Today, Microsoft released a free suite called the Experience Pack for Windows XP Tablet PC 2005 Edition. The six utilities in the Experience Pack include:

• Energy Blue - A new theme that adds a sweet looking rainbow to the desktop. I haven’t done too much with desktop themes leaving them the boring default for most computer. This is something I notice that a lot of other people like doing: customizing their desktops. I did put the PC Mag theme in play on one of our machines recently.
• Ink Art - our youngest son likes ArtRage. It will be cool to see what he thinks of the upgrade. Me? I’m not an artist, but I can appreciate beauty of this tool
• Ink Crossword - I’m not much of a crossword puzzle guy either. If I was, though, I’d like this better than the paper alternative. Cool, you can download new puzzles through the program.
• Ink Desktop - now Tablet PC users can write on the screen; a more simplified version of Orange Guava (which I installed and then uninstalled a couple days later). This was one of the first things I wondered about why I couldn’t do on the Tablet PC. Glad to see it here. How do you save the notes you make?
• Media Transfer - Cool idea but where’s the search? For example, I tried to find a song by AC DC on the desktop machine and it wasn’t stored under any of the three different AC DC folders (AC/DC, AC-DC, AC DC). I was able to locate the song by using the song search instead of artist.
• Snipping Tool v2.0 - Quickly snip out the sections of the desktop or web pages and email or save them.

Scoble lists the new Snipping Tool as a “must have for Tablet PC users” and I agree with that with the old version, but I have a few issues with the new version that I posted in the comments area of his blog. What’s the deal with the longer loading time of the snipping tool? I mean it’s a noticeable delay (10-15 seconds) on my M1400 with 1GB of RAM. Also, if I just want to cancel and keep the snipping tool running why does it completely exit out of the program? Grrrr. Program exits should be a bit harder to do than this. I changed to prompt save on exit but it isn’t prompting me. Ahhh, if you click on the scissors twice then that cancels out the prior snip. Still would be nice to be able to disable the red cancel X.

These extra goodies are kind of reminiscent of what the Mac experience is like. You get lots of extras when you first boot up your new Mac. Users love free goodies!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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