Re: Drawing tablets

At 03:27 PM 4/10/98 -0700, Garry wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>I was wondering who has used graphic tablets on their computers, which brand
>and how you like it.


Dear Garry,

I once had a Wacom Pen 2 (I think that was the name) writing tablet and it
was great once I got it to work.  There were so many conflicts involved
that I had to return it.  Everyone said it was the best tablet to get if I
were to get one so since it was on sale at Computer City, I went for it.
(For some background here... I have a PC Club made K-5 166 with 64 megs of
SDRAM)

When it was plugged in I had it originally plugged into one of my Com ports
and spent a couple hours configuring the com interrupt settings in Windows
and even had tech over here trying to configure the dang thing for me for 4
hours.  That only made it so I could use it so long as I wasn't online or
so long as I wasn't using my mouse.  We tried to give it a separate
interrupt setting, but then the mouse started doing strange things so the
best bet was for it to share an interrupt with another device (if I were to
explain the hows and whys of that decision I would be blabbing on here all
day).

The next day I called Wacom and they walked me through the installation and
we got it to work, but then the Photoshop Text tool was acting loopy (not
allowing me to change font sizes) and the lasso tool would freeze Photoshop
when I would be doing alt+mouse click to trace an image (my favorite
tool!).  I told Wacom about this and they said it was a Photoshop issue and
for me to reinstall Photoshop or call Adobe (which costs money).  That was
impossible as my Photoshop was working just fine before I installed the
tablet.  I reinstalled Photoshop and that didn't help.

I also called Logitech, the manufacturer of my mouse, and they said that
the devices were still conflicting.  We uninstalled my "Mouseware" software
(as that uses more resources than I needed with the kind of mouse I had)
that comes with the Logitech mouse and used the Windows drivers instead.
That didn't do much good. Finally Logitech said to go out and get a serial
mouse so there would no longer be a conflict between devices in the com
port.  I did that and still the Wacom tablet was acting buggy.  However,
the Logitech people were the most versed in their tech support and they
were the most helpful!

It was then when I decided that after spending almost two days trying to
get that silly tablet to work, that I would have to bite the bullet and
return it.  Too bad as when it was working it was incredible the things
that pen could do.  It made painting, selecting and tracing with the lasso
tool, etc--EVERYTHING!-- so much more accurate and less time consuming.
Using Photoshop was like using a completely new program.  It even improved
Paint Shop Pro! I didn't have to use Photoshop as much when I got the
tablet to work.  It was so wonderful that it had the feel of being an
artist in an actual art studio using actual brushes and textures without
the mess! The Paint program that comes with the tool seemed ok, but
unfortunately I didn't have much opportunity to use it.

Now I am sure there are many of you out there who have had good experiences
with that Wacom tablet.  I have friends who swear by them and have no
complaints (both with Macs and PC's).  I wish I could be part of that
crowd.  I am curious if there are others out there like me who have
experienced similar problems and what they did to solve them.

Ok, I'm done!

Dani

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