Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

I own a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC, which is a pretty nice piece of hardware, but unfortunately it also has some limitations. The biggest is the lack of ability to boot from a standard external USB drive. You absolutely need a Tosbhia drive, and not even that will always help you out. From reading the forums at Tablect Pc Buzz it appears that even the original Toshiba drives that should work, doesn’t always do so. So it’s a hopeless market.
Of course I didn’t know of these problems before I bought my tablet, but maybe that was good enough, otherwise I might have gone for another model or make.

Anyway, from a local supplier I had found this combined CD-R/RC/DVD-ROM external USB drive that Toshiba makes, which apparently should work. And reading the forum at Tablet PC Buzz I had concluded that this drive would work (its the PA3352E-2CD2 for the interested), and had more or less decided to buy it, disregarding the rather high price tag. During the meeting with Henrik W. from Microsoft DK about the MSP program I saw that he too had a M200 tablet, and asked if I could see his external DVD drive, and check the model number. I did, and it was the same as the one I was planning on purchasing. And so I did.
Today it arrived – and it works like a charm! So I’m a happy camper! I can’t wait to get a clean install of Windows XP Tablet PC 2005 Edition, and get away from all of that preinstalled Toshiba crap.

I needed some software to burn the ISO’s to cd’s, and I found this free piece: CDBurnerXP Pro. Get it – it’s hot!

Btw. after obtaining and burning the installation ISO’s I found that the Tablet PC 2005 Edition and the Media Center 2005 Edition share installation media. Each is comprised of 2 CD’s, and the first is a standard Windows XP SP2 CD, the second contains the extra components for the OS, the stuff that makes it a Tablec PC or a Media Center (disregarding the hardware). But CD2 contains both sets of components. So there you have it

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