[apextwin]

Hey Jason,

You mentioned that you wanted to give Thinkoutside some time to reply before you make a post about this little issue on PPCT's front page. What kind of timeframe did you have in mind?

I am just curious because next week my wife will leave for London, taking my laptop with her. If Thinkoutside has not released a new Stowaway XT driver by then I will have to resort to pen and paper to take notes in class (haven't done that for years now). :|

[apextwin]

Hey Jason,

You mentioned that you wanted to give Thinkoutside some time to reply before you make a post about this little issue on PPCT's front page. What kind of timeframe did you have in mind?

I am just curious because next week my wife will leave for London, taking my laptop with her. If Thinkoutside has not released a new Stowaway XT driver by then I will have to resort to pen and paper to take notes in class (haven't done that for years now). :|

[hamishmacdonald]

Yes, the driver situation is annoying. I've had my XT for a few months now, and I'm pretty eager to not have to resort to kludgey workarounds... but and least there is a kludgey workaround that's been pointed out, which will save you having to take the drivers off your iPAQ:

[quote="arif"]One of the astute readers over at the Brighthand forums (who goes by pro_worm) identified a registry key that activates/deactivates the faulty drivers for the XT [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Drivers/BuiltIn/Stowaway, Prefix = STO]. You can change this key to a null value when you're not using it and your PPC will function normally. Unfortunately, this is only a partial fix, as you still have to reset the machine for registry changes to go into effect.[quote]

In other words, go into the Prefix=STO entry and delete the "STO" part then soft-reset to disable the driver; put it back in and reset to enable the driver. (You can use the excellent freeware PHM Registry Editor to do this, which is available from http://www.phm.lu/Products/PocketPC/RegEdit )

If you're watching these XT-related fora like me, your heart leaps every time you get an e-mail about them, and you think "Is this the announcement? Is it here?" So I apologise for getting your hopes up. But at least this severs the need to keep cradling the iPAQ with a PC to put the driver on. (Since, of course, it doesn't install with a simple .CAB file either, which would have been handy.)

[apextwin]

So I went ahead and tried the regedit trick (thanks for the tip, by the way). While it's definitely better than having to reset every time I am still far from being a happy camper. When I finally used the Stowaway keyboard in class I found out that the power button issue isn't the only one I'm having to deal with. Sometimes keys would randomly go into repeat mode, then I lost one entire lecture because accidentally hitting the green function key and the delete key turned off the PPC (i.e. I had to reset and lost all unsaved data)...

To make a long gripe short - where is the update? I think by now we have all the right to at least get an official response from Thinkoutside (or whoever happens to work on the updated driver).

Are you still thinking about bringing this issue to Thinkoutside's attention via an e-mail petition, Jason? It seems like they have put ordinary consumers on ignore by now.