XP SP2 Continued
Well, I didn’t get a chance to work on my tablet much this weekend as I had a guest from out of town. We spent most of the weekend at a friends house watching Lord of the Rings movies since everyone’s wives (and in some cases, kids) were out of town. It was a pretty relaxing weekend and was definitely needed.
But, I did work with my tablet enough that I saw some of the new “enhancements” for SP2. The security monitor still thinks my Norton Antivirus isn’t running, but it is. I changed the setting for the security monitor to not look for the antivirus software and it has stopped giving me the warning. The wireless network icon in the systray look different now, which is a nice touch since my tablet would sometimes have both network connections going in some situations and I needed to shut one of them down. Now I don’t have to hover over one to see which one it is (not THAT big of deal, but it is nice). Some of the wireless network setting screens have been modified to provide more information about the wireless network.
The TIP (or input panel) for the tablet was been greatly improved. When you click in an textbox or area where you would normally type a icon appears a bit offset that you can click on to bring up the tip. This was a nice feature (but if you don’t like that, you can turn it off). The new tip does grow as you write like they say it does, but only if it is undocked, which is the default if you bring it up using the afore mentioned floating icon. The new character pad mode is very nice. Instead of trying to determine what you wrote by matching the recognized letters against a dictionary it just recognizes one character at a time. This makes typing emails and URLs a lot simpler. It may also help if you attempting to write some code. Overall I think the handwriting recognition was improved as it does a better job translating my chicken scratch. The fact that you can see what you are writing and can correct it is really nice. But, I miss the ability to have it auto insert after a given pause time period. It still has the feature, but when you turn it on you loose the ability to see and edit the text as you write it. Oh well. For some reason when I bring the TIP up by clicking the TIP icon on the task bar the TIP is docked to the bottom of the screen and will not undock. It can switch to the top of the screen when I change the options to do so, but when I attempt to “undock” it, it just shuts off completely. For some reason I just expected it would stick around and float on the screen. It does appear undocked if I’m writing in an text box and click the floating icon to make it appear.
Internet Explorer now has the added features of blocking pop-up adds. So, I’ve turned off that feature on the Google Toolbar to see how well it works. So far so good. It also has a Manage Add-ons menu which lets you see the active X controls that are installed and used by IE. This is akin to the “View Objects” menu previously, although the new one gives a bit more information on each one. including the ability to enable/disable each one without actually just uninstalling it. IE does seem to take a longer time to load though, and I’ve noticed that sometimes when I switch between apps I can see the screen redraw a bit more than I used to…..but not sure what to make of that.
So far I haven’t run into any issues that are SP2 related that is making me think it was a bad decision to install it. Hopefully that will be the case till they put out the release version!