I’m not sure if anyone caught it, but in my post yesterday about installing the Tablet PC OS on an iMac, did anyone notice what went right? I mean, think about it, I was installing the Tablet OS on a 250MB SATA drive. Yeah, so what you say? Well, remember that just the other day I was frustrated by the fact that I could not install a fresh copy of the Tablet PC OS on my new Toshiba M400; I had to use the recovery image instead because I didn’t have a SATA driver.
Recall, the Tablet OS/Windows XP installation CDs do not support SATA out of the box. You have to slipstream and burn your own OS CDs with the drivers, use an external floppy with the drivers, or stay with the OEM recovery images. That’s right, normally installing XP on a SATA drive–especially in a notebook where there isn’t a floppy handy–can be a nuisance.
So do you see now what didn’t happen? I didn’t have to do anything special to install the Tablet PC OS on the iMac even though it had a SATA drive. Boot Camp’s installation or Apple’s original firmware (I’m not sure which) took care of the driver issue for me.
With Vista this issue goes away, but I wonder if there’s something the Tablet OEMs could be doing in the meantime to simplify installing the Tablet OS on a SATA drive.
Apple did a good job here. In the future, if they build in the Wacom Tablet PC driver, I’ll flip out.