I'm wondering if such a beast exists: A relatively modern device in the tablet form factor, where the screen is big enough to display an 8.5" x 11" page at actual size?

Either a true tablet form factor like the Win8 tablets coming out now, or, a laptop with a fold-around keyboard so it folds completely flat. Or hell, even an Android or WinRT tablet, but I'm pretty sure none of the iPad/Droid/RT devices are anywhere near big enough.

Everyone who uses sheet music or chord charts these days is moving all their stuff to iPads/Androids running software like ForScore. That's all well and good, but the iPad/Android approach has serious problems for me:

• All the sheet-music-display software for iPads/Androids that I've seen (such as ForScore or others) requires a file format conversion to either PDF or to a proprietary format. You can't display your chord chart or sheet music in its original editable format (in my case, chord/lyric charts in Winword .DOC files).
• Lack of direct access to the file system means that you must do some kind of an import step in the sheet music software. Some of the software will support DropBox directly, which is real good, but still not quite as useful as copying the files directly.
• Cannot *source edit* the charts/music in their original format other than scribbling annotations atop them.
• If you annotate the charts by scribbling notes atop the charts, your annotations are locked into that software, you can't get them back to the original source documents. Any annotations are now in that program's proprietary file format. Even if they weren't proprietary files, because of the lack of direct-access-to-the-filesystem, you now don't have an easy way of transporting those annotations back to a source computer where the original files were composed.
• iPads, Android, and WindowsRT tablets are just too friggin small. At that size, you need the chart too close to your face to be useful for the way I use my chord charts. When I use chord charts, I stand really far back from the music stand and keep an eye on the chart out of the corner of my eye, and an iPad or Droid is just too small for that.

Right now I'm experimenting with one of my company's very old tablet PCs running WinXP tablet edition. The device is a Motion Computing M1400. This is actually QUITE CLOSE to what I'm looking for. It's close enough that I'm using it as a proof of concept (the "concept" being that I can somehow someday go paperless for my chord charts). Its 12"-diagonal screen is the correct aspect ratio, and when I display an 8.5x11 page on it, it's starting to come close to actual size. Not quite, but much closer than an ipad or droid would be. (Ideally, for a 4:3 screen like that, I'd want about 14 inches diagonal for Actual Size display and I'd be happy with 13.) Because the M1400 runs Windows, I can simply copy my .DOC files to it and display them. I even have a fairly fancy Word VBA macro that handles the process of setting up playlists and paging through the charts in a live performance setting (that was the thing I asked for "Save As" dialog box help in another thread recently).

If I don't find something better than that M1400, I will ask my company if I can buy it from them, and just use it for this purpose. (Heck, I'm thinking it was destined for the recycling rack to begin with.) The problem is, the thing is old and no longer supported, and Motion Computing no longer carries things like extra batteries for it (I checked). I found a replacement battery from one third party company but I've got no idea how good it would be. I'd like something new, something actively supported, something lighter, that I don't have to tether to a power supply, and that has enough CPU/RAM to run Win7 or Win8.

Okay, so there's a billion Win8 tablets coming out right now in all sorts of different sizes. I should be able to use one of them, right? Well, here's the problem. Their screens are all 16x9 ratio. Our fascination with watching DVDs on our computers has done this to us: Every computer made today has a 16x9 screen. (Even the ones made by Motion Computing.)

Okay, sure, so you can still display an 8.5x11 page in portrait mode on a 16x9 screen. There will be a gap above and below it, sure, but the page will display. True, but the problem with that aspect ratio is that you have to have such a massive screen to reach 8.5 inches in width. In order to view that 8.5x11 page at Actual Size, you need a screen that is more than 17 inches diagonal.

Does anyone make modern 16:9 tablets, for US sale, with screens in the neighborhood of 17 inches diagonal?

Anyone know of a relatively modern device (i.e., likely to be still supported with regard to replacement parts and batteries) with an NTSC (4:3) aspect screen in the neighborhood of 13-14 inches diagonal?

I'm having trouble finding what I want via Google.

How about something in the All-in-One PC range:

http://store.sony.com/c/VAIO-Tap-20-Touchscreen-Computers/en/c/S_J2_SERIES_PAGE

-jk

Interesting! Checking it out now.

The Sony Vaio name makes me cringe, having had prior bad experiences, but that might be the kind of thing I'm looking for, and maybe Sony has improved their stuff in the years since I last touched one.

Hm, at 20 inches in landscape mode, it'll display TWO pages at nearly actual size, meaning, no page-turning mid-song (my longest charts are two pages tops).

Investigating. Thanks.

Hm. Looking at the video of the thing in action, it looks like it would be a bit bulky for airplane travel. I wouldn't expect to *use* something like that *on* an airplane. What I mean is, it might be a hassle packing in the baggage and getting through airline security. Although not really any worse than a big laptop I suppose. Hm.

Something like that is less like a tablet and more like a 20" desktop monitor that happens to have batteries and a computer inside it. Maybe I should expand my proof-of-concept testing to include a 20" desktop monitor in that role and see if that's something I could be happy with.

Now that I calculate it out, I see that it doesn't really get me two pages at actual size. Width is OK, but height only gets 9.75 inches.

Of course if I go vertical with something that big, then I'm way beyond 8.5x11 and I could do some tricks, like, put the music even farther away, or lower down, which would be even better.

Hm. It's got me thinking. Thanks.

Hm. Battery life is only a couple of hours. Some of my gigs run three hours. I could turn it off and top off its charge during set breaks, though. Still, that's a razor-thin margin on battery life. And yes, I could just run the power cord out to it, but I'm trying to avoid that.

Sorry everyone... just thinking out loud here.

Contrary to your earlier assertion, Android devices DO have "direct access to the filesystem", not that this helps with the other, more important points.

Cheers

And this guy's kickstarter for a 17-inch tablet never got anywhere.

So the industry is doing 10-inch tablets and 20-inch tablets at the 16:9 aspect ratio, but nothing in between. Hm.

I may be back to trying to find an older 4:3 tablet or foldable PC in the 13 inch range.

Anyone know of any model numbers of older PCs in that form factor?

Asus is working on a 18" tablet, the tablet runs Android and the base/stand runs Windows.

Asus tablet

Lenovo is working on a 27" table top tablet.

Lenovo tablet

How about using a tablet / laptop with DVI/HDMI output or MHL and an MHL-HDMI converter to a screen of your choice. Neater still would be a Nexus 10 and Netgear PTV3000 to do it wirelessly over Miracast.

There are a number of interesting products coming from the USB display space, including things like this Monitor 2Go (DisplayLink chipset inside).

If my memory serves, several companies (AOC, and perhaps Fujitsu?) make a USB powered monitor that you could drive from a compact laptop.

I considered doing some kind of remote display thing. A couple of issues with that.

First, I don't yet see a battery powered or wireless remote display, meaning, anything I put in front of me is going to need two cables running to it, and that's two cables more than I want.

Second, it means that now I'm traveling with two large heavy expensive LCD displays instead of one, it's two things I need to take out for the TSA, it's two things that might have an electronics failure or get damaged in transit, etc.

Yeah, if it weren't for that, I'd just bolt a cheap LCD monitor to a mic stand and be done with it. Still not entirely set against the idea, but it's mostly out of play at this point.

On a side note: I looked at the Monitor2Go specs and I don't see how it's any better than just any other LCD monitor. Maybe some additional plastic to help it stand up on its own and dock with an ipad easily, but that's about it.

So you just need this, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81iiGWdsJgg

Except.. productised.

Hells yes.

Of course all the ways they're showing those things being used, I don't care about. I just need a display in that size and shape, and E-paper would be an awesome way to do it.

I could envision hacking up an old laptop to add a display like that.

For what it's worth, I have a Sony Tap 20 unit in my office, which we're planning to turn into an electronic voting prototype, donated by Sony and Microsoft who are intrigued by the idea.

You can think of it as a big, heavy, battery-powered tablet. Or, you can think of it as an all-in-one Windows 8 touch-enabled PC that happens to have an internal 2.5 hour battery and ships with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

If what you want is to have sheet music in front of your face and have swipe gestures to go between pages, this Sony thing plus a swipe-grokking PDF viewer might be exactly what you're looking for. You will need something more substantial than a standard music stand to hold it, though.

The Sony thing sounds great but for the 2.5 hour battery life. That's right on the hairy edge of being too short. Still, that's very tempting and very close to what I'm looking for. With a screen that big, it could almost be propped on the floor farther in front of us, more like a stage teleprompter.

I've already got the page-turner app sorted out. I don't want PDF, I want it to be source-editable doc format, meaning I had to write a Word macro for crating set lists and paging through them, but that all works now.

Swiping, or even a touch screen for that matter, is not a necessary part of my plan. The page turning will be accomplished with a wireless bluetooth pedal ala this or this.

Actually, Dan, if you've got that thing handy...

Does it happen to have Word on it?

If so, and if you have access to it, do me a favor and open up *just* Word, showing a 20-page document in full screen reading mode. Let it sit there, ideally with a bluetooth mouse connected. Screen brightness can be turned down a bit, but it must be set so that it does not go to sleep nor have the screen turn off at all. How long does its battery really last in that state?

Any chance you could just have an auxiliary battery plugged in and sitting on the floor? Doesn't have to be anything fancy or compact, a lead-acid gel-cell motorcycle battery would do the trick maybe 8" by 4" by 4", about 12 amp-hours at 12 volts.

tanstaafl.

The Sony's power brick is 19.5V at 3.3A. That's not exactly a standard thing for which you can buy a battery pack.

Amusingly, I thought the computer was asleep, since its screen was off, but instead it had apparently crashed, while sitting there, and I had to hard boot it. At least it boots fast. I don't have Office on here (despite having a bunch of stuff in C:\Program Files\Office15), but there is a PDF viewer that does 2-up and lets you swipe to advance.

It's too late today for me to start a battery drain test for you, but I'll give that a shot tomorrow.

Awesome, Dan! Thanks!

Yeah, I'm really curious what kind of battery life it *really* gets when it's sitting there displaying a document for a long time (i.e., the screen is never allowed to go to sleep).

And that "kickstand" on the back: That only works for a landscape mode display, right, you can't prop it up in portrait mode using that kickstand?

Hm. CNET said they got three hours and 42 minutes out of the thing in a video-focused battery drain test. That's more like it.

Hmmmmmmmmmm........

Are you familiar with the MusicPad Pro? It's a 12.1" screen tablet purpose built for a music library. It's a discontinued product now, and your requirements for Word file editing probably count it out, but it seemed really well thought out. If what you're doing is chiefly displaying words and/or chord charts, you've got probably more flexibility in solutions, but if you were depending on actual scores and relying on having a lot of them available at any one time, it was about the only game in town for many years.

If I were to guess at the reasons for its demise, it's that the company was just a few years ahead of its time. The market for a many hundred dollar piece of equipment just to manage sheet music is probably terribly small. Now that everyone has a tablet or is contemplating purchasing one, it makes a lot more sense to sell that kind of solution as a software app, which many companies are in fact doing.

When I have the screen brightness all the way up, it estimates 2 hours of battery life. When I turn it all the way down, the estimate becomes 3.5 hours. Right now, I'm doing a run-down test for you with the brightness all the way down.

The kickstand is a bit wonky. Works just fine for landscape. If you fold it to the middle, the machine will stand up in portrait mode, but one bump and it's going down. If you want to run this machine in portrait mode, you'll want to build/buy your own stand for it.

Or add a little bit of gaffer tape to the setup.

With minimal screen brightness and nothing running (just whatever Windows Explorer is called now), I'm at four hours and three minutes with 7% battery life left and the machine gently reminding me to plug in now, damnit. Not bad.

I'm currently doing proof-of-concept testing on a WinXP tablet with a 12.1" screen (the aforementioned Motion Computing M1400), so basically, I'm doing that same thing but with the bonus of having live editing available by having Word installed on the tablet.

And yes, I once upon a time seem to recall seeing a web site for a company that had a purpose-built tablet for sheet music (pre-ipad days), so it might have been them.

Interestingly, a google search for those people turns up these people, who have a pre-made list of computers, some of which look like the sorts of things I'm looking for:
http://www.musicreader.net/hardware/tablet-pc/tablet-pc-comparison.html

I'm going to investigate the 13" ones in that list and see if I want to get one of them on ebay or something. (*EDIT:* Never mind, all the 13" ones on that list are 16:10 widescreen displays, we're back to my same original problem.)

Okay, that is awesome. Thank you SO MUCH for doing that rundown test.

They have one of those on display at the Best Buy near my house. Glimpsed it (but didn't get to play with it, thanks to that painting/drawing app on the thing that draws all the kids to it). Vixy thinks it's too big, and that if we did what I wanted to do and prop it on the floor like a teleprompter, we'd have to put it too far forward. I still want to poke at it and do some experiments with something that size. I have a 20" monitor at my house I could stick on its side and experiment with.

The bezel is roughly an inch all the way around, which doesn't seem unreasonable. If you hold up two US Letter pages to the screen, they fit by width, but the top inch of each page gets cut off. That says if your sheet music is printed with 1-inch margins on US Letter, you can have it on screen at full-life size without cropping anything.

Like I said before, a regular music stand would not stand up well to this much weight on top. You'd want to build/buy/cobble something more substantial. The built-in kick-stand thing seems reasonably solid and you can change the view angle. It's just held together with friction on the joints, so over time I'd expect it would loosen up, and thus the need for a more substantial stand.

Aha okay, here's something interesting:

http://hk.viewsonic.com/en/products/airpanel/index15.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Display

Back in the early aughts, Microsoft wanted to sell folks on the idea of a tablet PC you carried around the house which RDP'd into your desktop computer. It didn't fly, but Viewsonic managed to make a few of these, which can be had for about 100 bucks on Ebay:

- 15" diagonal screen, 4:3 aspect ratio (EXACTLY PRECISELY the size and shape I want because that's 9" x 12" viewable area)

- Battery powered (LI-Ion 4-hour rechargable, I'll have to see about replacement batteries).

- WiFi with the ability to RDP into a Windows PC. (Via a Windows CE os with an RDP client built in.)

If I kept a real laptop off in the corner somewhere and used this as a remote display, this could be perfect.

One catch: this thing has to have the ability to run in portrait mode, with the RDP display going full screen in portrait mode.

Can anyone with better google-fu tell this thing will do portrait mode? My searches aren't coming up with much and all the pics show landscape mode.

Well, if it'll do portrait mode, the battery thing is sorted:

http://aadhoc.blogspot.com/2007/10/repair-viewsonic-v150-battery.html

Nope, it can't. I emailed a guy who had a web site up about hacking the V150. I suppose I could display the pages twisted 90 degrees on the host PC, but that's starting to get a bit TOO frankenstein even for my tastes.

Now I'm just using this to keep track of all the stuff I find. Here's one that might meet my specs, Toshiba Satellite R15:

http://www.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-satellite-r15-s822/4505-3121_7-31272309.html

14.1" diagonal twist-around screen (too bad it's not actually 15 like in the name) but that does in fact give me 8.5x11 viewable area. Could do maybe....

Anyone know of any other old twist-arounds with screens that big or bigger?

I just won an ebay auction on the Toshiba Satellite R15. We shall see how it does with its 14.1 inch screen.

Results so far with the Toshiba Satellite R15.

The good:

- 14.1" screen is precisely the correct size. Can show an 8.5 x 11 chord chart at exact actual size in portrait mode.

- Doesn't have built-in bluetooth, but, the bluetooth dongle from the Pageflip Cicada Pedal works perfectly. Also it happens to work with my old MS bluetooth mouse, so I now also have a cordless mouse for it too.

- It has an SD card slot so I can synch/backup song charts with my other computers even when there's no wireless available.

- I've got my chord chart software pretty much working the way I want now. I can create/edit/reorder multiple set lists, using any document that Word can open. I've figured out how to put up the chord charts on the screen without any scroll bars or menus, and zoom them to fit the screen edge. Each page of the set list offers an "Edit" button that will let me edit and save the chord chart live in Word (using the stylus and the onscreen keyboard) and then it will automatically reinsert the edited song into the set in the correct spot. I can display the charts using any color scheme I like, choosing page background color and foreground text color. I can email a set list to another band member. It's all working perfectly now.

- I've now even got some holes cut on the back of the casing to slot the computer into a mic-stand attachment, so it can mount onto a mic stand, instead of precariously balancing it on a music stand. (The mic stand attachments that wrap around and grip tablets from the edges are all designed for ipads and aren't nearly big enough for a full laptop PC like this. I found a rare one that would go to 10 inches wide, which did fit the Motion Computing M1400 tablet, but not this Toshiba tablet.)

- Battery rundown is two solid hours on a third-party battery I purchased to go with it. Not great, but, I could simply have a second charged battery on hand for the second set.


The bad:

- It's a fairly heavy laptop, as laptops go. It's almost as heavy as the printed songbook it's trying to replace. Though not *quite* as bulky.

- The screen rez is only 1024 x 768. For chord charts where the font is condensed to fit the page, the text starts to get hard to read sometimes because the anti-aliasing features of the display engine are working too hard to make the fonts readable.

- When rotated into portrait mode, off-axis viewing of the LCD pixels themselves is tricky. LCD displays are optimized for landscape viewing, in terms of the pixel layout and orientation. So if you're looking at, say, black text on white or white text on black, when you view this display in portrait mode off-axis, everything turns into rainbows. I can correct for this by choosing to use green text on a black background, so there's no rainbow. But even then, there's issues with viewing the text off-axis: Some font sizes blur too much off-axis to read. That's a problem because me and Vixy use our charts off-axis: We put the music stand between us (so it's off to my right and off to her left) and keep an eye on it out of the corner of our eye, we don't put the stand directly in front of us.

That last one might still kill it. I'm going to play with display settings and see if I can improve things in that regard.

Not all LCDs have that problem; just the cheaper/common ones.

I wonder if anyone else made a 14.1" NTSC-aspect-ratio tablet with a fold-around screen? One with better rez and better off-axis viewing?

Hmm, on paper this Gateway M275 looks similar...

Well, for a $50.00 auction, I got one of those Gateways. I'll bet it's the same exact LCD display and pen sensor assembly as the Toshiba unit, but, I'll find out when I get it.

In the meantime, playing with the contrast settings on Toshiba produces interesting results. You can make off-axis viewing in one direction better, at the expense of on-axis viewing and at the expense of off-axis viewing in the other direction. Sigh.

This is being such an interesting experience. It makes me truly appreciate the current generation of tablet computers, which have long since solved all of these problems (except for the screen size).

Hey, man, check out that Sony. Great off-axis performance.

I know. Vixy vetoed it though, too big.

So what if it is? One for you, one for Vixy, no more off-axis problem.

tanstaafl.

We deliberately only use a single music stand so that way, it's between us, so it doesn't get directly between us and the audience. Well, ideally we'd simply get good at memorizing and not need a reference chart at all, but we have day jobs.

You want an IPS screen for the best off axis viewing. Sometimes hard to find in laptops, more common in desktop monitors.

What I really want is one of those paper displays, hacked to work as a second display monitor, taped to the top side of the lid of a modern laptop.

The Toshiba Satellite worked well for its first go.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/29869731
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/29871063

Haven't done a gig with Vixy with this setup yet. This was me and Betsy Tinney playing for Marian Call on Saturday. Figured it would be a nice experiment to try it out on someone else first.

Might do this setup with Vixy in a couple weeks.

Neat! Do you have any pics of it in action up close?

I saw Marian Call at a Firefly event about a year or so ago. She was good.

I don't have any pics yet. I should be getting its sister Gateway tablet PC in the mail today, which I'm going to format with Win7 instead of WinXP and see how that performs. If it works well, I might just spruce up the software a bit and put up a whole web page about the project, pics, software, and all.

I'm glad you had a chance to see her. I'm guessing the event was a CSTS somewhere? Once, my full band did a CSTS with her, along with SJ Tucker, here in Seattle, and it was just awesome. So much fullness to the sound. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioCNkROWPrw

Heh, yeah, it was CSTS. They did one in Arlington, VA at the Drafthouse (nothing like the Alamo drafthouse).

Some updates:

- Got the Gateway M275 in the mail and set it up with Win7.
- Gateway working well, and almost every bit of hardware on the device had a Win7 driver automatically installed by the OS. Nice. Except the video driver...
- Getting a working video driver on Win7 was a bit of a pain. Turns out that Intel doesn't support that model of video chip on later OS's at all and you have to hack the XP driver to work on Win7: http://www.groundstate.net/855GMWin7.html
- Gateway off-axis viewing has exactly the same issues as the Toshiba Satellite R15. The anti-aliasing turns into a rainbow at off-axis angles. Forcing the text to green-on-black helps, but then you've got the contrast issues with the in-between shades of green: From Vixy's side the letters disappear because the antialiased pixels disappear, and from my side the letters get blobby because the antialiased pixels turn to full brightness. Adjusting the contrast makes it better for one side at the expense of the other. BUT! I have a solution that will work on either PC (see below).
- Gateway PC also has a sort of a "wash" effect on the screen at off-axis angles that I don't seem to recall the Toshiba had as badly.
- Gateway PC is lighter and thinner than the Toshiba despite having the same specs.
- Toshiba PC had enough extra space in the casing that I could cut mounting bracket slots directly into its case. For the Gateway, I had to fashion a "cradle" for it out of foamed PVC sheet.
- Toshiba PC, running XP, had some issues with hibernate/resume (pen calibration no longer works after resume), so I'm currently reformatting the Toshiba to see if it functions better under Win7.

How I solved the antialiasing problem...
- Turn off antialiasing. Then it doesn't matter what angle you view the font at, it's always pixels 100 percent on or 100 percent off. Then the font looks the same no matter what angle you view it at.
- PROBLEM: Even when you turn off antialiasing in the OS, Microsoft Word still displays its text antialiased. (SERIOUSLY GUYS? YOUR FLAGSHIP PRODUCT IGNORES YOUR OWN OS'S GLOBAL SETTING FOR ANTIALIASING? GAH!)
- HOW TO FIX:
-- First you have to turn off ClearType. Control Panel - Hardware And Sound - Display - Press "Adjust ClearType Text" in the sidebar.
-- Then you have to turn off Antialiasing altogehter. Run SYSDM.CPL - "Advanced" tab - Press "Performance" - Uncheck "Smooth edges of screen fonts", apply.
-- Now the OS has antialiasing turned off but Microsoft Word still has it turned on. Now you must force Word to obey the system's antialiasing setting by editing the system registry.
Word 2003
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options
Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\RespectSystemFontSmooth
New DWORD Value, NoClearTypeNW, set value to 1 and then the next time you run Word it will respect the fact that you turned off antialiasing in the OS.

I tested this out with Vixy and she (finally) liked it. There's a chance we'll be using this setup (not sure which PC yet, I'm still installing Win7 on the Toshiba) at our next gig. Crossing fingers!

Okay, both the Gateway and Toshiba tablet took Win7 just fine. Both of them had the same Intel video chip and needed the funky XP driver hack linked in the last post. I've bought secondary backup batteries for both PCs and done rundown tests.

Both of them are sufficient for what I want to do, and I've modded the mounting cradle that I made to accept either one of them.

In the end, the Gateway is the better computer, with about 1.5 times the battery life, better construction, weighs less, smaller outer dimensions, etc. But its screen has the problem of having a hazy appearance when viewed off-axis on my side (Vixy's side is fine).

I'm thinking the Toshiba will be the main performance PC and the Gateway will be the backup. Tomorrow will be the first Vixy & Tony rehearsal with this system, and we'll see how the Toshiba holds up. If all goes well, this Saturday will be our first performance together with it as our band.

Dignan asked for some up close shots, so, they are attached. Enjoy!

Sweet! I love it!

It's a pretty thick laptop, but it seems to be working for you. Very cool solution. I love the pedal page turner...

Yes, I'd love something thinner and lighter, but as this exercise has shown, there isn't anything with those screen dimensions in the thin/light category. That was the root of my problem.

The page turner is the PageFlip Cicada and I'm very happy with it so far. Our cellist uses an AirTurn with an iPad running the ForScore software.

Update on how it behaved at the first rehearsal with my band:

1. My Word macro encountered this CodeModule.AddFromString bug, and I'm currently researching ways to fix it. I thought I already was doing the thing that he suggests at that page, so I'm trying to come up with other ideas. It appears to be a timing issue with on-the-fly compilation of VBA macros. (Update: Seems to be fixed. Turns out that there was a way I could put the code later in the macro, as close to the end as I could get it, and sure enough, just like he said, the crash went away.)

2. I discovered that, if you have your hands full (ie, you are playing a song) and the little "Your battery is down to 10 percent" balloon pops up on the screen, the balloon does not go away on its own. It stays there, covering up the last verse of the song, until you dig out the stylus and click it. I *want* the balloon to warn me if the battery is getting low, so I don't want to disable it altogether. Not sure what to do there. Ideally I'd want a smaller warning instead of the big balloon. Wonder if there's something I can do in that area. On the good side: Battery swap is super easy, so I just have to keep the extra charged battery on hand. (Update: Trying solution: Power Meter Plus floats on the desktop and I turn off all battery notification balloons in the Windows OS.

3. When I put the laptop back into the rolling backpack that I've been using to carry things to gigs, I managed to put it into the backpack bluetooth-dongle-side down. (The dongle sticks out from the laptop just a bit). This cracked the casing on the dongle and made me worry that I will someday destroy the dongle in this fashion. I am currently searching for PCMCIA Bluetooth adapters so that I can get rid of the dongle and have flush edges on the laptop so that I don't have this problem again.

Doesn't that stand for "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms or something?

tanstaafl.

Perhaps strips of plastic or rubber glued along the tablet edges adjacent to the dongle could provide a safe 'recess' for that USB port.

Naw, that'd make an already-big laptop bigger. If a PCMCIA card doesn't work, I'll just hack the USB dongle into the interior of the laptop. There's actually enough space in there, that Toshiba's casing is bigger than it needs to be.

First show with the Vixy & Tony band was a success, the tablet worked great.

The PCMCIA Bluetooth Adapter that I tried didn't work, so I stuck with the USB bluetooth dongle and just remembered to unplug it before packing away the tablet.

I'd still like to solve the PCMCIA bluetooth problem, though. Anyone got any suggestions? The 3com one should have been perfectly, but it simply suffered from old software. It had to use its own connection/pairing manager instead of the Windows connection/pairing manager. This software could see the pedal, but it didn't see it as having any "services" it could connect to. I think the problem was that the card was so old that the only thing it wanted to use Bluetooth for was a network connection to another computer. When faced with a bluetooth keyboard (that's what the pedal is), it doesn't know what to do.

Anyone know of any good PCMCIA Bluetooth adapters that work with Windows 7 and can pair with BT keyboards? My criteria for finding one is that it must fit flush. If it protrudes, then it's no better than the USB dongle I'm already using. Tempted to try this one and see if it works with the antenna retracted. (*edit for posterity*": Yes that one worked. I do have to extend the antenna during a gig, but I remember to retract it before packing up and all is well.)

Does the laptop offer a mini PCI slot somewhere? Perhaps you can swap out any existing WiFi cards that may be populating one for a WiFi and Bluetooth combo card.

That's a great idea. I believe that its wifi adapter is in fact of that variety. I'll have to crack it open again and take a closer look.

I believe it's got an Intel pro wireless 2200bg mini-PCI card in it.

I'm having trouble finding anything in that form factor that includes both Wifi and Bluetooth. There are plenty of mini PCI-Express adapters in that category, but the plain old Mini PCI versions seem to be thin on the ground.

Anyone know of any?

I seem to recall buying something like that from EnGenius

Even if they don't list a combo bluetooth mini-PCI module, they might be able to direct you in a useful manner.

Another tack: isn't there an internal BT option card for that notebook? All of the ones (Dell) I've used here have all had an internal connector for optional BT. And the BT cards for them are on eBay (cheap!).

Yours isn't a Dell, but.. worth checking that possibility.

I believe these devices predate ubiquitous bluetooth, so I don't think there's an internal connector for one in there. I will look, though.

I'm seeing this one is a valid device:

http://www.pcplanetsystems.com/abc/product_details.php?item_id=2414&category_id=229

But that web site looks very shady, to the point where I'm not confident to give them my credit card number. All the reputable sites which list that same card all say Out Of Stock. Still searching...

The junk shop around the corner from us has a bin full of old mini-PCI and mini-PCIe cards, $5/each. Unfortunately, they're only open Fridays, and this Friday is a holiday (closed).

But if you're still hunting a week and a bit from now, email/PM me a reminder and I'll dig through the bin and see what's there. Postage from me to you is only a buck or so.

Cheers