I absolutely love my Wacom tablet for photo editing and retouching. Today after installing the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update from Microsoft through Windows update, I restarted.  It did it’s thing and then I got a popup saying something like “Tablet Driver was not Found”.  Great.  My Wacom wasn’t even plugged in at the time.  Sure enough, it probably managed to screw something up.  Here is the link to the updated drivers from Wacom.  You just have to pick your tablet model and operating system version. Mine is the Intuos (GD) series running on Win 7, and interestingly enough there was a newly updated driver released just about a week ago.

Installing the latest driver seemed to do the trick, and all is well again.  Just be sure to uninstall your existing tablet driver, prior to installing the new version.  I personally lost some of my preference settings, but that took just a couple of minutes to re-tweak. There you have it – a very short and sweet blog post, that might help a few people out there in cyberspace.

I honestly can’t see anything wrong since installing service pack 1, but it was pretty comical to read somewhere online that it’s been 16 months in the making.  That seems like a really long time, just for the first service pack.  I haven’t found very many things wrong with Windows 7, but I’m sure it repairs a some little nuances that others have noticed.  So far so good, thankfully.  I’m glad the update didn’t screw anything else up.

I just realized you can’t assign Windows hotkeys to custom functions in the Logitech Setpoint tool. That really stinks, if you’re using a logitech mouse with all of these extra buttons, bells, and whistles. I’m currently using the MX1000 wireless laser mouse, which is pretty old but still my favorite. With Windows 7 I would love to be able to show the desktop with a click of the center mouse wheel, similar to how you can assign expose on a Mac in OS X. There is a “Show Desktop” button at the lower right hand corner of your screen, but it’s a lot faster to simply assign a mouse button. It took a little bit of searching, but here’s the hack / fix found here.

Instructions: (I had to right click on Notepad and choose “Run as Administrator” for it to work – without doing that it might not allow you to save the changes you make to the default.xml file)

1. Quit Setpoint.

2. Go into your Setpoint directory (in my case, it is: C:\Program Files\Logitech\SetPoint)

3. Edit default.xml

4. Find this line: <HandlerSetGroup Name=”OthersGenericMiceGroup” HandlerSetNames=”CloseApplication,Copy,Cut,QuickSwitch,Do Nothing,DoubleClick,StartMenu,DragLock,GenericMouseButton,
LeftMouseButton,Maximize,MiddleMouseButton,Minimize,
PageDown,PageUp,Paste,Redo,Unassigned,Undo” />

5. Insert “ShowDesktop” option so that the line shows this: <HandlerSetGroup Name=”OthersGenericMiceGroup” HandlerSetNames=”CloseApplication,Copy,Cut,QuickSwitch,Do Nothing,DoubleClick,StartMenu,DragLock,GenericMouseButton,
LeftMouseButton,Maximize,MiddleMouseButton,Minimize,
PageDown,PageUp,Paste,Redo,ShowDesktop,Unassigned,Undo” />

6. Save the file.

7. Restart your Setpoint application which will be in the same directory.

8. Voila, now using your Setpoint application you can add the Show Desktop functionality to your side buttons.

If you want to use the keyboard command, it’s simply Windows Key + D

A special thanks to Razvan Lupusoru for this cool trick.

This little Indian kid named Varun on youtube is a pretty smart guy.  I like this kid’s way of reasoning when it comes to mac vs pc.  I love macs, but I’m not going to lie… I think they’re definitely way overpriced for what you get.  I’m not taking sides, as I’ve worked with both for years.  I actually just ordered a brand new desktop pc with an i7.  It has more memory in the video card alone than my current (7 year old) computer has snapped into it’s motherboard DIMMs.  Savings? $1000-1500 over the new incredible iMac 27″.  That’s a lot of cheddar that can get redirected into new photo gear for me.  Anyway, I’ll be sure to post a full review of my new setup once it arrives.

Amazingly, a lot of graphic design jobs you might find won’t always have you on a mac.  Make sure you know how to use both – otherwise you’re going to have to educate yourself pretty quick once you land that first design gig straight out of college.  That means knowing what the heck you’re doing in Windows XP and the all new Windows 7, as well as knowing OSX.  Thankfully the Adobe programs are pretty much identical whether you’re on a mac or a pc, with the exception of the alt/option key on your keyboard (it’s not rocket science).

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