Make Tablet Go Bye-Bye?

[Commander Suzdal]

I have a client who bought a Gateway Tablet PC laptop about a year ago. He's decided he doesn't particularly care for the tablet features and would prefer to use it simply as a laptop. It's the kind that doesn't go into full tablet mode unless you swivel the screen.

This being the case, I could gain him some free memory and system performance if I could just disable the Tablet PC features that he doesn't want to use anyway, but wouldn't you know it, Microsoft in its infinite whizz-bang--err, wisdom, has not seen fit to provide any straightforward way of doing this. There don't appear to be any Tablet-specific entries in the services list or the system startup panel of MSConfig. The Control Panel for Tablet PC functions lets you change settings, but I didn't find anything for turning off the tablet features altogether. In my searches on the web (at MS site and Google) I have found some instructions for disabling the Input Panel by editing the registry, but I would like to get it all stopped--there are several tasks in the task manager list that are pretty obviously Tablet-related, and many of them are resource-hogs.

Any ideas/experiences/dirty tricks?

 

[Tengis]

Couldnt you just disable the services?...

 

[Langford]

I have a Toshiba tablet PC at home, and unless I pull out the pen and make a gesture, there is no difference between the tablet and a laptop. I am curious how your client's configuration differs from mine, because mine couldn't be more convienient.

 

[Commander Suzdal]

Couldnt you just disable the services?...

There are no Tablet-PC related services listed in the services control panel. Nor are there any listed under the startup tab in msconfig. I can't find them, I'm stumped.

I can tell that some of the items in the Processes list under task manager are Tablet-related by their names, but I don't know how to track them down from there and keep them from launching at startup. Even if the client was tech-savvy enough to kill them from the Task Manager, what a pain that would be.

 

[djnes]

msconfig should be able to stop them from running at boot. On a side note, I'd tell the client to do a little research next time before buying something. As far as I know, I think you can remove the Tablet edition, and install a regular version of XP.

 

[IanG]

As far as I know, I think you can remove the Tablet edition, and install a regular version of XP.

Assuming he's got real installation CDs and not just a backup cd, you could try a repair install and when prompted to put in cd2 hit cancel. That should leave you with XP Pro - it does with MCE anyway.

 

[Commander Suzdal]

I have a Toshiba tablet PC at home, and unless I pull out the pen and make a gesture, there is no difference between the tablet and a laptop. I am curious how your client's configuration differs from mine, because mine couldn't be more convienient.

There probably is no difference, it's just that he's decided he doesn't want to use the tablet features and now the processes that support them sit there eating up RAM for no good purpose.

He finds the Tablet features run sluggishly on his machine and don't suit his working style well enough that he wants to use them. Pull up Task Manager, sort by memory usage, and walk down the list and note how much memory the tablet-related processes are consuming. On his machine it's about 10% of his available memory.

I realize that the version of Windows that ships with Tablet PCs has been customized/optimized to enable all the cool things that tablets do, but it's still XP Pro under there. It shouldn't be so hard, if someone decides they really prefer traditional computing after all, to turn off the toys that you don't need. Better than having to buy a new laptop or install vanilla XP Pro on your Tablet machine.

 

[Commander Suzdal]

msconfig should be able to stop them from running at boot. On a side note, I'd tell the client to do a little research next time before buying something. As far as I know, I think you can remove the Tablet edition, and install a regular version of XP.

msconfig doesn't appear to show anything Tablet-PC related. If you know the name of the startup process(es) that should be disabled, that would help tremendously.

As far as him doing better research, well, you know what they say about hindsight... Besides, if people never made dumb mistakes with computers, they wouldn't have to pay ME to fix them...

I know a regular XP install would take care of it, but that's the cost of a license plus the time and trouble to set up his machine all over again. Not running something on your computer that you don't want to run should be easy and free, don't you think?

 

[Commander Suzdal]

Assuming he's got real installation CDs and not just a backup cd, you could try a repair install and when prompted to put in cd2 hit cancel. That should leave you with XP Pro - it does with MCE anyway.

If all else fails, this might just do the trick. I'll have to remember it for MCE too--thanks! I want to get myself a new laptop with a decent GPU someday, and I notice a lot of them come with MCE--not my cup of tea for a productivity/light gaming machine.

 

[pigster]

This being the case, I could gain him some free memory and system performance if I could just disable the Tablet PC features that he doesn't want to use anyway, but wouldn't you know it, Microsoft in its infinite whizz-bang--err, wisdom, has not seen fit to provide any straightforward way of doing this.

If you use program like Process Explorer it will show all running services and what they are - in particular, it describes several as 'Microsoft Tablet PC Component'. You will also have to identify the Gateway services relating to buttons, etc, but that should be pretty obvious.

FWIW, I also believe that it's a complete waste of time, and you'll see no real improvement in performance in everyday business use.

 

[Langford]

There probably is no difference, it's just that he's decided he doesn't want to use the tablet features and now the processes that support them sit there eating up RAM for no good purpose.

He finds the Tablet features run sluggishly on his machine and don't suit his working style well enough that he wants to use them. Pull up Task Manager, sort by memory usage, and walk down the list and note how much memory the tablet-related processes are consuming. On his machine it's about 10% of his available memory.

I realize that the version of Windows that ships with Tablet PCs has been customized/optimized to enable all the cool things that tablets do, but it's still XP Pro under there. It shouldn't be so hard, if someone decides they really prefer traditional computing after all, to turn off the toys that you don't need. Better than having to buy a new laptop or install vanilla XP Pro on your Tablet machine.

The only "tablet related" process my system is running is tabtip.exe, and it takes up almost nothing. I can get rid of it pretty easily, but I have no reason to. I suspect the processes that are effecting his RAM are not really tablet related.