Mophie Juice Pack Air still has problems

Well, although the Apple store refused to replace the Mophie JPA that I bought in their store, Mophie themselves were more responsive. They didn’t actually reply to my customer support mail, but 3 working days after I sent it, I got an email from UPS saying a new JPA had been shipped.. from Illinois, USA! I received it a few days later.

A little suspicious that they replaced it unquestioningly – makes me wonder if it’s a common fault. I was also annoyed to see that they’ve changed the cap design slightly – it makes it easier to remove, but the two spare caps I bought for £15 now won’t fit.

As for the JPA? Yep, it’s charging my iPhone fine now. BUT – it’s still showing strange behaviour. Now I get the following combinations:

- Using the supplied Mophie microUSB cable with my laptop, will charge the JPA, but not the iPhone. Windows says “unknown device”.
- Using the Mophie cable with my Apple mains USB charger, also charges the JPA, but not the iPhone
- Using a microUSB cable bought off eBay, DOES charge both iPhone and JPA.

This is in contrast to my last JPA, which was more or less the other way around. To coin a phrase.. WTF?!?

I’ll do some more testing to see if perhaps the cable’s faulty. Anyway, my retracting USB cable charges both, which is good for now.

Hoda / eGalax EETI Touchscreen now working in Tablet Mode with Windows 7

Well, after going through my previous post, it turns out that the technique to get Tablet mode working DOES work, pretty much as the forum posting describes.

In short:

1. Download the Tablet drivers for the touchscreen from this link.
2. Uninstall your existing touchscreen driver software (ie. TouchKit), and go to Device Manager to ensure that the HID USB Device is removed from the Mouse list.
3. Reboot, if required.
4. If Windows tries to autodetect and re-install the HID USB Drivers, then uninstall them again by right-clicking the entry in Device Manager
5. Run Setup.exe from the Tablet drivers that you downloaded, and follow the install instructions straight through.

And that’s it - the Tablet-related control panel options are now accessible, and a circular crosshair appears whereever you touch.

Now the bad news.

It’s not really worth the bother. For anyone who’s used an iPod Touch or iPhone, the Windows Touch gestures are laughable. Swiping your finger down on a web page, if you manage not to simply select text, basically sends a Page Down keypress to the browser - so it simply scrolls down a page, regardless of how you swiped. Compared to OSX, where the scrolling has momentum and speed, it’s a very poor substitute.

As for Media Centre; does it have swipes? Can you flip through albums. Well… No! Instead, tablet mode gives you touch buttons at the top and bottom to scroll through the options. Again, laughably backward for a not-yet-released OS.

Anyone tried a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H with Windows 7?

For the umpteenth time, the other day, I tried to install Windows 7 on my Media Center based on a GA-G33M-S2H.

The wierd thing is that it just hangs when trying to boot from the Win7 install media. I’ve now tried DVDs (both 32-bit and 64-bit), and a bootable Flash that worked on my Acer Aspire One. The -S2H doesn’t seem to support Flash USB as a bootable device, nor emulating Flash USB as a floppy; instead, you have USB-HDD,CD-ROM,Floppy,and a fourth, I think; none of which work.

So – have you installed Win7 on your GA-G33M-S2H? If so… HOW?!?