Stowaway XT Drivers for WM2003

[55Kevy]

Are they available yet? Or has someone developed a reasonable (i.e. do it once and forget it) workaround for the existing drivers?

Kevin

[Jason Dunn]

Nothing so far. I just emailed Think Outside again...this is really getting silly now. :roll:

[midili]

any ideas on how we can get a concerted effort to get ThinkOutside working in a positive direction? I sent an e-mail several weeks ago asking for a status and got nothing in return. I bought the keyboard because it was on sale at a great price and I thought for sure they would have a driver out in the near future. This is crazy....

Jeff

[apextwin]

About two weeks ago I talked to customer support at Thinkoutside. They told me that the updated drivers for WM 2003 would be released around mid-September. I tried calling back for status updates but for some reason the customer support phone # now leads to a voice mail box that is full :? Definitely not a good way to deal with your customers.

[Jason Dunn]

any ideas on how we can get a concerted effort to get ThinkOutside working in a positive direction?

Let's give them a few days to get back to me, and if they don't, we can try a front-page post where a few 1000 people can email them asking for the driver. I don't mind waiting, but the silence is getting silly.

[Christian]

any ideas on how we can get a concerted effort to get ThinkOutside working in a positive direction?

Let's give them a few days to get back to me, and if they don't, we can try a front-page post where a few 1000 people can email them asking for the driver. I don't mind waiting, but the silence is getting silly.

Sounds good to me. Thanks for trying to get some traction - it seems that ThinkOutside doesn't respond to lowly customers... :?

[sankyou]

I too have pinged these guys. Their response was something like: While the driver works in WM2K3, you may have to frequently reset your device. What a cop-out. Reset = not working... I don't know if any of you checked out the review on www.davesipaq.com but they reviewed the Stowaway XT on the Ipaq H2215 and gave it rave reviews. This is my PDA and somehow he managed to miss the fact that the PDA was running like crap on that driver... Anyway I'm down to do any mail flooding and anything else that can be conjured up as I want my keyboard :)

[apextwin]

I am down for a concerted mass mailing to Thinkoutside. I bought the keyboard at the end of June to take notes at law school. Now it's 2 1/2 months later and I still can't use it. And to make matters worse Thinkoutside has not released any information on whether or when an updated driver would be available (apart from my phone conversation with them - but nobody else seems to have been told that mid-September would be the release date).

[midili]

I sent an e-mail to Dave at DavesIpaq asking him to clarify the stowawayXt "as the best keyboard for the h2215." I explained the soft reset problem we are having and ThinkOutsides position that frequent soft-resets are considered acceptable behavior for a 'working' driver.

Maybe something will happen if Dave and Jason both try and get ThinkOutside to act.

[Christian]

In my opinion its worth noting that it's not that the driver is unstable, or even that it requires more frequent soft resets, but that it prevents the device from ever being turned on without a soft reset. (Unless my device is somehow special) It's completely unusable, and I find it strange how anyone writing a review could not have noticed - all that is required is for that person to turn off their device once and attempt to turn it back on. :? Meanwhile, it's been over six weeks since I received by XT paperweight...

[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.