Windows 10 Pen Woes, Part 1

May 18, 2018

After a decade of (mostly) reliable service, my ASUS R1 Notebook PC finally cashed in. Triggering the on/off switch would power it up, as shown by the onboard light indicator, but the computer itself would fail to boot at all. That was a few weeks ago. After trying to resuscitate the computer a few times, I finally accepted that it was dead and gone and that I’d have to get a replacement. My old laptop was critical in the production of my Sleuthhounds games, among other things, because it was what I used to draw all the graphics as the laptop was equipped with a hard-point pen. The journey to getting a functioning replacement was not without its difficulties.

The first step was figuring out exactly what type of replacement device would be appropriate for me. The two main choices were to get another 2-in-1 laptop/tablet combination PC or else to get a dedicated digitizing tablet that is added as a peripheral to an existing PC in much the same way that a mouse or keyboard is.

Digitizing tablets essentially come in one of two flavours themselves. First, you have those tablets that are just a surface to trace on with the accompanying pen. Second you have tablets that also act as another display for your computer. I knew that if I went the digitizing tablet route I’d have to go with the latter because I’ve tried tablets that are a drawing surface with no visual before. With these you have to watch your actual computer monitor while your hand is drawing on the tablet. I’ve never been able to make the mental leap necessary to look in one place and draw in another. So a visual digitizing tablet it would have to be, if it was to be any manner of digitizing tablet at all.

In pricing out replacement options I quickly found that digitizing tablets with a visual display cost just as much, if not more, as 2-in-1 laptops that can be converted into tablet mode. The idea of having an additional computer for testing purposes and that, being a laptop, was mobile to boot and was likely going to be cheaper than a digitizing tablet very quickly made that decision for me.

With the choice of device narrowed down to some manner of laptop or tablet PC I began exploring the local options. I don’t have a problem ordering small bits of hardware online, but an entire laptop, that was something I wanted to be able to check out in a store, especially so I could try out the accompanying pen before buying to make sure the drawing capabilities felt right. On top of that, I had a bunch of custom Windows-based software I’d written that I knew I’d want on the new device, so that reduced my options further to Windows based machines.

I did consider Microsoft’s Surface as a possibility. The Surface’s were all towards the pricier end of the alternatives I was looking at. They shifted even more towards that end once I learned that I’d additionally have to buy the pen and possibly a keyboard as the Surface does not typically come with them included. And the Surface pen and keyboard are not cheap. In the end I settled on the ASUS 14” VivovBook Flip TP410, a 2-in-1 laptop that included the pen at no extra cost.

The one thing that I knew would be a drawback with getting any new Windows-based device was that it would be equipped with Windows 10. When I first tried it a couple of years ago on my desktop my experience with Windows 10 was not a pleasant one. However, since I was getting the new laptop primarily to draw with I felt that, after some initial configuration of the machine, I’d be able to get by using Windows 10. And for about a week I did.

After doing the initial Windows 10 setup for the machine I was in business in very short order. I copied a couple of the applications I was familiar with using to the laptop and had no difficulties just starting them up and drawing with the pen, save one. The ASUS 14” VivovBook Flip TP410 supports both the pen and finger touches for input. Now I like to rest my hand on the screen when I’m drawing and even though Windows 10 has settings where it’s supposed to be able to differentiate between a finger touch and a palm, and thereby cancel out palm touches as input, I found the reliability of this left a lot to be desired.

After a bit of searching around on the internet and a bit of poking around on my own, I learned that the finger touch sensitive part of a laptop/tablet is typically registered as a separate device from the pen digitizer in a computer’s hardware settings. As such, it’s possible to go into Windows’ Device Manager and permanently disable the finger touch hardware, which I did. After that, there was no problem with resting my hand on the display and I was off and drawing just like on my old laptop.

But remember that week that I mentioned? During that week, Windows did what it always does after a new install/configuration, it phoned home to the Microsoft servers and started downloading updates. Now Windows isn’t smart enough to get all the updates at once. It gets a few updates at a time, restarts, then goes to check if there are any additional updates. Rinse and repeat until up to date.

Along the way through this cycle it downloaded the Fall 2017 “Creators” Update. A significant Windows update that was ostensibly intended to improve the capabilities of Windows 10 machines specifically for creators. That sounds good in theory. Too bad Microsoft didn’t actually listen to any creative stakeholders when they prepped this update.

Whew! Where to begin? Well, first of all after the update had run, Windows decided that I had made a bad choice disabling the finger touch sensitivity of the laptop. So it kindly went and turned it back on without either asking me or informing me. I of course discovered this as soon as I tried using the laptop after that update was in place – just general use, not even drawing at this point – as the unreliable palm rejection was back in place and resting my hand on the screen was being treated as a touch event. No big deal, I just went back to the Device Manager and turned the touch device off again.

Then I fired up my drawing software. The. Horror.

After doing all my research and due diligence and testing out the drawing abilities of he laptop in the store before buying with the specific goal of having a new computer that I could easily draw on, imagine my dismay when I found that drawing was no longer an option – at least not an easy one. Prior to the “Creators” update all I had to do to be able to draw was to start the appropriate painting program, touch the pen to the screen, and move the pen to a new position. And lo and behold a line would be drawn. If that sounds familiar, then you’ve probably experienced something similar through using a real pen or pencil on real paper. The metaphor that using a pen on a computer is 100% based upon.

So what did my new computer do after the “Creators” update? Press the pen to the screen, move the pen, and…the image I’m working on scrolls? What?! Let’s rub two brain cells together and think about that for all of, I don’t know, three seconds. That’s the equivalent of saying, I’m going to put pencil to paper specifically so I can drag that piece of paper from one side of the desk to another.

To be fair, after getting the “Creators” update you can technically still draw with the pen. However, to do so you have to constantly be holding down a button that is mounted on the side of the pen. Having a death grip on your pen to keep the button pressed is not conducive to long or even short drawing sessions.

As a software developer myself, I can usually understand the decisions that other software developers make. I may not always agree with them but I can understand them. However, taking a pen whose primary role, whose primary real world metaphor, is to draw with and to…take away the drawing ability? I’m sorry, but that’s just dumb.

I wasn’t the only one to think so. Online can be found the complaints from a veritable army of creators who also encountered and were stymied by this delightful feature (some of which went to the extremes of rolling back the update and disabling any further Windows updates or else ditching Windows altogether and switching over to Linux). Keep in mind that this update was rolled out months ago. Microsoft has not corrected this poor behavior nor incorporated any easily accessible user settings to change it. However, we, the user base, should be thankful for small mercies. They at least included a registry hack that can be used to kind of, sort of revert the pen functionality back to what it was before the update. As a public service, and for my own reference purposes, here are the steps needed to put this registry hack in place:

1. Open the Start menu and type in “cmd” to have Windows search for the “Command Prompt” desktop app.
2. Right-click the “Command Prompt” desktop app and select “Run as administrator”.
3. Type the following command into the Command Prompt window and hit enter:

reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Pen /v LegacyPenInteractionModel /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

4. Close the Command Prompt window.
5. Restart the computer (the setting doesn’t take effect until you do a restart).

Once the registry hack is in place the pen will function more or less like a mouse. Pushing the pen to the computer surface acts like holding the left mouse button down. There’s some dodginess around right-clicking with the pen and by various accounts I’ve read the registry hack cripples pen pressure sensitivity (which, with the applications I use, isn’t an issue for me as I don’t need pressure sensitivity).

Following putting the registry hack in, I was up and limping again. I could at least draw again, rather than scroll, although there remained a few other problematic issues. Those issues required a bit more work than a mere registry hack to fix. As they delve into the programming side of things, I’ll wrap up my diatribe here for now and resume my tail of undoing/working around what Microsoft did next week.

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