Emmanuel's Blog

Installing Windows 7 (with Multi-Touch!) on the HP TouchSmart iQ804

The HP TouchSmart is amazing!  It’s great to be able to use the included wireless mouse+keyboard or directly touch the screen.  Some applications are already made to work well with touch (e.g. Zune Desktop or Windows Media Center) and Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta even supports multitouch (on Windows 7 – see below).

Here’s a video I found on YouTube.com with a good demo of the HP TouchSmart (older model):

The above features come with the HP TouchSmart software pre-loaded in Windows Vista.  For multitouch you’ll need Windows 7.  Here’s more info:

• HP has a nice flash website with lots of info and videos on the HP Touchsmart – check it out at http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/touchsmart/#/Main/
• Windows Vista (64-bits) drivers and software for the HP TouchSmart iQ804 can be found here on the HP Support site.   You need these drivers to get your Windows 7 installation working.
• The Vista installers won’t work on Windows 7, but you can use 7-Zip Portable to extract the drivers from the EXEs downloaded from the HP support site above.  The installers are compressed using WinRar, which is one of the formats supported by 7-Zip.
• Kurt Brockett wrote a cool tutorial on how to install Windows 7 on the HP TouchSmart – check it out at http://www.brockett.net/?p=637
  • Note: I haven’t yet found a way to re-install the HP Software that comes with the pre-installed Vista Home Premium on the HP TouchSmart.  Kurt Brockett mentioned that he knows how to do it, but he hasn’t yet posted instructions (he looks like a busy guy – I understand).
• You can download a beta version of a Windows 7 multitouch driver for the HP TouchSmart at http://www.nextwindow.com/windriver/ .  Note that since the drivers are not yet signed, you will need to place Windows 7 in “Test Mode” before installing the drivers – here’s how to do it:
  • Open a command line window as an administrator and run these commands:
    • bcdedit /set nointegritychecks ON
    • bcdedit /set testsigning ON
  • After executing, the phrase “Test Mode” should be displayed in each of the 4 corners of the desktop. If it does not, reboot and try it again.  Thanks to Brian Blanchard who posted a comment on Kurt Brockett’s tutorial with this info.
• To test out that the multitouch drivers are properly installed click here to download the “Windows 7 Air Hockey” application from Blendables.  It crashed on me a couple of times, but it started working after a couple of reboots.  If you can use two fingers to move the two hockey pucks – multitouch is working for you! 
• If you are running the Windows 7 build from the PDC (build 6801), Raphael from WithinWindows.com posted a great utility to unlock a bunch of features.  He called it “Blue Badge rev 3”, since only employees with proper Microsoft domain network credentials (a “blue badge”) were supposed to have access to these features.  Click here for more details and to download it.
• Kevin Marshall also has a nice post on multi-touch and Windows 7 basic gesture recognition (this is for developers).
• Cooliris is a cool application that displays images from your browser in a 3d way – it works great with the HP TouchSmart – check it out at http://www.cooliris.com/
• The latest Google Earth also work really well with Windows 7 multitouch – I can rotate using two fingers, pan using one finger, etc…
• There's a good website for TouchSmart users at http://www.touchsmartcommunity.com/ - they also have developer forums.
• The "Geek Tie Guy" has a few good articles on how the HP SmartCenter software (written in WPF) came about - it's nice to see these HP developers used WPF - and how cool the UI is.
• Richard, another developer who attended the PDC, installed Windows 7 on his HP TouchSmart and he set up a site at http://www.multiplefingers.com/blog/

Good Times!