UMPC Tips

I’ve been using my TabletKiosk eo for almost one month, and I have some tips to share:

• To stand the eo on your desk, try a wire mesh business card holder from Office Depot. It’s the perfect size and feels pretty stable. If you’d like a little more stability or you want to protect your eo from scratches, you can put little pieces of plastic, non-adhesive, gripping material between the eo and the holder. The material is sold as ‘Grips’ at Best Buy.
• Since UMPCs have such a wide screen, unlock your taskbar and move it to the right or left side of the screen, freeing up valuable vertical pixels. Also, since you probably won’t be running many apps, consider resizing the now vertical toolbar to be super thin. You should still be able to see all the icons.
• Use Synergy, VNC or XP’s built-in Remote Assistance app to control your eo from your primary computer when you have both on your desk.
• JKK and Chippy are using a CD case to hold their eo. I couldn’t find one I liked until this weekend. Case Logic makes a really nice case whose zipper is not recessed and has smooth, rounded corners. I had to remove 3 plastic rivets with wire cutters, but it was worth the effort. I found it at Best Buy.
• I’ve been using the Brando USB 2 IDE/SATA cable a lot with the eo for accessing DVDs and CDs (using an old internal CD/DVD drive) and for backing the eo up to an extra hard drive.
• Balloon Tips must go.
• Just like any other Windows machine, you should install Spybot Search and Destroy, Adaware, and some form of Virus protection (I’ve been using AVG Free Edition).