Wanting a nice challenge on top of life’s normal challenges, I recently agreed to hubby’s suggestion of installing Vista onto the new hard drive of my Toshiba M200 tablet. For those not familiar with the Toshiba M200, let me give you a bit of context.

The Toshiba M200 has no inbuilt DVD/CD drive or floppy drive. This was our first show stopper. How do you install a new operating system without being able to boot from a CD or to install a boot disk? I even had trouble trying to get to the BIOS setup. In some frustration, I handed it over to hubby who did a bit of research and discovered the very excellent blog post about installing Vista on to the M200.

Hubby followed through the instructions but it still took about a bit of trial and error to get Vista installing. When hubby got it up and running, it was time for all my software installations and the Windows updates (quite a few Important Updates that had to be downloaded, installed and rebooted multiple times). That took a while.

Next thing I tackled was the driver and specific Toshiba tablet functionality issues. I probably should have done this straight after the Windows Updates had been completed.

On the bottom of the Installing Vista on your Toshiba M200, there were some links about downloading various packages to get the tablet functionality working properly (functions like screen rotation, etc). Unfortunately, the links on the source website had been moved. So here’s the updated links and instructions. Download and install the following:

• nVidia GeForce driver - locate the M200 downloads page. It states that this display driver is for Windows XP but it works on my M200 running Vista. Download and install this first. If you don’t, the rotation facility just won’t work until you have a working display driver to support it. You’ll need the pm200sp2vidx.exe file from the pm200sp2vidx.exe page.
• Toshiba Value Added Package V1.1.3 for Windows Vista (v1.1.3; 09-07-2007; 38.79M) - this it the Toshiba Utility. It’s for the M400 but will work on the M200. Get it from the M400 util_tvap_os2007252a.exe page.
• TOSHIBA Tablet PC Extension for Windows Vista (v1.0.0.1; 12-08-2006; 12.89M) - this helps to specify what the Tablet buttons do, i.e. the rotation facility and accelerometer functions. Get it from the M400 util_tablet_extension_25334D.exe page.

So far so good. I haven’t tested the accelerometer function yet but rotation is definitely working. Sound and wireless are both working. I’m also running dual monitors which is great. Response from the tablet has been good too with not too many sluggish waits when running applications. Admittedly, I haven’t been running full blown with my applications, but things are looking well!

Update 2 February 2008: You may want to check out Ryan Adam’s post How to Boot From the Network (PXE Boot) with TFTP And Windows PE, where he has posted simplified instructions for booting from the network and has provided a zip file containing the files needed.

Update 18 April 2008: You may find that your bluetooth device does not work very well. If that’s the case, download the Bluetooth Monitor for Windows Vista and the Bluetooth Stack for Windows Vista. You may also want to download the BlueSoleil bluetooth stack, especially if you are going to use your wiimote with powerpoint.