Well, if it'll do portrait mode, the battery thing is sorted:

http://aadhoc.blogspot.com/2007/10/repair-viewsonic-v150-battery.html

Nope, it can't. I emailed a guy who had a web site up about hacking the V150. I suppose I could display the pages twisted 90 degrees on the host PC, but that's starting to get a bit TOO frankenstein even for my tastes.

Now I'm just using this to keep track of all the stuff I find. Here's one that might meet my specs, Toshiba Satellite R15:

http://www.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-satellite-r15-s822/4505-3121_7-31272309.html

14.1" diagonal twist-around screen (too bad it's not actually 15 like in the name) but that does in fact give me 8.5x11 viewable area. Could do maybe....

Anyone know of any other old twist-arounds with screens that big or bigger?

I just won an ebay auction on the Toshiba Satellite R15. We shall see how it does with its 14.1 inch screen.

Results so far with the Toshiba Satellite R15.

The good:

- 14.1" screen is precisely the correct size. Can show an 8.5 x 11 chord chart at exact actual size in portrait mode.

- Doesn't have built-in bluetooth, but, the bluetooth dongle from the Pageflip Cicada Pedal works perfectly. Also it happens to work with my old MS bluetooth mouse, so I now also have a cordless mouse for it too.

- It has an SD card slot so I can synch/backup song charts with my other computers even when there's no wireless available.

- I've got my chord chart software pretty much working the way I want now. I can create/edit/reorder multiple set lists, using any document that Word can open. I've figured out how to put up the chord charts on the screen without any scroll bars or menus, and zoom them to fit the screen edge. Each page of the set list offers an "Edit" button that will let me edit and save the chord chart live in Word (using the stylus and the onscreen keyboard) and then it will automatically reinsert the edited song into the set in the correct spot. I can display the charts using any color scheme I like, choosing page background color and foreground text color. I can email a set list to another band member. It's all working perfectly now.

- I've now even got some holes cut on the back of the casing to slot the computer into a mic-stand attachment, so it can mount onto a mic stand, instead of precariously balancing it on a music stand. (The mic stand attachments that wrap around and grip tablets from the edges are all designed for ipads and aren't nearly big enough for a full laptop PC like this. I found a rare one that would go to 10 inches wide, which did fit the Motion Computing M1400 tablet, but not this Toshiba tablet.)

- Battery rundown is two solid hours on a third-party battery I purchased to go with it. Not great, but, I could simply have a second charged battery on hand for the second set.


The bad:

- It's a fairly heavy laptop, as laptops go. It's almost as heavy as the printed songbook it's trying to replace. Though not *quite* as bulky.

- The screen rez is only 1024 x 768. For chord charts where the font is condensed to fit the page, the text starts to get hard to read sometimes because the anti-aliasing features of the display engine are working too hard to make the fonts readable.

- When rotated into portrait mode, off-axis viewing of the LCD pixels themselves is tricky. LCD displays are optimized for landscape viewing, in terms of the pixel layout and orientation. So if you're looking at, say, black text on white or white text on black, when you view this display in portrait mode off-axis, everything turns into rainbows. I can correct for this by choosing to use green text on a black background, so there's no rainbow. But even then, there's issues with viewing the text off-axis: Some font sizes blur too much off-axis to read. That's a problem because me and Vixy use our charts off-axis: We put the music stand between us (so it's off to my right and off to her left) and keep an eye on it out of the corner of our eye, we don't put the stand directly in front of us.

That last one might still kill it. I'm going to play with display settings and see if I can improve things in that regard.

Not all LCDs have that problem; just the cheaper/common ones.

I wonder if anyone else made a 14.1" NTSC-aspect-ratio tablet with a fold-around screen? One with better rez and better off-axis viewing?

Hmm, on paper this Gateway M275 looks similar...

Well, for a $50.00 auction, I got one of those Gateways. I'll bet it's the same exact LCD display and pen sensor assembly as the Toshiba unit, but, I'll find out when I get it.

In the meantime, playing with the contrast settings on Toshiba produces interesting results. You can make off-axis viewing in one direction better, at the expense of on-axis viewing and at the expense of off-axis viewing in the other direction. Sigh.

This is being such an interesting experience. It makes me truly appreciate the current generation of tablet computers, which have long since solved all of these problems (except for the screen size).

Hey, man, check out that Sony. Great off-axis performance.

I know. Vixy vetoed it though, too big.

So what if it is? One for you, one for Vixy, no more off-axis problem.

tanstaafl.

We deliberately only use a single music stand so that way, it's between us, so it doesn't get directly between us and the audience. Well, ideally we'd simply get good at memorizing and not need a reference chart at all, but we have day jobs.

You want an IPS screen for the best off axis viewing. Sometimes hard to find in laptops, more common in desktop monitors.

What I really want is one of those paper displays, hacked to work as a second display monitor, taped to the top side of the lid of a modern laptop.

The Toshiba Satellite worked well for its first go.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/29869731
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/29871063

Haven't done a gig with Vixy with this setup yet. This was me and Betsy Tinney playing for Marian Call on Saturday. Figured it would be a nice experiment to try it out on someone else first.

Might do this setup with Vixy in a couple weeks.

Neat! Do you have any pics of it in action up close?

I saw Marian Call at a Firefly event about a year or so ago. She was good.

I don't have any pics yet. I should be getting its sister Gateway tablet PC in the mail today, which I'm going to format with Win7 instead of WinXP and see how that performs. If it works well, I might just spruce up the software a bit and put up a whole web page about the project, pics, software, and all.

I'm glad you had a chance to see her. I'm guessing the event was a CSTS somewhere? Once, my full band did a CSTS with her, along with SJ Tucker, here in Seattle, and it was just awesome. So much fullness to the sound. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioCNkROWPrw

Heh, yeah, it was CSTS. They did one in Arlington, VA at the Drafthouse (nothing like the Alamo drafthouse).

Some updates:

- Got the Gateway M275 in the mail and set it up with Win7.
- Gateway working well, and almost every bit of hardware on the device had a Win7 driver automatically installed by the OS. Nice. Except the video driver...
- Getting a working video driver on Win7 was a bit of a pain. Turns out that Intel doesn't support that model of video chip on later OS's at all and you have to hack the XP driver to work on Win7: http://www.groundstate.net/855GMWin7.html
- Gateway off-axis viewing has exactly the same issues as the Toshiba Satellite R15. The anti-aliasing turns into a rainbow at off-axis angles. Forcing the text to green-on-black helps, but then you've got the contrast issues with the in-between shades of green: From Vixy's side the letters disappear because the antialiased pixels disappear, and from my side the letters get blobby because the antialiased pixels turn to full brightness. Adjusting the contrast makes it better for one side at the expense of the other. BUT! I have a solution that will work on either PC (see below).
- Gateway PC also has a sort of a "wash" effect on the screen at off-axis angles that I don't seem to recall the Toshiba had as badly.
- Gateway PC is lighter and thinner than the Toshiba despite having the same specs.
- Toshiba PC had enough extra space in the casing that I could cut mounting bracket slots directly into its case. For the Gateway, I had to fashion a "cradle" for it out of foamed PVC sheet.
- Toshiba PC, running XP, had some issues with hibernate/resume (pen calibration no longer works after resume), so I'm currently reformatting the Toshiba to see if it functions better under Win7.

How I solved the antialiasing problem...
- Turn off antialiasing. Then it doesn't matter what angle you view the font at, it's always pixels 100 percent on or 100 percent off. Then the font looks the same no matter what angle you view it at.
- PROBLEM: Even when you turn off antialiasing in the OS, Microsoft Word still displays its text antialiased. (SERIOUSLY GUYS? YOUR FLAGSHIP PRODUCT IGNORES YOUR OWN OS'S GLOBAL SETTING FOR ANTIALIASING? GAH!)
- HOW TO FIX:
-- First you have to turn off ClearType. Control Panel - Hardware And Sound - Display - Press "Adjust ClearType Text" in the sidebar.
-- Then you have to turn off Antialiasing altogehter. Run SYSDM.CPL - "Advanced" tab - Press "Performance" - Uncheck "Smooth edges of screen fonts", apply.
-- Now the OS has antialiasing turned off but Microsoft Word still has it turned on. Now you must force Word to obey the system's antialiasing setting by editing the system registry.
Word 2003
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options
Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\RespectSystemFontSmooth
New DWORD Value, NoClearTypeNW, set value to 1 and then the next time you run Word it will respect the fact that you turned off antialiasing in the OS.

I tested this out with Vixy and she (finally) liked it. There's a chance we'll be using this setup (not sure which PC yet, I'm still installing Win7 on the Toshiba) at our next gig. Crossing fingers!

Okay, both the Gateway and Toshiba tablet took Win7 just fine. Both of them had the same Intel video chip and needed the funky XP driver hack linked in the last post. I've bought secondary backup batteries for both PCs and done rundown tests.

Both of them are sufficient for what I want to do, and I've modded the mounting cradle that I made to accept either one of them.

In the end, the Gateway is the better computer, with about 1.5 times the battery life, better construction, weighs less, smaller outer dimensions, etc. But its screen has the problem of having a hazy appearance when viewed off-axis on my side (Vixy's side is fine).

I'm thinking the Toshiba will be the main performance PC and the Gateway will be the backup. Tomorrow will be the first Vixy & Tony rehearsal with this system, and we'll see how the Toshiba holds up. If all goes well, this Saturday will be our first performance together with it as our band.

Dignan asked for some up close shots, so, they are attached. Enjoy!

Sweet! I love it!

It's a pretty thick laptop, but it seems to be working for you. Very cool solution. I love the pedal page turner...

Yes, I'd love something thinner and lighter, but as this exercise has shown, there isn't anything with those screen dimensions in the thin/light category. That was the root of my problem.

The page turner is the PageFlip Cicada and I'm very happy with it so far. Our cellist uses an AirTurn with an iPad running the ForScore software.

Update on how it behaved at the first rehearsal with my band:

1. My Word macro encountered this CodeModule.AddFromString bug, and I'm currently researching ways to fix it. I thought I already was doing the thing that he suggests at that page, so I'm trying to come up with other ideas. It appears to be a timing issue with on-the-fly compilation of VBA macros. (Update: Seems to be fixed. Turns out that there was a way I could put the code later in the macro, as close to the end as I could get it, and sure enough, just like he said, the crash went away.)

2. I discovered that, if you have your hands full (ie, you are playing a song) and the little "Your battery is down to 10 percent" balloon pops up on the screen, the balloon does not go away on its own. It stays there, covering up the last verse of the song, until you dig out the stylus and click it. I *want* the balloon to warn me if the battery is getting low, so I don't want to disable it altogether. Not sure what to do there. Ideally I'd want a smaller warning instead of the big balloon. Wonder if there's something I can do in that area. On the good side: Battery swap is super easy, so I just have to keep the extra charged battery on hand. (Update: Trying solution: Power Meter Plus floats on the desktop and I turn off all battery notification balloons in the Windows OS.

3. When I put the laptop back into the rolling backpack that I've been using to carry things to gigs, I managed to put it into the backpack bluetooth-dongle-side down. (The dongle sticks out from the laptop just a bit). This cracked the casing on the dongle and made me worry that I will someday destroy the dongle in this fashion. I am currently searching for PCMCIA Bluetooth adapters so that I can get rid of the dongle and have flush edges on the laptop so that I don't have this problem again.

Doesn't that stand for "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms or something?

tanstaafl.

Perhaps strips of plastic or rubber glued along the tablet edges adjacent to the dongle could provide a safe 'recess' for that USB port.

Naw, that'd make an already-big laptop bigger. If a PCMCIA card doesn't work, I'll just hack the USB dongle into the interior of the laptop. There's actually enough space in there, that Toshiba's casing is bigger than it needs to be.

First show with the Vixy & Tony band was a success, the tablet worked great.

The PCMCIA Bluetooth Adapter that I tried didn't work, so I stuck with the USB bluetooth dongle and just remembered to unplug it before packing away the tablet.

I'd still like to solve the PCMCIA bluetooth problem, though. Anyone got any suggestions? The 3com one should have been perfectly, but it simply suffered from old software. It had to use its own connection/pairing manager instead of the Windows connection/pairing manager. This software could see the pedal, but it didn't see it as having any "services" it could connect to. I think the problem was that the card was so old that the only thing it wanted to use Bluetooth for was a network connection to another computer. When faced with a bluetooth keyboard (that's what the pedal is), it doesn't know what to do.

Anyone know of any good PCMCIA Bluetooth adapters that work with Windows 7 and can pair with BT keyboards? My criteria for finding one is that it must fit flush. If it protrudes, then it's no better than the USB dongle I'm already using. Tempted to try this one and see if it works with the antenna retracted. (*edit for posterity*": Yes that one worked. I do have to extend the antenna during a gig, but I remember to retract it before packing up and all is well.)

Does the laptop offer a mini PCI slot somewhere? Perhaps you can swap out any existing WiFi cards that may be populating one for a WiFi and Bluetooth combo card.

That's a great idea. I believe that its wifi adapter is in fact of that variety. I'll have to crack it open again and take a closer look.

I believe it's got an Intel pro wireless 2200bg mini-PCI card in it.

I'm having trouble finding anything in that form factor that includes both Wifi and Bluetooth. There are plenty of mini PCI-Express adapters in that category, but the plain old Mini PCI versions seem to be thin on the ground.

Anyone know of any?