ST4120P – Not working in portrait mode

A while ago, I picked up a ST4120P, a Fujitsu Tablet PC.  It’s quite dated, having a blazing fast 933Mhz Pentium 3 Mobile Processor, a maximum of 512MB RAM, integrated 802.11b wireless and so on. However, it’s still a tablet and works fine for writing notes in programs such as OneNote (or Paint, for those that can’t afford office!).

I upgraded the drive to a 120GB Segate drive, which is quieter, uses less power and has 6x the capacity of the previous one. In other words, this tablet is all ready to go.

Or not. I encountered a small problem where the screen would work perfectly in landscape mode, but if you switched to portrait, the pen would be 90 degrees out of sync. This is odd, having installed all the drivers correctly. Google wasn’t much help – one other user reported this problem and solved it by installing from SP0, and removing certain parts of the SP2 install – not something I was prepared to do. I went back to Fujitsu’s driver site and found one driver I had overlooked, the “Pen User Mode” components. I downloaded and installed these and portrait now worked perfectly. Excellent, this tablet, which cost me around£150 total after upgrades, is now ready to go. Perhaps the best bit of it is the battery life – an amazing 6hr 30min even though it’s 5 years old – this is a real world test with the tablet idle, but screen on full brightness. The only downside is that a full charge takes 24hr, but otherwise a perfect, affordable tablet.

As things tend to disappear from Fujitsu’s site, you can download the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120P Pen User Mode Components from us. Use at your own risk of course, works for me, unlikely to break your system but in this cover-your-ass world I have to have some disclaimer just in case something goes awry and I get the blame…