here are all the I'm-pretty-sure-these-aren't-vanilla-Windows processes that are still running after it's finished startup. I give descriptions where I think I know what a particular startup process does, otherwise I just quote the description field.

00THotkey.exe - Enables use of function keys to control laptop functions
APntEx.exe - Touchpad driver (from Alps)
APoint.exe - And another touchpad driver (from Alps)
CrossMenu.exe - "CrossMenu Main"
hkcmd.exe - "hkcmd Module" (from Intel)
igfxpers.exe - "persistence Module" (from Intel)
TAcelMgr.exe - Acceleration manager (what does that mean?)
ThpSrv.exe - Parks your hard disk if you knock the laptop
TMESRV31.exe - "Toshiba MobileExtension Service"
TMETEMnu.exe - "Toshiba MobileExtension", spawned by TMESRV31
TSkrMain.exe - Acceleration "shaker" utility (what does that mean?)
TFNF5.exe - Switch laptop video output using Fn-F5
TRot.exe - Match screen orientation to rotation of tablet screen
TouchEd.exe - Turns touchpad on and off
TFncKy.exe - "TFncKy"
TPSMain.exe - Toshiba power saver applet
TPSBattM.exe - Spawned by TPSMain, probably battery-specific
TMERzCtl.exe - "TMERzCtrl"

In my original post, I counted 11 extra startup processes from Toshiba on a Portege 3500. In just two hardware generations, they've out-done themselves with 18 startup processes. Pretty soon there'll be more random systray applets than there are regular Windows processes. As it is, they're already sucking down 70 MB of working set. Good thing I've got a gig...

Can anyone provide more details of what each of these processes does? And (perhaps more usefully!) has anyone experimented with msconfig or autoruns to see the effects of disabling each of them?

Patch for tcserver.exe memory leak on Tablet PC - at last!

jonathanh — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 07:15:00 GMT

In August 2004, I mentioned that the Tablet PC uses managed code for parts of its inking support. Specifically, tabtip.exe and tcserver.exe. Buried wayyy down at the end of the comments you’ll see my acknowledgement that there was a “known issue” with a memory leak in tcserver.exe. I’d actually reported this bug to the Tablet PC team before, but without a clean repro they had no chance of fixing it in SP2.

And so the bug, and the workaround, went basically unnoticed in the wider world — until Andrew Orlowski at The Register picked up on it, and Scoble made his lame “I just reboot every day” admission. At which point things got much more interesting. I’d already been working with a Tablet PC dev to narrow the bug down, but suddenly he was told to make it a higher priority. Funny, that :-)

Different code fixes followed in short order, and pretty soon I was dogfooding the patch you can now download for yourself: “KB895953 - Memory Leak in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition”. Keeping quiet about this has been killing me, so it’s great to see it out at last. And it seems that I’m not alone:

“The most anticipated patch in Tablet PC history” — Larry O’Brien
“The one that Microsoft said it planned to fix ASAP” — Mary Jo Foley
“Many Tablet PC users had given up hope” — Marc Orchant
“Thank you for your patience while we got this through the process” — Hilton Locke
“Whoohooo!” — Loren Heiny
“To those Red Adairs of the Windows heap: we thank you” — Andrew Orlowski

MaxiVista just got even better

jonathanh — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:53:00 GMT

MaxiVista is a software application that lets you use another PC – your laptop, for example – as an extra screen for your main computer. Since more screen real estate is always better, this is a Good Thing. It's especially sexy with a Tablet PC, because you can rotate the keyboard out of the way, completing the illusion.

In my original review of MaxiVista, I noted their approach was fundamentally different from competing tools, which are basically “software KVMs”. Software KVMs let you use one keyboard and mouse to control two different PCs, often with support for moving the mouse cursor back and forth between the two displays, and cut-and-pasting between the two computers.

Having tried both paradigms, I liked MaxiVista better – and found out six months later that it was dangerously addictive. Now with v2.0 I can have my cake and eat it too, because they’ve added software KVM support! One keypress switches modes, from “laptop as second screen” to “software KVM” and back again. Oh, and for the exhibitionists amongst you (or teachers, maybe?) they also let you mirror one display onto many: see their price list for the different combinations. I’m running the $40 middle-of-the-road version.

Highly recommended – if you’ve got a PC and a laptop, go grab the free trial from http://www.maxivista.com/ and give it a spin. This is slick, seamless, magical stuff.

Update: Scott Hanselman loves it too - “now that I have a TabletPC, I consider MaxiVista to be a required tool”.

New Tablet PC feature on Channel 9 - ink-enabled posts!

jonathanh — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 08:24:00 GMT

Charles and the gang just showed off a new feature for the first birthday of the Channel 9 community site - readers can now post handwritten comments using a Tablet PC! Or a mouse, plus sufficient determination :-) Here's the first of many ink posts in that thread:

Diagnosing laptop hangs - and using a tablet pc because I WANT to

jonathanh — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 09:00:00 GMT

The solution to my hanging tablet pc turns out to be a simple case of "don't change the defaults, stupid". While using the Toshiba Portge 3500 at home, I had been experimenting with decreasing the wifi speed from 11 Mbps to 2 Mbps in an effort to increase its reliable range. Under SP2, the choice of transmit rates for the "Toshiba Wireless LAN Mini PCI Card" has multiplied, and I decided to try "Auto Rate Select (Standard)" instead of the default "Auto Rate Select (High)". This works just dandy with my decrepit old Linksys access point, but use that configuration on the Microsoft corporate wifi network, and it'll lock the sucker up solid for one minute out of every five. It seems that auto rate selection on wifi cards is as fraught with problems as full-duplex negotiation was in the bad old days of Ethernet! The good news is that no chickens were hurt in debugging this problem…

In the same post I discussed using a tablet pc with a pen because I had to, since before the mysterious hangs it was the keyboard that had failed. Iggy points out that I could use customisable menu toolbars to improve the usability of Office 2003 apps with a pen. I'm in full agreement on that point - I make my own toolbars for OneNote, Word, and Internet Explorer- but even with these customisations Outlook 2003 is still not a great user experience with a pen. Good enough? Certainly. Better than other e-mail clients? Easily. But great? Not compared to OneNote! Now the OneNote team have an unfair advantage, because they started with a blank sheet of paper, but I still think that they set the current gold standard for an intuitive user interface that just feels right when you're using a pen. And as Scoble points out, with OneNote it's not just about writing vs. typing speed - the Tablet PC becomes something you can use to draw, and record audio, and remove the physical barrier between yourself and everyone else in a meeting. Someone somewhere still has to invent the great category-killer mail app for pen users. I'm hoping that the Outlook team are watching the OneNote team, and taking notes

Using a tablet pc because you HAVE to (or, life is too short for 3 minute tasks)

jonathanh — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 09:06:00 GMT

Laptop woes have been conspiring recently to keep me from blogging. Initially it was just a couple of keys on my tablet pc that seemed to need several hits to register. The next day, however, the whole keyboard was dead. Worse yet, our tech support guys didn't have a hot-swap machine to offer, and Toshiba was back-ordered on keyboards. So for a week I learned which apps work fine with just a pen (OneNote, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger), which ones are marginal (Outlook, FeedDemon), and which are just plain painful (old-school chat clients, and pretty much anything else that requires strictly text input). Unfortunately the otherwise-excellent blogging tool BlogJet falls into the latter category, and I couldn't bring myself to use the web interface to post in the meantime. After all, my tablet pc would be fixed within a week, right?

Well, yes and no. The good news is that the keyboard is fixed. The bad news is that its annoying habit of freezing solid at irregular intervals has multiplied a hundred-fold. I'm pretty sure that those irregular intervals used to be once a week or so, when I would assume that it was hung solid and just reboot the thing. But when all you have is a pen, life slows down, and you wait a while to see what happens (if there were roses to smell, I'd probably be stopping to do that, too). Turns out that it mysteriously un-hangs itself after 30-60 seconds, and XP continues merrily on its way as if nothing has happened, every time.

Which is amusing, until it starts happening every 3 minutes. Then you learn just how much (or how little) you can do in 3 minutes of your online life, and it gives tasks a whole new level of intensity. Can I read this entire channel group of blogs in FeedDemon in 3 minutes? Answer that email? Post a blog item? It's as if I have my very own anti-carpal-tunnel-syndrome work-timer, and frankly it's driving me nuts. I think we've ruled out the obvious causes, like a failing hard disk (chkdsk says its fine) or an overheating CPU (it still hangs on even the slowest, coolest power scheme), so now we're moving on to voodoo magic (swap out random bits of hardware while waving a dead chicken over it). Or at least, tech support is. I hand it over to their tender ministrations tomorrow. Hopefully it'll come back sans chicken blood.

The problem with MaxiVista…

jonathanh — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 06:27:00 GMT

…is that once you've used it you can never go back.

For those who missed my earlier review, MaxiVista is a networked virtual display driver that lets you extend your Windows desktop onto the screen of a second computer. What this means is that every morning I put my Tablet PC next to my desktop's screen, rotate the keyboard out of the way… and suddenly I can drag windows from my desktop screen onto my laptop screen. Watch the video for the full effect!

And as Scott Hanselman notes, the MaxiVista folks just came out with version 1.5. This adds new power-user features (has anyone actually expanded their Windows desktop to the theoretical maximum of 8 physical screens across 4 PCs?), plus a couple of nice usability touches. Recommended - although I'm not quite sure that I'd agree with Scott's assessment of "it's pure sex" :-)

The problem is that once you get used to all that extra screen space, you can never go back to just one display. And that's exactly what I have while using my Tablet PC at home. So this week I finally broke down and bought Dell's smallest, cheapest LCD screen. Of course, this is a low-tech hardware solution that plugs into my Tablet PC via a big thick ugly analog cable. But really, in that split second after you click "Extend my Windows desktop on this monitor", do you care how it happens? Mmmm, pixels…

Update^2: MaxiVista v2.0 lets you flip between "laptop as second monitor" and "laptop as second computer". Oh, and performance has gone from "respectably fast" to "can't tell it's not a real screen". Highly recommended.

Debugging SP2 on the Tablet PC - managed code, tabtip.exe, and procexp

jonathanh — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 09:26:00 GMT

If you've got a Tablet PC and you're running SP2 (and you should be!) you might have noticed a couple of processes hanging around called TabTip.exe and TCServer.exe. And right after noticing them, you probably wondered why they seemed to be taking up so much memory.

Luckily, autoruns is not the only cool tool from those fine folks at Sysinternals. They've also produced the must-have procexp: it's a better task manager than Task Manager, and is great for these kinds of "what the heck is that process doing" moments. In particular, you can tell procexp to use highlighting to call attention to services, jobs, your own processes, or (as in this case) .NET processes:

Yup, that's right, TCServer and TabTip are both written in managed code - after all, the Tablet PC edition of Windows XP was the first to ship with the .NET CLR, so why not use it? :-) Now we can use another neat feature of procexp: right-click on the TabTip process, bring up its property window, and scroll across to the .NET tab. Managed processes define many counters to keep track of their own performance, and procexp lets you see them all. Here are some of the .NET memory counters for that process:

Now we can see why TabTip seems to be taking up so much memory: even though it's got just 0.5 MB of heap data and 1.5 MB of total data, the CLR has reserved 32 MB of virtual memory for it, "just in case". For users accustomed to unmanaged apps that do their own memory management, this "greedy" memory behavior of the CLR can come as a surprise, but for garbage-collected applications it makes sense. After all, if the machine has sufficient memory, why bother spending the time to collect objects that are no longer used?

As the Windows world moves towards .NET, we'll probably have to spend a lot more time explaining this to customers. In the meantime, procexp is a great tool for looking into the guts of your .NET applications.

Update: AT caught a mistake, now fixed. Also, this diagram from Rico Mariani's excellent introductory article on "Garbage Collector Basics and Performance Hints" shows the difference between allocated, committed, and reserved space very nicely:

Jittery digitizer on a Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet PC? Pen stopped working? Try this

jonathanh — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 09:33:00 GMT

I just fixed an annoying problem on my old Toshiba Tablet PC - the pen stopped working. To be precise, when I tried to use it the mouse pointer would flicker madly along the top and left edges of the screen, totally unable to track the real position of the pen. And the issue is apparently that a fresh install of XP SP2 disabled "Display Stretch" in the BIOS.

"Display Stretch" is of course the ugly hack that turns a perfectly readable 640x480 boot screen in the middle of your 1024x768 LCD into a blotchy mis-scaled mess that fills the entire display, and makes you wonder just who thought this would make a good impression on someone booting the laptop for the first time. But it turns out to be vitally important for the peaceful interaction of the Toshiba's digitizer and its Trident CyberBlade video chipset - turn it off and all hell breaks loose, penwise. Knowing this, and assuming that you've got driver version 6.4229.22ICD_Rotation_SE_DXVA_TABLET or later, just open Display Properties\Settings\Advanced\Flat Panel, and check the "Display Stretch" box. Voila!

Big kudos to whoever it was in Microsoft tech support who first tracked this one down and wrote up the solution…

What do you map your Tablet PC buttons to?

jonathanh — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:48:00 GMT

All Tablet PCs have extra buttons next to the screen, to give the user non-pen-based input options when in tablet mode. And of course these buttons can be remapped by the user - the question is what to map the buttons to, and why?

Here's my current setup and the reasoning behind it:

Right button turns off the screen - this is a standard Tablet PC option that Toshiba have for some bizarre reason disabled on the Portege 3500. Big thanks to Rob Bushway for finding monsus.exe to do the trick.
Middle button maps to the space bar - or "scroll to the next page" in any reasonable text app. Especially nice when reading documents in portrait mode.
Left button toggles the screen keyboard - when the tablet pc is on my desk, I rotate the keyboard around so that it's out of sight. Mostly I use it as a second screen for my desktop, but sometimes in standalone mode I still want to enter text (e.g. my login password).

Now, roundabout here I was going to say how I really wished that I could set up the buttons differently for different screen orientations - but I just noticed that option is already available in the screenshot :-) So, I'm thinking that I should set up a dedicated set of "reading" buttons for portrait mode, freeing up the middle button to use for something else in landscape mode. Any suggestions? What do you map your buttons to?

"That looks like a GDI leak"

jonathanh — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:54:00 GMT

After reading KC Lemson's blog entry about her system slowing down due to wisptis.exe leaking GDI objects, I fired up Task Manager and started poking around (click View, Select Columns, and then add "GDI Objects" to follow along). Outlook and my web browser were both pretty chunky, with a few hundred GDI objects each, but since they're heavily graphical that's understandable - and they weren't actively leaking. However, one application stuck out like a sore thumb with over a thousand GDI objects allocated. The guilty party? Toshiba's tpwrtray.exe, for creating custom power schemes on this Portege 3500 tablet pc.

Just to be sure, I killed and restarted it, and then ran a little experiment. TPWRTRAY starts out with a measly 55 GDI objects allocated, but woe betide you if you ever actually want to interact with it. Just wave the mouse pointer across its system tray control five times and you're talking 577 GDI objects. Open and close its properties panel five times, and that figure grows to 1255 GDI objects. With 60 seconds of idle mouse-pointer-waving I took it to 4,000 GDI objects, and it was still hemorrhaging!

This has to be the easiest denial-of-service attack ever on a Toshiba laptop - no typing required, just wave that pointer over the tpwrtray control and wait for the GDI leak to bring Windows to a grinding halt...

The joys of wireless, or, why I like cloudy days in Seattle

jonathanh — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:20:00 GMT

Like many other Microsoft product-group bloggers, I had today marked down as “absolute drop-dead deadline to finish my annual performance review”. Of course, this really means “start worrying about it last night, and then channel that nervous energy into furious writing today”. Thankfully, when I got in to the office my manager told me not to worry, since the tool he uses to submit it doesn't even go active for another five days (hey Eric, what's up with that?).

So, instead of finishing my review (or the spec for the mmmpphhh mmphh, which our lead PM has started dropping heavy hints about needing RIGHT NOW), I've been able to concentrate on cleaning out my inbox. Even better, I can grab a cappuccino and my laptop and do so outside. Dragonflies, birds, and a wireless connection make a nice break from the hum of air conditioning.

The only downside is that I'm wearing a white t-shirt, which reflects just enough glare onto the (non-daylight-viewing-optimized) screen of my Toshiba tablet pc that I have to squint to read it. Until a cloud passes overhead, of course. And that's why I like cloudy days in Seattle.

Alternatively, I've got to invest in some darker t-shirts.

The only way to work on a laptop: folder redirection and offline files

jonathanh — Mon, 03 May 2004 08:06:00 GMT

I might bitch about eating our own dogfood, but a lot of the time it's actually pretty damn tasty.

For example, I can't remember how I ever used a laptop without the combination of folder redirection and offline files. Microsoft's technical support staff use folder redirection to give each of us a gigabyte of storage space on a central server, mapped to My Documents. This is pretty nice in itself - since they back up that server, there's no need for me to bother with all the hassle of backing up my personal machines. In this sense folder redirection is “just” a personal share on a server.

Combine folder redirection with offline files, however, and you've got a killer feature for laptop users. When my Tablet PC is on the network, I've got full access to My Documents. Then I go off the network - and I still have full access to all those files, stored locally (and transparently) under C:\WINDOWS\CSC. I can modify them to my hearts' content, knowing that when I reattach to the network mobsync.exe will automatically detect this and let me synchronize all changes. And since I'm the only one touching those files, and I'm rarely working on more than one computer at once, synchronization conflicts (when it asks you to choose whether to keep one or both versions) are equally rare.

Notes and gotchas:

Even if an application doesn't normally keep its state in My Documents, you can often move it there. My Internet Explorer favorites and FeedDemon cache files live quite happily in My Documents, so that they're always synchronized across machines. Dare Obasanjo has just found out how sweet RSS feed synchronization is while hacking on the next version of RSS Bandit :-)
You can set up synchronization to happen automatically, but this can bite you in corner cases. Instead, I set it up to never synchronize automatically, do an explicit synchronization before disconnecting, and then let it remind me to synchronize on reconnection. Works every time.
In particular, you almost certainly don't want to synchronize automatically if you've just connected to the network over dialup. Use that narrow straw to check your email, but keep your documents offline for fast local access.
If you're an MSN subscriber, you can even synchronize to a web folder on the internet. Omar Shahine shows you how (and gripes about folder redirection - hey Omar, try my tips above!)
The synchronization manager will refuse to let you mark database files as “available offline”. This particularly hurts for Outlook's .pst archive files.

Any tips that I've missed? People seem to either love or hate offline files. Me, I just remember the hell of roaming profiles…

Updates:

Yup, I missed one - the other big win of folder redirection is when you combine it with shadow copies on the server.
Rich C left a pointer to a knowledgebase workaround so that you can sync Outlook .pst files as well.
Omar Shahine found a solution to his pain, using the undocumented mobsync /logon for a quick sync that just pushes files you've updated on your laptop back to the server, and mobsync /logoff for a full sync that also pulls any files that have changed on the server.
You can find more posts and questions about offline files in my “Offline Files” category.
~~Larry Osterman~~ Raymond Chen points out more things that can go wrong with roaming user profiles.

Edit: I've turned off comments on this thread - if you have a question, please go here instead.

Microsoft laptop gripes - and why we still have to recondition batteries

jonathanh — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 08:44:00 GMT

These have been hard days for Microsoft laptops. First Dennis Cheung's Acer doesn't autosuspend, then Omar Shahine gripes about power management on his Toshiba Tablet PC (and about why PC laptops aren't as sexy as PowerBooks), and finally Josh Ledgard complains that his Toshiba and Vaio are arthritic and creaking after only two years. Oh, and somewhere in there Wayne Kao discovered that iBook batteries don't last long, but my Apple buddies could have told him that :-)

I've already blogged about two software aspects of getting a good laptop setup before - namely, know what background applications are running, and customize your power schemes - but battery chemistry is still deep voodo to me. Thanks therefore go to Dean, who commented on Wayne's blog with a very useful pointer to "How to prolong lithium-based batteries". The big lessons seem to be keep 'em cool (which might mean taking them out when you're running hot on mains power), and try a full discharge every 30 cycles. That last part will seem wrong to anyone who remembers the "no memory effect" hype when lithium-ion batteries were first introduced, but matches IBM's "run it till its flat once a month" advice for their T40 laptops. The reason? Apparently the chemical engineering does indeed live up to the hype, but the power management circuitry still needs periodic recalibration via a full discharge. Net benefit to the consumer, who hoped he'd never have to recondition a battery again: zero.

Update: I've moved the information about ccmexec.exe and inventory.exe over here.

Update 2: A couple of other pointers to the same basic information on recalibrating your laptop battery to extend its life - "How to recalibrate your laptop battery" from lifehacker.com, and "Don’t Forget to re-calibrate your Laptop Battery!" from My Life, Cut Short.

Tablet PC power schemes, or how not to burn a hole in your lap

jonathanh — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 21:25:00 GMT

By default, Windows XP comes with a pretty good set of power schemes. But if you're a control freak, you'll really love the Power Saver application that Toshiba ships with its Tablet PCs. You can create an unlimited number of additional power schemes, give each scheme its own icon, and then play around with 20 different sliders and 2 drop-down boxes. And that's just on the most useful tab! On other tabs you can configure power alarms and emergency hibernation settings, toggle power to system devices, and generally do everything possible to eke out the last usable millivolt from your batteries.

Of course, it's also easy to spend more time playing with this application than you'll ever actually get back from it in terms of battery life. So here's some hard-won advice from a former addict on the 12-step road to recovery.

First, work out the number of distinct ways that you use your tablet. I seem to use mine in one of three different modes, regardless of whether or not I'm plugged in:

"Fast" - demos, compiling, and other compute-intensive tasks.
"Normal" - everyday computing, i.e. Outlook, OneNote, or just being a second display for my desktop PC.
"Cool" - browsing, either in bed or during long meetings.

Next, think about what's most important to you in each mode:

Fast - I need maximum performance, for which I'll happily trade off fan noise (and battery life, if I'm not plugged in).
Normal - I don't need blazing speed, but I do want peace and quiet.
Cool - maximum battery life and a cool lap, please.

Now create matching power schemes, using the "Details..." button to tune the power settings for each. The settings are pretty self-explanatory, except for three that interact to affect speed and noise:

Processor Speed: well, ok, this one is easy - it sets the maximum processor speed, where more speed equals more battery drain and more heat.
SpeedStep Technology: this is Intel's method of throttling back the processor even further. For everyday use leave it on "automatic", which throttles back only when the processor is idle. For demo use, try "performance" (never throttle). And if you want the ultimate battery life, try "battery optimized" (always throttle) combined with "low" processor speed. Just be prepared for a reeeally slowww laptop!
Cooling Method: if the processor heats up due to heavy use, it can either turn on a fan ("maximum performance"), throttle itself back ("battery optimized"), or do a little of each ("performance"). These three choices map nicely to my demo, browsing, and everyday computing modes.

The magic settings for everyday computing seem to be high processor speed, automatic speedstep, and performance cooling. With this combination the fan never turns on unless the CPU gets pegged for more than a few seconds - which is generally a sign that I'm doing something wrong…