Tablet PC users, grab your styluses: Microsoft has a gift for you. The Experience Pack for Tablet PC may not be reason enough to buy a portable running Windows XP Professional Tablet PC Edition, but the free download is definitely worth the few minutes necessary to install it.
The Experience Pack consists of half a dozen utilities and applets that are more about fun and frills than hard-core productivity. Among the most useful in the shipping version I tested: the Ink Desktop, which lets you scribble directly onto a tablet's touch screen--a handy feature for jotting down quick notes.
The upgraded Snipping Tool 2, which allows you to define a portion of the screen with the stylus and then virtually "snip" it, offers a host of new options, most notably image editor-style rectangular and circular snipping tools.
Aspiring artists can get a taste of graphics software with Ink Art, a program reminiscent of Corel's natural-media app, Painter. I also enjoyed the ink-aware crossword puzzle application, although I was hoping for a New York Times puzzle instead of the daily free downloadable Universal Crosswords puzzle.
I was less impressed by the Energy Blue Theme Pack's skin for Windows Media Player, which was supposed to be optimized for tablet use but seemed clunky. Similarly, the Media Transfer feature for moving music and videos between PCs appeared unnecessarily complicated when there are so many other ways to get the job done. But these misfires don't negate the worthiness of this free upgrade.
These fun tablet extras are designed for everyone--and the price is zero.
Free download
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