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Tech Update: Tablet not Retired (09/30 update added)
a year ago
Last journal, I detailed the process by which I upgraded my main laptop (a Toshiba Satellite S-70A) from Win7 to Win10, by first restore-disk-ing it to Windows 8 with a new SSD then running the Win10 media creation tool to upgrade that. The fact that I had restore discs should tell you how old this system is :D. Why go the intermediate step? Mostly to get the Toshiba-specific drivers and such in the system before the upgrade. Later on, whatever drivers were updated after the fact can be upgraded as needed.
Anyway, I've been running this system on Win 10 for a little more than two weeks, slowly re-installing applications I use (and kicking out those I don't). One of the earliest was Krita, the digital paint application I was using on my Android tablets, and also in tandem with Clip Studio Paint on Windows. Something had happened to the Win7 install that made Krita unusable, as in you'd draw a line and nothing appears till you moved the image window by zooming in or out, or scrolling in any direction. Now Krita works. But I couldn't do much of anything with it just yet...I had to get my tablet working.
On my home system, my tablet is a Wacom Bamboo Fun Medium (CTE-650) purchased as a refurbished model back in 2009. Wacom no longer supports this tablet with the current set of drivers, and my early attempts to use it resulted in windows treating it like a mouse, which not only meant no pressure sensitivity, but whenever I'm using my second monitor on the side, the tablet would span both monitors, making it nearly impossible to use a drawing app confined to just one. The Wacom settings applet would claim "no tablet detected", so there was no way to set the CTE-650 to only span one display.
A little bit of Google-Fu revealed a classic workaround -- installing an older driver. Now I keep an archive of installers for various hardware and software. More importantly I keep installers for old versions of any application I use (or plan to use). I did have older Wacom drivers, 5.2.5-5a, and a 5.3.5-3. Several attempts were made to install either of these drivers to no avail, and truth be told, the calls for help online revealed mixed success getting this tablet working in Win10...until I remembered what one had to do to change from Wacom to any other company's tablet -- you have to remove all traces of Wacom drivers to install anyone else's. So I went into Settings, and uninstalled the newer 6xxx and older 5.xxx drivers.
One other thing is that there are two schools of thought regarding drivers. One is you install the driver and the accessory just works. The other is that you install the driver to seed Windows with the 'correct' driver to use rather than whatever it was going to pull out of its nether regions, then you connect the accessory, and Windows plug-and-plays the "correct" driver. I followed the latter procedure, then just to be sure, rebooted before plugging in the tablet (a tactic much less painful with an SSD). But before using the tablet, I went looking for the "Wacom Configuration Utility"---and didn't find it. Now what? How do I set the tablet to only work on one monitor?
This time, I went rifling through the Start menu's entries for Windows, and after opening up
[Windows Accessories]
[Windows Administrative Tools]
[Windows Ease of Access]
[Windows Power Shell]
[Windows System]...
and some other dinking around till I found the "Bamboo" folder, within which I found "Bamboo Settings" (okay, I started typing "Wacom" in the search bar and 'Bamboo" showed up at the top of the suggestions, instead of "Wacom Settings"). This is the applet I was looking for, and I was finally able to restrict the tablet to a single monitor.
Micrografx Picture Publisher on the other hand, still will not render its own images and will have to be replaced (installing the latest GeForce Experience utility to refresh the drivers did nothing). I have other W10 laptops that do run this application correctly,and I'll have to use those to load up multi-layer images saved in MPP's native file format .PP5, export out the individual layers, then reassemble them as .PSD (maybe) or one of CSP / Krita's multi-layer file formats. Annoyingly, Picture Publisher only supports single-layer .PSD, Clip Studio Paint doesn't support Open Raster format like Krita does, and the latter two applications' implementation of .PSD is not quite consistent across the two applications. The "good" news is, I'm not one of those artists who generate a bazillion layers on every project. The downside is I did a *lot* of multilayer images in Picture Publisher before switching to CSP and Krita. And yes, I knew the time was going to come that MPP would prove too old to run properly n newer systems (compatibility settings didn't work either). The timeframe to migrate the projects done on it to newer formats basically started when I began this OS upgrade.
09/30/24 update: Turns out Micrografx Picture Publisher can export a multi-layer image as a multi-layer PSD. Comes right up in Clip Studio, layers and all. Boy do I feel like a putz
Lastly there is Libre Office. I had been using this to export some text documents to PDF, mostly shipment tracking data that nobody presents in a format that doesn't break in bizarre fashion when attempting to print -- either as a hard copy or as a PDF. I was copy-pasting the shipping data from the site (in this case Trackingmore.com), pasting it into a LibreOffice document, performing edits on the typeface, font size and formatting, then exporting that to PDF so it could be merged with the PDF invoice from the retailer. Mostly this is for train purchases, as I'm way behind on inventorying my collection, and this is the sort of info I wanted to capture in it. And it would have worked fine if not for the BSODs I started getting (first time on this particular system) while trying to edit the document/s early this morning. I cannot say for sure LibreOffice was responsible for the Video_Scheduler_Internal_Error, but I've gone several hours of BSOD-free operation by not running LibreOffice, which did report a newer version being available before Windows spazzed, so maybe I'll try updating LO before kicking it off my system. Pity...it was completely trouble-free under Win7.
Anyway, I've been running this system on Win 10 for a little more than two weeks, slowly re-installing applications I use (and kicking out those I don't). One of the earliest was Krita, the digital paint application I was using on my Android tablets, and also in tandem with Clip Studio Paint on Windows. Something had happened to the Win7 install that made Krita unusable, as in you'd draw a line and nothing appears till you moved the image window by zooming in or out, or scrolling in any direction. Now Krita works. But I couldn't do much of anything with it just yet...I had to get my tablet working.
On my home system, my tablet is a Wacom Bamboo Fun Medium (CTE-650) purchased as a refurbished model back in 2009. Wacom no longer supports this tablet with the current set of drivers, and my early attempts to use it resulted in windows treating it like a mouse, which not only meant no pressure sensitivity, but whenever I'm using my second monitor on the side, the tablet would span both monitors, making it nearly impossible to use a drawing app confined to just one. The Wacom settings applet would claim "no tablet detected", so there was no way to set the CTE-650 to only span one display.
A little bit of Google-Fu revealed a classic workaround -- installing an older driver. Now I keep an archive of installers for various hardware and software. More importantly I keep installers for old versions of any application I use (or plan to use). I did have older Wacom drivers, 5.2.5-5a, and a 5.3.5-3. Several attempts were made to install either of these drivers to no avail, and truth be told, the calls for help online revealed mixed success getting this tablet working in Win10...until I remembered what one had to do to change from Wacom to any other company's tablet -- you have to remove all traces of Wacom drivers to install anyone else's. So I went into Settings, and uninstalled the newer 6xxx and older 5.xxx drivers.
One other thing is that there are two schools of thought regarding drivers. One is you install the driver and the accessory just works. The other is that you install the driver to seed Windows with the 'correct' driver to use rather than whatever it was going to pull out of its nether regions, then you connect the accessory, and Windows plug-and-plays the "correct" driver. I followed the latter procedure, then just to be sure, rebooted before plugging in the tablet (a tactic much less painful with an SSD). But before using the tablet, I went looking for the "Wacom Configuration Utility"---and didn't find it. Now what? How do I set the tablet to only work on one monitor?
This time, I went rifling through the Start menu's entries for Windows, and after opening up
[Windows Accessories]
[Windows Administrative Tools]
[Windows Ease of Access]
[Windows Power Shell]
[Windows System]...
and some other dinking around till I found the "Bamboo" folder, within which I found "Bamboo Settings" (okay, I started typing "Wacom" in the search bar and 'Bamboo" showed up at the top of the suggestions, instead of "Wacom Settings"). This is the applet I was looking for, and I was finally able to restrict the tablet to a single monitor.
Micrografx Picture Publisher on the other hand, still will not render its own images and will have to be replaced (installing the latest GeForce Experience utility to refresh the drivers did nothing). I have other W10 laptops that do run this application correctly,
09/30/24 update: Turns out Micrografx Picture Publisher can export a multi-layer image as a multi-layer PSD. Comes right up in Clip Studio, layers and all. Boy do I feel like a putz
Lastly there is Libre Office. I had been using this to export some text documents to PDF, mostly shipment tracking data that nobody presents in a format that doesn't break in bizarre fashion when attempting to print -- either as a hard copy or as a PDF. I was copy-pasting the shipping data from the site (in this case Trackingmore.com), pasting it into a LibreOffice document, performing edits on the typeface, font size and formatting, then exporting that to PDF so it could be merged with the PDF invoice from the retailer. Mostly this is for train purchases, as I'm way behind on inventorying my collection, and this is the sort of info I wanted to capture in it. And it would have worked fine if not for the BSODs I started getting (first time on this particular system) while trying to edit the document/s early this morning. I cannot say for sure LibreOffice was responsible for the Video_Scheduler_Internal_Error, but I've gone several hours of BSOD-free operation by not running LibreOffice, which did report a newer version being available before Windows spazzed, so maybe I'll try updating LO before kicking it off my system. Pity...it was completely trouble-free under Win7.
