Windows 7 and Smartboards

[bluehobbit]

Hi,

I have a bit of a problem with windows 7 and smartboards and im wondering if someone might be able to help. I have been told that to enable the smartboards to work correctly under windows 7 i need to disable the single finger panning option. This is fine when i log in with admin permissions but it seems to reset it self when i login with one our student accounts and of course students cant see the control panel to disable single finger panning. Does anyone have any suggestions.

Thanks

[Dave84]

Yep, you can turn it off via Group policy.

Go to Admin templates > Windows Components > Tablet PC > Touch input, and enable Turn off Touch Panning.

[AngryTechnician]

Is this only on the new SMART Boards that can tell the difference between fingers and pens? I haven't changed a thing on our Windows 7 machines and have had no reports of any issues with our SB660 boards.

[deano]

Sorry to hijack thread, bu have you experienced an issue with orientation of SMARTboards when not logged in as local admin. We are having to go round all PCs and orient boards for staff because there changes are not being saved! Anybody experienced this?

[AngryTechnician]

Again, no issues with that here. Hell, I watched a non-admin upgrade the sodding firmware of the board the other day. Made me slightly nervous, but certainly put paid to any questions I ever had about it needing admin rights!

[bluehobbit]

Yep, you can turn it off via Group policy.

Go to Admin templates > Windows Components > Tablet PC > Touch input, and enable Turn off Touch Panning.

Ah brill thanks for that.

Our latest board is an SBD6600 i think and we were told by a guy from the smartboard people that it was advisable to turn panning off because it moves the board rather than individual items so you cant resize objects for example

Our software needs admin rights to update our students and teachers do use very limited profiles so thats probably an explanation.

I have heard of problems with orientation but havent seen it with my own eyes yet...

[Willith]

Some of our Windows 7 machines have Smartboard 9.7 loaded on them. I remember orientating a board and having to set the resolution to 1024x768 because the orientate application was only showing up in a corner of the screen. I dont think 10 has this problem.

[Razzy]

Sorry to hijack thread, bu have you experienced an issue with orientation of SMARTboards when not logged in as local admin. We are having to go round all PCs and orient boards for staff because there changes are not being saved! Anybody experienced this?

Hi Deano,
Yes we had exactly the same issue. Not sure how to get Orienting working without local admin access as the orientation process actually makes registry changes. (you can see a non-admin users failed registry writes if you goto smartboard tools - diagnostics)

We basically had to create a group on the server called TempAdmin. Then made every member of staff a member of this group, Then went around each Whiteboard pc, Logged in with our admin login and went to Control Panel - Administrative tools - Computer Management - Local Users and Groups - Groups.
Right Clicked the Administrators entry and selected 'Add to Group'.
Then 'Add' and typed in our domain\TempAdmin 'Ok' 'Apply'.

This is allowing Orientation settings to be written to the registry when a member of staff is logged into the pc, But still keep the kids from installing programs etc.


We were having an issue with 'single finger panning' too. I would have loved to have read the group policy fix mentioned above before we rang SmartTech.
Their solution was to go into Device Manager and uninstall the Smart Virtual Tablet PC under Human Interface Devices. This works as it removes the 'Pen and Touch' Component in Control Panel and therefore removes the 'single finger panning' option altogether. Its a bit of a hammer to crack a nut however as it also removes some other options you might actually want.

We are running Windows 7 and most of our wb's are 6-10 years old.

[Face-Man]

if you don't have local admin rights you could try (either server side group policy or)

1.Open Local Group Policy Editor: Run... gpedit.msc
2.Navigate to User Configuration - Administrative Templates - Windows Components - Tablet PC - touch input
3.Enable the Turn off panning setting.

[cicero44bc]

Thanks for this tip, saved a lot of time!

[McBridge]

Thanks for the tip with the turn off paning setting as that problem has had me baffled for a while. I also had the problem with the orientation of the boards and my solution was to make the teachers (who are in there own OU and have there own group membership in AD) local admins on the PC's.

[riles]

The new smartboard update fixes this problem. released feb 14 10.7

[witch]

Now you are worrying me - I have just sorted out 7 new Windows 7 Tosh laptops - they are all attached to old smartboards and so far I havent had any problems...what am I looking for?

[GeeDee86]

Hi - I've got the problem where:

Non-admins can run the alignment/orient tool, but these settings are then not saved... but when I (as an admin) log on, it works fine and saves for all users.

Has anyone discovered the particular registry keys needed please?

Also - one of our teachers has helpfully tried to apply a firmware upgrade using the tool and managed to cook a board for us... might be worth SMART looking at their software and sorting out problems like this!


G

[Michael]

Smart Notebook 10.8 has been available since July 2011.