Unwanted troubleshooting on a new tablet

 

Hewlett Packard updated their tx1000z tablet recently to a new model, the tx2000.  The previous model had a touch screen, which I think of as a passive tablet screen.  The stylus actually has to touch the screen to work.  The new model has an active screen - you can hover and "right click" with the stylus.  I've used the tx1000z a little in the past and liked everything about it (the size, keyboard, recessed track pad, etc…) and when HP added the active tablet display, I decided to get one to update my older laptop.  You can see a full review of the tablet at https://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1064&review=HP+Pavilion+tx2000z, so I won't go over the details again.  I will point out a few problems I had with it, on of which was probably my fault.

 

My first impression was mixed.  I turned it on at about 7 PM and accepted the HP and Microsoft license agreements.  Then the hard drive started chugging and setting up Windows and HP utilities for me.  This took awhile.  When I created my user account, I was asked to scan my fingers to make login easier (at the time, the fingerprint scanner was a free upgrade).  Anxious to start using my machine, I declined and moved on.  Then all the HP first run utilities ran.  Then all the sample software kicked in.  Then I got prompted to make backup DVDs, which I did.  At 10:30, I realized I was not actually going to get to use the machine that day.  Instead, I started uninstalling items I did not want.

 

I'm not the first (nor will I be the last) to complain about preinstalled software on computers.  Believe me, I understand this is like advertising, and helps keep the cost of these machines a bit more affordable.  It can easily spin out of control, though.  This tablet, when I received it, had about 4 GB of applications I did not want - a Sims game, a couple dozen or so HP trial games, some odd web browsing and print utilities, etc…  I got my network connection working the next day, updated Vista (only three updates were needed) and I was set.

 

Except the machine seemed sluggish.  Noticeably sluggish.  I checked task manager (which took 15 seconds to start, not a good sign) and saw the CPU was just about pegged at 98%.  I looked at the running processes and saw explorer.exe was consuming the CPU, although the memory usage was about right (8MB).  To investigate further, I right clicked My Computer, went to the Manager console and looked at running services.  I turned off some HP utilities that I thought may be the culprit and got to as close to a "clean" install of Windows as I could.  No good - the cpu was still spiked.  I had only bare essential services and drivers loaded.

 

I thought about wiping the hard drive and clean installing only Windows to ensure I had no rogue apps installed, but decided not to.  I couldn't believe that any app which was shipping with this machine could consume the CPU so well.  It made no sense - since the CPU was running hot, the fan was also running at full speed to cool it, which really made my battery life very short.  I simply did not believe the battery life I saw (just over an hour) was so out of line with what reviewers had experienced.

 

Next, Gary Neitzke and I were talking, and he reminded me about Process Explorer.  I tried it instead of task manager (and if you haven't replaced task manager with this utility you should) and it showed the Explorer process at the same CPU level, but it gave me the child processes to explorer as well.  None of them registered as any level of CPU usage except the driver for the fingerprint reader: "Digital Persona".  It was bouncing between 1 and 3 per cent - no where near the 90%+ explorer was using.  Since it was the only anomaly, though, I decided to kill the process.  The CPU almost immediately fell into an idle state, and explorer dropped to near 0%.  At least I had found the culprit.

 

I opened the control panel and looked at the fingerprint utility.  There was a command to check for updates, so I did.  And it failed since I had killed the process it needed to check.  Restarting the process showed no updates were available.  Since I was more interested in fixing the problem than understand exactly why this driver was misbehaving, I felt I had two choices: either uninstall the driver (since I wasn't using the fingerprint reader) or keep troubleshooting.  I decided to give it one more shot.

 

I went back into the control panel to see if the fingerprint reader even worked.  Since I did not scan my fingers when starting the machine, I could very easily have some defective hardware on my hands, and that hardware could cause a problem.  But the scanning went well and I associated my fingerprints with my account.  And the utitlity immediately dropped back to 0% CPU usage.  The CPU problem was solved, and the tablet is a great machine now.

 

The tester in me realizes the problem isn't really solved.  The bug, as it were, is that the driver consumes the CPU if the user never scans a finger.  My next step is to contact Digital Persona to let them know about this problem.  To be fair, I'm not expecting much.  After all, why would you get a fingerprint reader if you did not want to use it?  I'm the "corner case" here, and not part of their mainstream scenario.  If I really did not want to use the fingerprint reader, I could always go back to my step 1 and uninstall the software.

 

Questions, concerns, comments and criticism always welcome,

John