N-trig digitizer on my HP Slate 500 (Windows 8 RTM)

N-trig released their much anticipated W8 drivers recently (August 13th).  The drivers have been broken since the Consumer Preview.  Well I downloaded these and immediately tried to install them on my W8 Release Preview.  I wasn’t impressed.

After going back to the instructions I noticed a blurb “before updating to Windows 8, make sure you have the latest bundle installed”.  I must have skipped right over that in my first pass.

I sent an email to N-trig support to get clarification and received email back a couple of days later.  Basically they stated.

This step comes to ensure you have the latest DuoSense SW installed under Win7.  Then when you upgrade to Win8, you should follow the installations of our new driver and it should work OK.

So they are expecting everybody to upgrade to W8 and not do a fresh install.  I don’t know about you, but I am not a big fan of upgrading.  I like to perform a fresh install.

Well, I since it didn’t seem to work very well in W8 as a fresh install I decided to go back to W7 and see if it was any better.  I found my original W7 image that I took way back in March 2011 and restored it.  I did have to go into the and edit the booting information that W8 updated.  No real big issue.  After getting back to W7 (yuck), I made my W8RTM bootable USB drive and ran the setup.exe off the USB drive.  Got prompted to upgrade and save user settings.  Took about 45 minutes.  After reboot I found that I had no touch or stylus.  I then installed the updated N-trig driver and found that touch and stylus came back.  Checked Device Mgr. and found nothing missing or had issues.

THE GOOD

The much anticipated calibration tool is great and helps with the false touches and ghost taps.

THE BAD

The lack of the Input Control Panel.  Having upgraded from W7 it is there but throws when trying to use.  The exclusion of the Input Control, the ability to put the digitizer to Touch Only, Pen Only, or Auto is a huge missing component.

I will say that the drivers are better than what they were in the Consumer Preview and Release Preview (note that they didn’t exist), but still in my opinion are lacking.

I emailed N-trig support to find out when this was going to added and their response back was there are no plans.  Huge, huge disappointment.

I do a lot of inking with the stylus and without this control I get a lot of false touches or palm rejection.  It comes close to being unusable.

Shame on you N-trig…