Hey venture,

Thanks for the update.

Paint it! has always been a bit troublesome, and I think HP won't be shipping it anymore or provide updates for it. I don't think any registry settings will fix much.

Integrating more closely with Windows was the primary goal for TouchSmart 5.0/5.1, so I'm glad to hear that it's useful to you.

Building parallax backgrounds isn't too hard. Look into the Backgrounds folder of where the TouchSmart software is installed and take a look at the various XML files in there. They describe the layers of the parallax. It should be fairly easy to figure out. The hardest part is producing background images that tile well. The left and right edge of each image have to match precisely because they will be tiled together. If you need more, I can send you something more via private messaging.

I have it running on an IQ506, so IQ810 should work as well. Not supported and all that, so do it at your own risk, etc.

Not necessarily. The shell upgrade should work from any lower version, but I've never tried going from 3.0 to 5.1. If you go to 4.0 first, I assume you'd use the new all-in-one updater which also gets you all the 4.0 app versions. If you don't use it you'd be running 3.0 apps with the 5.1 shell. That should work in general, but for example the music app won't be controllable anymore since in 4.0 the media control element was taken out of the shell and put into the music app itself.

The link in my initial post still seems to work. That's what you need to upgrade to 5.1, if you are adventurous enough to try it. I think it will work, in the sense that it will probably install correctly and function as designed. But since you'll be installing it on an 810 the overall suite of apps may feel a little odd in the new shell.

The all-in-one updater is this one: http://www.touchsmartdevzone.com/download/4070/TS4Upgrade/

I'll give it a try:

1. That's probably fine. If it works, that's all that matters.

2. Maybe you need to de-authorize the app on facebook.com and then try logging in again?

3. The TS browser is part of the 4.0 upgrade package. Maybe it didn't register itself as a tile? You may have to drag a shortcut to it from the All Programs menu into the carousel.

4. The "magic menu" (tap on canvas) should let you create graffiti magnets. Music/Video/Photo apps should allow for magnet creation as well. Twitter and Weather app too. Can't remember if Recipe Box does.

And someone posted this solution in that forum:

I found the answer via google once but can't find the exact steps again.

Basically, it involves turning off secure browsing (temporarily) at facebook.com while using Internet Explorer (somewhere in your account/security settings at facebook.com)

Then go to the Facebook app in TouchSmart and login, make sure to use "remember login" option.

After logging in there, (I think) you can go back to Internet Explorer and turn on secure browsing again and everybody should be happy.